While everyone is talking Thanksgiving turkey, I’m putting out my favorite Christmas decorations, stacking up Christmas music, lighting holiday incense and soaking in the sights and sounds and smells.
It’s not because Thanksgiving comes a week earlier this year. We’ve always played Christmas music during Thanksgiving dinner, but by now my music and dvd collections have expanded so there isn’t enough time between Thanksgiving and Christmas to hear/see each of them once. So I started earlier this year.
I love everything about Christmas. There’s no frenzy here. I don’t love shopping, never did, but gathering a few things to give as gifts isn’t a hardship. I do much of it online, but I also go to malls on purpose during the season, just for the festive look of it.
Making fudge and apple cake with a Christmas glaze for my neighbors is nice. (Christmas music plays while we cook.)
I love church during Advent season. The faces of the acolytes who carry the light down to the altar candles always look like Christmas – a bit shinier than usual and quite reverent. As the kids walk slowly, jeans poking out below the white robes, they resist the temptation to jostle each other and I imagine their parents watch and wonder, who is this child, so somber? Surely this is not the kid who had to be reminded (threatened) to get here on time.
You won’t find me griping about the commercialization of this event, because for me it never has become that. If all I ever had of Christmas were the sights and sounds and fragrances, and if that could last for months, I wouldn’t complain.
Ó Anita Garner 2008