'Tis the Season

Well, first off, I confess that I do my Christmas presents list in Excel.  I add up how much I spend on each person, particularly the kids, to make sure it’s roughly equal and to keep track of what I’ve bought, what’s shipped and what’s arrived. I've been called uptight. However, I also confess that I’ve never added up the total for all gifts.  I don’t think I could mentally handle that.  Each year I say I’ll do less, and I never do. But I will be immodest and brag:  I've been done with my Christmas shopping since Thanksgiving week, and am now about 80% done with wrapping. 

Next:  I have waaay too many Christmas ornaments.  And now so do my girls.  One of my daughters was dating a lovely young man recently and it came up in conversation: “I come with a lot of Christmas ornaments!” Apparently, he gave her a slightly weird look.  But I digress. 

The ornaments that started it all.

Whenever we go on vacation, I love to go to Christmas stores.  I’ve become very selective of what type or ornaments I like.  It all started at a college church camp in Big Bear; toodle-ing around town I came to a Christmas shop that had a couple boxes in the corner.  I peeked in and there were gold metal stamped angels, and also white metal angels in three different versions.  I think they were about $1.50 each, I just loved them, and bought six of each.  In retrospect I should have bought them all; they are my favorites and I treasure them.  And that started my obsession with beautiful Christmas ornaments, especially angels.  Every year now I scour the internet looking for anything similar to those first, and never find any.  Or if I do, the prices are exorbitant.

I don’t buy cartoonish angels/ornaments, only beautiful ones, but I also love a good, fancy orb, birds, nativity, and things that are unique and creative and reflective of a particular time or place. And Snoopy, but not plastic; my dad loved Snoopy. Then I discovered that Lenox has had a series of angel ornaments, Christmas Carol-themed ones, and nativity ornaments, and I’ve scoured those off eBay.  I haunted Home Goods several years back, when they still had overstock from department stores rather than just things made for their own stock, and found some good Wedgwood ones there.  Finally, I have a thing for birds, and now I have an entire tree (one of the skinny ones) dedicated entirely to bird ornaments. I’m a sucker for a good ornament.

Yum! But not this year . . .

Petite Fours are also a Christmas weakness.  The local Stop & Shop for years carried petite fours at Christmas.  Even if I wasn’t regularly shopping there (I’m more of a ShopRite gal), I would call or swing by to pick-up a few boxes from the bakery.  But somehow, to our great distress, they no longer carry them.  I’ve hunted around other local stores as well:  nope.  So I went online and Swiss Colony has some.  Of course the shipping is exorbitant so in the last few years I’ve bought a lot of them to make the shipping worthwhile.  But here’s something the girls don’t know:  I’m not getting them this year.  I don’t know if they will be horrified, or if they will take it in stride.  But I’ve already spent too much, the economy ain’t great, and it seems like a luxury too far.  And honestly, we can all bake.  Once in elementary school I made a sixteen-layer cake, and the same principals should apply. They read this blog; I will report if any bloodshed occurs.

I haven’t gone overboard on stocking stuffers this year either.  I remember years ago being at my sister’s house for the holidays, and was shocked to see that not only were all the stockings stuffed full, but each had an entire extra bag full as well.  I thought it was a bit extravagant and overboard.  Well, call me a hypocrite.  The last several years we’ve had stuffed stockings and shopping bags as well, but not this year. I think I have maybe three things for each stocking, and they are mostly practical (not toothbrushes, but in a similar vein). The good news is that the girls are now also buying stocking stuffers and since it’s not all on me, we’ll have plenty.  I haven’t gotten to the point that my sister did a number of years back:  everyone got socks and underwear in their stockings.  The kids comment? “Well, that’s what you get when you don’t believe in Santa anymore!”

The Christmas Eve Service.  When I was in high school and college, we always had our big formal Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve, and then go to the 9:00pm Christmas Eve Service at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach.  It was as fancy as it sounds.  The dinner would be on the fine china, and we’d have anywhere from ten-to-eighteen family members. I was lovely, but also lively. A wonderful time. When we got older my mom actually paid people to wash the dishes so we wouldn’t have to, and could get to the service without being gross and exhausted.

St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church at Christmas

Christmas Eve at St. Andrew's was wonderful.  It’s the church I was baptized at and that we went to when I was young. They have since renovated/rebuilt it.  It seats 1200! And they’d have four services on Christmas Eve, and they were all packed.  They’d have a choir of about one hundred, in traditional choir robes; a pipe organ that made the floor and the beams rumble; they’d bring in an orchestra of about twenty pieces, because you clearly need violins and trumpets and drums for Christmas Eve; and candle light.  The church itself had an all-glass ceiling (this is Newport Beach, of course), and also a balcony and we always sat in the balcony (until the grandparents got really old and we sat downstairs). (I confess once, not on Christmas, my heel got stuck on the carpet and I tumbled down the stairs.  I wasn’t hurt, but it was quite a spectacle. I was about 22 at the time. A bunch of men rushed to save me.)

So the service was “Lessons and Carols”, which in Protestant means they read all the bible verses from the nativity story, interspersed with Christmas carols. Then they also had additional songs by the choir (Glorious!), and a sermon. The choir always had two professional ringers:  one soprano and one tenor.  It was all very beautiful and wondrous and I would cry with the beauty and emotion. 

Dr. John Huffman, who preached on DEATH at Christmas.

But the sermon was the kicker.  The pastor at this church was GREAT. He was the kind of guy who, if he weren’t a pastor, would have made a great senator, back when senators might even be noble. He would preach sermons that were rigorously theological, but he was also very well-read, and tied-in classic philosophy, history, culture, current events – everything.  He was a great orator, and he was always very convicting.  But on Christmas Eve, he always preached on DEATH.  Because of course you had a couple thousand people who only attended once or twice a year, and he wanted to make the gospel clear and powerful. 

Now as someone who loves Christmas and always wants more of the spiritual and less of the commercial, I loved having a good, serious Christmas sermon on DEATH.  However, there are a lot of people who come to Christmas Eve Service to feel good and festive and happy; I can’t say I blame them.  So he got a lot of hate mail for his sermons on DEATH. But I tell you, those were some of the best sermons he every preached.  I really miss them. But eventually he stopped preaching on DEATH on Christmas Eve, and is now retired.

The Hayloft Sanctuary

Of late, we’ve had some difficulty picking a good Christmas Eve Service.  In Connecticut you don’t have mega churches with the hundred-voice choirs.  The services are quieter and lovely, but not like a Carnegie Hall version of Church.  At our last church it was lovely, because there was literally an old barn as part of the church building, and the service was in the hayloft sanctuary (refurbished, and nicer than it sounds). It felt very Christmassy being in a barn.  But then we left that church and our new church doesn’t have a Christmas Eve Service; it’s much smaller and there is a high percentage of young families with young children.  It’s just logistically complicated, so they do the equivalent of a Christmas Eve Service a couple of weeks in advance.  With desserts.

So one year we tried a nice church, which had two services --  an early one for kids and a later one for adults.  Well, somehow I got the wrong bulletin and didn’t know it and was confused the whole time because I didn’t have the right words or songs.  It was a fine service, but it’s hard when you’re singing the wrong words.

Next we went to a church that was very casual.  Again, very oriented towards kids and a little hokey.  I wondered what we’d gotten ourselves into.  But toward the end they got into the good carols and hymns and all was well.  It wasn’t packed, and it was obvious we were visiting, so right after the service we were ambushed by one of the pastors and invited back.  We had to explain we had a church home elsewhere.

Then we went to another service at a different church the following year.  This was a mistake. The hymns were nice and the organist played well, and it was nicely decorated, but the sermon was . . . platitudes. Sadly, (I know, we’re terrible sinners), we made fun of the sermon the whole way home.  It really was awful of us.  We were polite while we were there, but we’ve been going to church a looooong time, and this sermon had every Christian cliché that we’d ever heard. It was tough to take it seriously. We felt bad for the pastor, but not bad enough to stop making jokes. We tried it again a few years later (because the carols were good), but by then they’d “upgraded” it, with flashy videos and rockus music and lots of trendiness and big-screens; it just wasn’t for us.

Finally, last year started out pretty rocky.  We were trying to decide where to go, with great controversy.  We finally settled on the church where I’d had the wrong bulletin years before, but when we got there, we found that it was some kind of a potluck and other stuff and the service wouldn’t start for another 1.5 hours.  Totally messed with our dinner plans.  The flashy church was out of the question.  After family debate and drama in the car, we went to one that was a bit of a drive.  It’s a sister church of the church we are currently going to.  We got there in time.  We got seats.  It was lovely. Christmas was preserved, and thoroughly enjoyed. That’s where we’ll go again this year. Probably. There is another option with a fabulous choir . . .  but that will require more debate and drama. 

A Favorite.

There is one more tradition I must share:  when they girls were younger, I would buy them a new Christmas books each year.  Some were nativity and others just lovely stories:  The Candle in the Window or Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates.  We’d always open and read the new books on Christmas Eve, but then follow up with reading all the old ones too.  So that is our tradition:  the last thing before bed, we bring out all of our children’s Christmas books and spend an hour or so reading them together.  We take turns reading now, but still do the voices and animal noises, as needed.  We love the stories and we love the memories.  It sets the mood of calming down and being quiet and cozy after a busy day and busy weeks.  We stop the frenzy and just enjoy own time together on the couch with good books and beautiful pictures.  We all have our favorites and the tradition cannot be improved upon.

Kissing the Face of God, Morgan Weistling

May your lead-up to Christmas (or Hanukkah) allow you time to remember why we do all this.  Yes, it’s family and gifts and celebration – every culture has some sort of holiday like this (except communists; I think in Mao’s China you’d be killed for it). But for most of us, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, even those who don’t believe or go to church still recognize that it’s about baby Jesus. There is a sacredness to it if you sit in the quiet. For those who are more serious followers of Christ, it is holy, it is hope, and it is love.  The gospel message of Emmanuel, Christ With Us, is at the heart of what we believe, and it is our joy.  And I wish you all that joy.