Homemaker For Christmas
A Meditation on the Labors of Advent
These days, the “Christmas spirit” seems more like it’s breathing down my neck than winsomely beckoning me toward the commemoration of Christ’s birth. Today felt especially ominous—it’s December 7th and the bag of greenery sitting in my dining room for the past week has been an itchy loose thread in the fabric of my ever-moving thoughts. It felt stressful to leave it there; it felt stressful to dump it out and have to decide how to use it. But I took the leap and dumped the bag.
Half an hour later, I’m still snipping bits of pine, rearranging vases and candles and whatnot, and snapping at my kids because my brain can’t take a single second’s worth more of this chaos. I’m also trying to solve the question of what to do with a very bare wall that was suddenly revealed by moving the drying rack that’s been standing beside our kitchen table for the past six months (small house woes).
The same thing happened the night before. Plan: Make a garland for the Christmas tree. Oranges have been dried, darling wooden beads that look like cranberries have been purchased, twine has been procured. Still, chaos reigns: The kids scoop up handfuls of beads and scatter them over the rug. I am taking deep breaths so I don’t yell. I don’t have enough oranges to complete the garland. The beads flake red paint all over my clothes, and my fingers, for some reason, feel like dried prunes.
One more story, and then I promise I’m done.
The day I decided to put up the faux evergreen garlands around the front-porch pillars (and my husband usually does this, but for some reason it had to be done right that minute while he was at work), a swirling icy wind cut into my face and fingers. The wind chill was 6 degrees. The children, of course, wanted to come outside and watch, but very quickly the one-year-old began crying because of the cold. I plopped her inside, shut the screen door, and willed my fingers to move enough to hook string lights onto their nails. To the tune of the one-year-old’s angry sobs (how dare I put her inside?!).
I’m puzzled by how difficult this whole decorating-for-Christmas thing is. Why, this year, does it feel like so much effort to make my home look cozy and warm, thoroughly winterized? And why do I feel such stubborn urgency in achieving this aim? One memory that keeps flickering in my mind is the feeling of pure magic and warm security that always flooded my little body when my childhood home was decorated for Christmas; how I ran my fingers over the lights wound around the staircase rail, how I cuddled up on the couch to gaze at the glorious Christmas tree. That mixture of magic, warmth, and safety I want my children, too, to experience. Except now the labor to make it happen is in my lap.
I’ve never been good at home decorating. I’ve never felt at ease with it; I’ve often wondered why, if women are expected to beautifully and tastefully adorn their homes, there isn’t some course of interior design offered? My unease with décor is one source of difficulty. And then there is the reality of this being the first winter we’ve had two toddlers. As lovely as they are, they do make some things (like decorating for Christmas) a bit more challenging. And December, stark-cold, busy December, is full to cup’s brim with activities, festivities, programs, travels. The planning and execution of one more task spills me into overwhelm.
Such labor to create peace. Such labor to preface a birth. Anne Ridler’s poem “Christmas and Common Birth” has long been a favorite of mine[1], and I think of the lines “birth is awaking, birth is effort and pain . . . To bear new life or learn to live is an exacting joy.”
Here in my kitchen I can easily survey the fruits of my Christmas-decorating labor, and I finally breathe calmly, glad it’s over with. But now to begin the more difficult, “exacting,” intentional labor, more difficult even than that of stringing Christmas lights or making garlands: awaking to the wonder and significance of Christ’s birth, which “declares the glory of the flesh” and upends our dreams of holiday perfection (because what is our flesh but gloriously messy and smelly and all things not tinsel and holly?).
Ridler’s poem continues:
The whole self must waken; you cannot predict the way / It will happen, or master the responses beforehand. / For any birth makes an inconvenient demand; / Like all holy things / It is frequently a nuisance, and its needs never end; / Freedom it brings: We should welcome release / From its long merciless rehearsal of peace.
Inconvenient demand, nuisance indeed, to decorate for Christmas, especially for a disquieted mind. But I don’t think decorating the house was quite the awakening of self that Ridler speaks of. That may come about by the more unusual (at least for December) act of staying in one place, breathing, attending to what is happening, to what lies ahead. That is where I want to be found, concentrating on the birth pains of this Advent season[2], noticing the stretches of peace and gifted beauty, ready to have Christ’s glory “force[d] into” my frantic veins.
I certainly don’t regret the minimal decorating I’ve done in the past week—a few pine branches imperfectly poked into a clay vase are bringing much joy to my heart. The ways we prepare for Christmas with lights and wreaths and such are not entirely superficial; as Nadya Williams explained in a recent newsletter, such decorating signifies “the mystery, the wonder, the beauty that we crave with the innermost recesses of our being.”
But because decorating, for any multitude of reasons, has become more stressful than festive, more harried than relaxed, it may well do me good to lay it aside for the rest of the month. The tree will remain half-decorated until I can make another garland with a sense of peace (and my husband’s help). Maybe the mouse living in our kitchen will make its nest in the remainders of the pine branches sitting in their bag.[3] Maybe the bare wall will remain bare. God bless this mess, and all that—but I truly mean that benediction now. And this benediction, too: May my children’s hearts be warmed not only by the Christmas lights, but also by the sound of their father and their mother reading from Scripture after lighting a flickering candle:
[The Lord] heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds. He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names. (Psalm 147:3-4, NRSV).
On we labor, forgetting and remembering, forgetting, and remembering again, the Incarnation and all its transformative implications—not least of which is that the peace we long for isn’t dependent on having a Christmas wreath on our door. Christ came to visit us all—
For those with wreaths, and those without.
For those with well-decorated homes, those with ramshackle homes,
and those with homes in between.
For those for whom December is one long bleak month of
discouragement and depression, loneliness or listlessness;
for those who thrive on crowds and lights and festivities.
For those surrounded by loving family and for those
who make company with their own aching hearts.
For those who love the holiday season, those who hate it,
and those who simply don’t have the energy to care. The Christ-child came to make His home with us all.
[1] I was introduced to this poem through Malcolm Guite’s wonderful Advent collection “Waiting on the Word.” If you enjoy poetry, pick this up. You won’t regret it.
[2] And for me this means asking, “What in my heart needs to give way to the unpretentious love signified by Christ’s birth?”
[3] As of the editing of this piece, the mouse is dead. Hallelujah!