As a child, I loved to sit alone in the dark quiet of the living room, watching the lights blink on our Christmas tree, reflections glowing on the wall behind. There was no magic at work — our household wasn’t really religious — but the glory of those little lights glinting in the dark stirred me strangely.
Even after the story of Christmas became dear to me, the magic of Christmas remained elusive. I feel this especially in the matter of decorating — it’s like a melody that I never quite catch. I admire people who pull off their decorating seemingly by instinct, obeying an inner wisdom that I lack.
An Advent wreath is the only thing I can reliably make happen. When our children were toddlers in foster care and new to our home, I bought a gleaming brass Advent candle holder at a thrift shop and brought it home. I liked the idea of live flames echoing the winking lights of my memory. Later, when caring for my children seemed a long progression of defeated hopes, the themes of the Advent lights — the wanting, the waiting — became painfully important.
So on the first Sunday of Advent this year, I went and rummaged through a couple of storage boxes until I found the brass ring. I put it on the table and stood four new candles in it that my mother had supplied.
On Monday, I came away from a special education meeting with the school in which I made several requests for increased safety and skills for my vulnerable child. I had spent many hours in advance gathering data, writing out background information, getting the advice of an educational consultant. The school granted none of my requests. Everything I seemed able to provide seemed wholly inadequate against what our family needed for health and joy. I was deeply tired of waiting for me to come up with anything worth waiting for.
On Tuesday, we were planning to have family over for dinner, and the Advent wreath was still pitifully bare.
The problem was that I had no greenery. Our yard had no proper conifers. I missed the western red cedar at our old house, whose branches were generous shedders.
In past years, I was able to glean from the various evergreens in a twenty-acre park nearby. This year had brought a big windstorm in mid-November, and the parks department had cleaned up assiduously afterwards, leaving no stray branches. Walking through the park on a frosty morning, it looked uncommonly manicured. Except for a few trees with scarlet skirts of fallen leaves, it was swept bare.
Any greenery that I was going to come up with that day was going to be bottom-shelf. I considered my immediate options. I didn’t have the audacity to go out in daylight to forage among my neighbors’ shrubbery. We had also cut down our holly tree in the summer, shredding its prickly glossed leaves and cutting the trunk into firewood. The sword ferns in front were raggedly prehistoric. And I had a personal distaste for the laurels, whose preternatural vigor had caused several fence disputes with the neighbors.
That left just the bamboo. The bamboo seemed just as bottom-shelf as the laurels: an aggressive pusher of snaking rhizomes and the source of similar fence problems. But its tapering leaves and pliable stalks were green and pleasing.
After the special ed meeting, I had tried to shake off, or at least compartmentalize, the dread that fogged my thoughts and prayers. I found myself looking online for antidotes to existential dread. I read:
“Let your body take over and quit giving your mind all of your attention. Love your body and prioritize it. Your mind isn’t the best thing about you. It’s along for the ride.”
“Your decorative scruples are not the best part of Advent,” I told myself. “Love your Advent wreath and prioritize it.”
I went outside with the clippers, snipped lashings of slender bamboo, and brought them inside. I divided them into clumps, fastened each one near the base of the four candle basins, then twisted them clockwise under-over in a circlet of greenery. It was vibrant and handsome.
It was also poor and inadequate. The thin leaves would probably dull and dry in just a day or two. But I ignored that and set the places round.
We lit a single candle out of four, then sat to eat, listening to Robert Southwell’s poetry set to music in Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols:
This little babe, so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake.
Though he himself for cold do shake,
For in this weak unarmèd wise
The gates of hell he will surprise.
The whole incarnation seemed bottom-shelf inadequate: a vulnerable baby born to peasants with the meagerest materials at hand to receive him. Yet this was God’s all-sufficient provision for our deepest longings.
With tears he fights and wins the field;
His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries,
His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns cold and need,
And feeble flesh his warrior’s steed.
The Son of God put on feeble flesh and became God-With-Us in a move of grandest, loving rescue of all humanity. The inadequacy of prepared materials is not necessarily an unhopeful sign.
By Thursday morning, the bamboo had wilted and crisped. I stepped out for a walk, and passing by an empty lot, saw strewn branches of fir – proper fir! – all over the ground. Two workers were clearing brush from a construction site and paid no attention as I stooped gleefully and gathered the branches. I carried them home in the crook of my arm, cradling them almost. They were not bottom-shelf at all.
Beautiful! Yes, incarnation in a lowly stable…I love also the blessing of proper greens – in due time.
This was lovely and encouraging. Thank you.
Not only is this essay wonderfully well-written, it is also poignant, and at several moments in the story I found myself truly moved.