grassroots (noun)—the most basic level of an idea or a thing, way down there in the dirt with the roots and stubby grass and scratchy hay and who knows what else; and when you’re thinking about Christmas and Christ coming I guess there’s more than one way to apply such a word, which is really kind of breath-catching and beautiful.

 

She sits on the steps at the front of the sanctuary. Her brow is furrowed; her lips pressed together in a fierce, defiant pout. She wears a white angel robe made from an old sheet, and cardboard wings that she painted herself are tied to her back, their ribbons forming an X across her chest. They’re slightly crooked, as is the pipe-cleaner halo that sits on her head, dipping slightly toward one ear. As she stomps back to sit next to me in the pew with stormy reluctance, I wonder how we’re ever going to make it through the children’s Christmas program.

You can probably picture it.

And you can probably picture, too, her brothers: one big, one small. They’re both dressed in bathrobes and capes and crowns, a not-exactly-historically-accurate conjuring of the “wise men from the East”. One holds a graham cracker box covered in shiny silver foil and stick-on gemstones. The other swings a cord from which hangs a purple and blue mirrorball. It’s hollow, and while it originally held an overpriced beverage at the Eras Tour concert, it is something you could, with a little imagination, pretend now contains gold or frankincense or myrrh.

Around them in the sanctuary, other children mill about: more angels and wise men, and shepherds with dishtowels draped over their heads. Some come sporting fleecy jackets or vests, dressed as sheep with cotton balls glued to paper ears they've pinned on hoods or headbands. Here and there among them are the occasional cow or donkey; at one point a dinosaur runs past me. I laugh out loud, because I can’t help but think that of course a T-rex has a place here, amid the chaos, where the Creator who made dinosaurs and sheep and stubborn little girls finds a place in the world He made.

And then the story begins, led by a lanky youth minister in a shepherd’s robe and sandals. He grins, inviting children up to the front as each character enters the narrative. I take a breath, readying myself for an intervention as my grumpy little angel slides off the pew. But she surprises me and steps up quietly, turning to face the congregation with big eyes and a solemn face. She stops beside a girl a few years her senior and glances up at the cardboard star the other child holds above all their heads. She watches as the story plays out.

She watches.

She listens.

The shepherds and animals and wise men come forward to where a smiling mom and dad, holding their baby, play the parts of Mary and Joseph and Jesus. The kids kneel and the congregation sings. At one point, the baby spits up and his parents blush bright red and I smile big because how many times have I wondered about the humanity of Jesus as a baby?

And then it’s over, and the chaos spills out of the sanctuary and it’s like somebody turned up the volume knob. Kids chase one another through the forest of adults, weaving their way back to their parents occasionally to ask for just one more Christmas cookie. Parents nod (it’s Christmas, after all!) and try to finish up their conversations, well aware of the fact that bedtime is fast approaching and well-sugared kids aren’t likely to go down without a fight.

By the time my own circus leaves, the parking lot has emptied considerably. There’s no snow on the ground, but the air is cold, “piping for the blood to dance to”. * We leave the city lights behind, driving down dark country roads toward home, but the night isn’t completely black. Scattered among the fields and forests around us are Christmas lights in jewel tones: merry red, bright blue and green, warm yellow and orange and white.

We are all quiet now, staring out the windows. I speak softly, asking my children what they thought of the Christmas program. Really, I’m just trying to gauge if they liked it or not; if we’re going to be doing it again next year. But what I get gives me a lump in my throat that comes back now as I think about it again.

“I liked it. Especially the part where we got to kneel by the manger. The floor was kinda hard, and my knees hurt after a while… but yeah. That was my favorite part.”

They’re little, these kids of mine. Six and four and one. You’d think they’d have said they liked the cookies or the dressing-up or maybe the music.

But no.

They got it, in a way that it’s so terribly easy for me to miss, even though I try to keep reminding myself of the real “reason for the season”. Maybe it’s easier for them, because they’re so little yet? All they have to do is hear the story, put on a costume, and imagine what it might have been like, and everything else falls away, even the hard floor pressing against their knees, and there they are. Not in a warm, brightly-lit church. Not looking at a clean prop of a manger. But out somewhere in the dark. The ground hard and cold beneath them. Their Creator lying before them, unable to direct even his own tiny flailing fists. Wonder singing in their little souls.

 

*Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

 

remember (verb)— to be able to bring to one's mind an awareness of someone or something that one has seen, known, or experienced in the past, and sometimes (in a mystifying way) it’s tied closely to anticipating something that is coming.

 

It’s the first cool Sunday of autumn. Mid-September, and the sky is folded clouds in shades of grey. The trees are mostly green yet, but there are a some—maples, and a few birches—that have begun their slow-motion, seasonal burn of red and yellow. The sounds of crickets and cicadas, a last call of summer, come in the windows on a cool breeze, their sounds blending with those coming from the TV: chanting crowds, shrilling whistles, and droning football commentary. It brings back memories of similar days from my childhood, where I’d leave them behind and run outdoors to games and friends, the hiss and smack of the front door closing behind me just as I reached the porch step to leap off. But I could always tell how the Packer game was going, based on the yells or cheers coming from the all the houses along the street with their own cracked-open windows.

 

Today, it’s just me watching. Or listening, really. The smell of bread baking fills the house as I chop carrots and mushrooms and onions for the first “Soup Sunday” of the season—a tradition Eric and I started back when it was just the two of us in our dear little apartment in New York. Now, I cook while kids play and baby naps, and it may not seem like much, but the way the past & present come together in this moment fills my soul with an easy joy.

 

It's the beginning of fall, and already I can feel the tug toward winter. We’re in the time of golden days, when the harsh heat of summer has left, but before November ushers in the bitter cold of winter. I can’t help the little thrill of excitement when I think of what’s to come. All the goodness of autumn, yes: crunchy leaves and bonfires; apple picking and pies; cozy sweaters and soft, worn flannel. The beauty and extravagance of leaves at last showing the splendor of their true colors, glowing in contrast against a grey sky or set afire by the sun shining out of the highest blue. 

 

But I love what comes after, too, when the colors arereplaced by brown and grey. The cold seeps in, and darkness comes earlier and earlier. Bare trees, shorn fields, chill wind… no more harvest warmth to cheer the heart in the absence of summer’s brightness. As the obvious beauty falls away, other things come into sharp focus. September and October are the wide beginnings of an anticipation that narrows as the season progresses: they are the first things to set the tone for Advent, and for Christmas. A harvest time of Eden-like bounty is gradually replaced by a fall into the barren cold of early winter. Each year, as the distractions of the natural world are stripped away, I find myself looking toward Christmas, and as I do the hope of Christ’s coming seeps backwards, through Advent, until it reaches me where I stand now in the kitchen. Stirring soup and breathing in the smell of baking bread. Watching the trees let go the first of their bright leaves. Feeling a thrill of hope at this change of seasons.

 

 

wonderful (adjective)— inspiring delight, pleasure, or awe, sometimes flashy and in-your-face, but not always: sometimes wonderful is quiet, whispering to some subconscious understanding of the natural world and your place in it.

 

It’s—

             the—

most

 wonderful

time—

                                                     of the year!

 

So goes the old song, anyway. Maybe I’m a little early; maybe that song isn’t applicable to these late fall days, to this November melancholy. Maybe you’re supposed to save it until the bright sparkle of Christmastime, when the snow sticks around a bit more, covering all the browns and greys completely, and even the stoplights on the city streets (to borrow from another song) “blink a bright red and green”.

Maybe. Or maybe I’m not that far off to sing it now, as I drive along country roads watching combines crawl methodically back and forth across the dry fields, stopping now and then to fill wagons with their harvest gold. The dry leaves of cornstalks and soybeans shine with an almost-hidden luster that only the long light of morning or evening can bring forth, and only if you’re watching for it: shades of lavender and cream. The dying plants in my garden have a softer beauty now. They are frail, the veins standing out in the spotted leaves, but the dimming colors are richer, somehow, for surviving the first weeks of cold nights. It occurs to me that maybe people are a little like that, too, in their own way.

 

The world is tilting, falling towards winter in slow-motion, the way the last of the autumn leaves do when they finally release their hold on the branches of the trees. And I feel that tug within me, in some deep place of my soul: the world is preparing for something. In its dying and scattering, its harvesting and gathering in, it is a stripped-down version of itself, and it waits… leaning toward Christmas.

“For a second you catch a whiff in the air of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart.

The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens.”

Fredrick Buechner’s words have played in my mind over and over to the rhythm of this time of gathering dark and growing cold.

“Advent is the name of that moment… if you concentrate just for an instant, far off in the deeps of you somewhere you can feel the beating of your heart. For all its madness and lostness, not to mention your own, you can hear the world itself holding its breath.”

It’s the most wonderful—full of wonder—time of the year.