A Simple Christmas - now past

 

As I anticipated the Christmas holiday season this year I simply couldn't bear the thought of entering into all the usual rush and falderal. Memories of Christmas over the past ten years or so prove to me the reality of my existence - the times they are a changing. I can’t fight the changing times. I might as well go with the flow. May I do so with grace and ease. 

This year, extended family gatherings were planned weeks in advance of what had been traditional celebrations on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. This is the way it goes when children grow up, get married and make choices as to how and where and with whom they are going to share the holiday. When grandchildren arrive on the scene each individual family naturally circles around immediate family. I get that. At some point long ago a decision was made by my own aunts and uncles and cousins to let go of extended family gatherings and simply gather with their own. Wonderful memories remain. New memories are being made.

Now, an empty nester with both my daughters far away and not coming home for Christmas this year, I chose to not put up a Christmas tree and to leave most of the decorations in their boxes. Jim was agreeable to the idea. It felt like the right thing to do this year. Though I’ve never gone hog-wild with decorations - think Griswald Christmas lights- neither am I an Ebenezer Scrooge. I wanted to have some symbolic reference and arrived at a simple advent wreath and lots of candles and peaceful seasonal music.

Each Sunday of Advent I lit the candles one by one – Peace. Hope. Joy.  Praying that all my dear ones would be blessed with each of these. I was really enjoying the simplicity that I had chosen. As I anticipated lighting the Love candle however, a deep melancholy rose up. An almost irresistible urge came upon me – to fly to the mall and join the consumers in the last minute frantic search – for what? Self-awareness invited me to consider what was going on. I missed my girls. I missed the former times. I was sad. I was lonely. I was grieving. I’ll admit it.

Christmas day found just Jim & me at home – alone. It was a quiet restful day. I took delight in cooking up a lovely dinner for two. Even so, I would have loved having a crowd around my table. It wasn’t to be this year.

Now, two days post Christmas day I’m content. To have been spared so much rush and hurry with the choices I made did my soul a world of good.  I wondered if more of life could be lived at a simpler pace. Confirmation of this came to me from this morning’s read from Common Prayer – a Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals:

 Twentieth-century Quaker, Thomas Kelly wrote, “Over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living which we know we are passing by. We have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! If only we could find the Silence which is the source of sound!”

Listen. Do you hear the whisper, the faint call? May you be blessed with unhurried serenity and peace and power in these last days of 2012 on into the New Year.