family

Small Christmas rituals

My commitment to simplifying this holiday is significant.  And it has paid off: the Christmas cards are mailed, the gifts are all bought, though not all wrapped, the tree is up.  Still, I adore Christmas and its traditions, and have some small annual rituals.

There are a few things we do every year.  Whit has a LEGO advent calendar.  Grace has an advent calendar that has 24 pockets on it, each of which holds a small card with an instruction for her.  So one day it’s “read a Christmas book to your brother” and another it’s “write a letter to your grandparents” and a third is “bake cookies for our neighbor.”  A couple people have been surprised that she is satisfied with this, in lieu of a morning chocolate or a LEGO minifig.  But … at least for now, she is.

I’m very moved by Advent, probably because of its themes of darkness and the promise of light.  I have several books about it, and this year I’m dipping into Watch For the Light.  More evenings than not I open the window of my small third-floor office and stick my head out into the cold, watching the sun go down across the streets, the glow of the sunset filtered through the black branches of the tree I know practically as well as my own hand.

We have a big green boxwood wreath on the front door, around which I tie the same wide length of celadon green satin ribbon every year.  Our tree is decked with ornaments we’ve been collecting since we were married, and dotted with a few from my own childhood that Mum gave me.  Each year for the past several I’ve had personalized ornaments made for Grace and Whit, too: a silhouette one year, doll-like, cloth faces another, their names on porcelain circles a third.  When the tree was decorated, the angel sitting proudly on its crown (every year), Grace leaned back and looked at it carefully.

“Why is it that some peoples’ trees are more fancy, Mummy?” she asked me.

“What do you mean, fancy?’

“I mean … you know, all gold, or all silver, or the ornaments match.”

“Well, Grace, our ornaments don’t match but they all have a story to them.”

She thought this over for a minute, gazing at the tree, before saying, “Oh.  So I guess our tree isn’t fancy, but it is full of love.”

Exactly.

I adore this 24 days of books tradition that the Gutsy Mom posted – check it out.  She gathers 24 Christmas or seasonal books, wraps each in twine or ribbon, and labels them with a day.  Each day they read that day’s book.  I think this is marvelous and I hope to try it next year.

And even though I listen to Christmas carols year-round, they are still important to me in this season.  We are listening to two CDs on repeat: the Lower Lights’ Come Let Us Adore Him and a homemade one of all of my old favorites.  I come by my obsession with Christmas carols honestly: my father played his CDs of Kings College Choir singing old-fashioned hymns from Halloween to Valentine’s Day.  I’ve also grown fond of some more modern interpretations, in particular Annie Lennox’s (among them, Universal Child), Shawn Colvin’s (Love Came Down at Christmas), and a couple by the Barenaked Ladies.  Oh, and Sugarland’s Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel, which I’m especially obsessed with lately.

My friends and I have an annual Secret Santa tea, complete with champagne, at a marvelous place in town that’s lit with sparkling pink lights.  Grace and Whit and I will bake several batches of cookies and decorate them.  We will exchange gifts and celebrate with our extended family, the stool, and hopefully take our annual photograph of the whole clan (C’s reindeer headgear included).  While I generally dislike scented candles, there is one called Forest, with a faint smell of pine and winter, that I adore, and it’s burning this whole season.  Sadly, we will miss a couple of my favorite holiday traditions, my parents’ annual Solstice ball and carol-signing on Christmas Eve with my oldest friend, though it’s for a very good reason.

How do you celebrate this season, whatever it means to you?

Ordinary thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was full of experiences that carried the mantle of important, moments I could feel turning to memories even as I lived them.  Most of all there was our Friday evening celebration of my in-laws’ 45th wedding anniversary and the 9th anniversary of my father-in-law’s successful heart transplant.  My in-laws had their three sons and five of their six grandchildren together (the sixth, 8 months old, was not able to stay up so late!) for a lovely dinner.  My sister-in-law and I made a book of photographs of the last 9 years for our father-in-law, and the memories contained in its pages brought everyone in the room to tears.  Also of note: my turkey was damn good.  I think my cider-based brine (which I pretty much made up) was a hit.  I think I was proudest, though, that all of my dishes were done before dinner was served.  A big achievement for such an ardent believer in clean as you go as I.

It was two far less weighty moments, however, that stand out for me as the most crystalline.  They were moments with a surprising, surreptitious power, the kinds of mundane experiences that I have learned can turn into the most sustaining and vital memories.  I hope that Grace and Whit remember days like these with the same affection and gratitude that I do.

On Friday morning Matt had to work so Grace, Whit and I took our skates to be sharpened and then stopped by a playground on the way home.  I sat on one of the swings (swinging alone is one of my favorite things to do) while they played together for 15 minutes … 30 … 45.  I swear.  I watched in wonder as they cooperated, laughed, and made up an imaginary world where the ground was lava.

The sky was crystal clear, the branches were all bare, and we didn’t see another human being the whole time we were there.  It was so warm both kids shed their jackets.

The sun shone on that hour.  And in its light I saw something glinting.  My life.

On Saturday afternoon Grace, Whit and I walked to a nearby movie theater to see The Muppets.   They are generally amenable to my walk-whenever-we-can policy, parroting now my points that it is better for both our health and for the environment.  On our way home we detoured past the house Hilary and I were born in.  I pointed out the windows to the living room, where I told Grace I remember walking in circles around the room reciting my times tables.  When I was in third grade.  With the homeroom teacher who is now her Math teacher.  And they are learning their times tables.  Sometimes it all swirls together so blindingly I have to blink and hold onto something so I don’t get dizzy.

The three of us played for a long time on the seesaw, which has three weighted balls that you can slide from side to side to even out the weight.  I wished my physicist father was with us to answer some of the questions I got.

Then they hopped on the swings and went for a while, holding hands.  They made up songs and sang them at the top of their lungs.  I sat over to the side, watching them.  The light turned their faces golden as it sank towards the horizon, and then everything cooled and dimmed when it slipped below it.  I looked at my children, and I looked at the light of the hour.

I am as proud of my children for their imaginative play as I am for any of their more conventional accomplishments.  I feel intensely grateful that they are still overjoyed by a playground, that they can run and jump and swing and invent a world.  That they want to do this together adds immeasurably to my joy.  This pride is linked to my belief about the power of fairy tales, I’m sure of it.  I want my children always to experience wildness (a central reason I love the cemetery so much, another place we went this weekend).  I want them to rejoice in the freedom offered by unstructured situations.  I want them to enjoy moving their bodies, to prize the fresh air, and to laugh together.

And they did.  And I was grateful.  The holiday held a plethora of gorgeous moments, for sure, many of which I’ll never forget.   The two that I felt were the purest expression of thanksgiving, though, were these two hours at the playground.

Thanksgiving 2011

Thanksgiving.

I am thankful for so much that I sometimes feel gratitude like a swell in my chest, pressing on me from the inside out.  And yet, there is still so much here I do not understand (Adrienne Rich).  Loved ones circle around tables and take time to consider that which matters most, the world turns ever-faster towards the darkest day of the year, our family in particular remembers the heart transplant, nine years ago, that changed all of us forever.

This is a particularly evocative time, for me, in the natural world.  The shadows gather earlier and earlier and the trees lose the last of their leaves.  The light right now carries a particular charge of both life and loss.  This weekend we will probably return to one of our favorite places, the tower at Mount Auburn, where last year my children took my breath away with their wisdom.  Perhaps we will go back to Walden.  For me this is always a quiet, thoughtful weekend, replete with both sorrow and hope.  Thanksgiving is the holiday of grace incarnate.

Maybe this is what grace is, the unseen sounds that make you look up. I think it’s why we are here, to see as many chips of blue sky as we can bear. To find the diamond hearts within one another’s meatballs. To notice flickers of the divine, like dust motes on sunbeams in your dusty kitchen. Without all the shade and shadows, you’d miss the beauty of the veil. The shadow is always there, and if you don’t remember it, when it falls on you and your life again, you’re plunged into darkness. Shadows make the light show. – Anne Lamott

Isn’t it, after all, the interplay of light and shadow that provides the texture of our lives? The darkness creates contrast, but it also scoops out some emotional part of me, allowing me to contain – experience, recognize, feel – more joy. I am grateful, I realize anew, for way my lens on the world is striated with both light and dark.

I am thankful today for evening light on bare trees, for the deep, glowing blue of the afternoon sky, for the words of a friend that make me feel less alone, for the tousled hair of sleepy children, for the lyrics of a song that bring tears to my eyes, for the moments when I am really and truly present, when I feel my spirit beating like wings in my chest.

So, this is happysad day for me, in a reflective season. My heart swells with awareness of my tremendous blessings, of the extravagant beauty that is my world. My thoughts are quiet and shadowy, but lit by incandescent beams of light. Like a night sky whose darkness is obliterated over and over by the flare of roman candles exploding, their colors made more beautiful by the surprise of them against the darkness. Like my life.

(I wrote these paragraphs in 2009 and they still feel as enormously, specifically relevant today as they did then, so I share them again)

Fairy tales

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. – Einstein

I just adore this quote.  Putting aside for a minute my essential belief that raw intelligence is innate, I agree with everything that Einstein means with this single beautiful sentence.  Why?  For lots of reasons.

Fairy tales are where the archetypes live.  They are where we learn about courage and love, about family, loyalty, and betrayal, about tests and triumph.  They are where we learn the most essential stories of humanity, the stories that go on repeating themselves over and over again in our lives and in our literature, as we grow into adulthood.

Fairy tales exist firmly in the realm of the imagination, and they allow children to dream of a world unrestricted by the boundaries of reality as they know it.  In fairy tales, magic can truly happen, and I think a commitment to the power of that which lies beyond reason and logic is fundamental to both intelligence and creativity.  How else can enormous leaps of the imagination come about, without this capacity?

More basically, stories are how you learn about the world.  I love that someone as aligned with the rigorous worlds of science and math as Einstein celebrates the power of the story.  I agree with him.  This reminds me of what I’ve written about my father: that he has a master’s degree in Physics, a PhD in Engineering, and an abiding trust in the ability of science, logic, and measurement to explain the world. At the same time, he has a deep fascination with European history and culture, often manifested in a love of the continent’s cathedrals, those embodiments of religious fervor, of all that is not scientific, logical, or measurable. His unshakeable faith in the life of the rational mind is matched by his profound wonder at the power of the ineffable, the territory of religious belief and cultural experience, that which is beyond the intellect.

I grew up in the space between those two worlds, believing that they are in fact as mutually enriching as they appear paradoxical.  I’d like to provide the same powerful learning for Grace and Whit.  As I help Grace learn the multiplication tables and how to touch type, may I remember to teach her also about dragons and princesses, about the hero’s journey, about spells which change the world, and about the fierce bonds of love.