Confession: Christmas kinda stresses me out. In my last post, I talked about how my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving. This month, we swing the other way a tad.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a total Grinch. I enjoy getting together with loved ones. I enjoy looking at my Christmas tree. I enjoy the haunting Christmas carols. And I rather look forward to celebrating Advent at church. The music is great, the decorations are pretty, and the candle-lit Christmas Eve service is my favorite of the year. Plus tea tastes so darn good when it’s cold outside.
What I don’t care for during this season is how my already-busy to-do list grows about ten miles — mostly with the expectations I place upon myself. I feel like I can’t fully rest until I’ve selected ALL the gifts for ALL my people. Thus for most of the month, I have this nagging feeling I’ve left something undone, and that can drive a doer mad. Or at least make it harder to relax. (Which is why tea time is so therapeutic this time of year.)
The second thing I don’t love about Christmas is how the pace of life speeds up at a time when the rest of creation is slowing down. There’s literally fewer hours of daylight this time of year. My chickens have stopped laying eggs. The trees have gone to sleep. And we’ve switched the cow from grazing grass to munching hay. The earth is taking a breather … but I find it difficult to keep in step with the season.
Between wrapping up the school semester, submitting year-end grades, attending recitals, catching up with people I haven’t seen in a while, doing Christmas shopping on top of the regular shopping, baking, decorating, practicing our family traditions, and trying to maintain general household/homestead order, I’m pretty tuckered out in December. And when I’m tuckered out, there’s always the danger I can fall into what I like to call my “Five Stages of Exhaustion.” They proceed as follows:
Overwhelm. We see the dark cloud of details and can’t find our umbrella.
Anger. We resent that we can’t find our umbrella.
Getting Demanding. We demand others help us find the umbrella.
Sadness. We realize we cannot find the umbrella — and we are wet.
Apathy. We don’t care about the umbrella anymore. We will just be wet.
So almost exactly a year ago, we were moving from our house in the city to our new homestead. Talk about a cloud of details. We even placed our already-decorated Christmas tree into the moving van and managed to transport it to our new living room with minimal ornament loss. While I easily could have gone through the five stages of exhaustion, I’m happy to report lots of people from church, our family, and Jason’s F3 workout group helped us find our umbrella that day. Between hauling our chicken coop across town, lifting our piano up steps, and unloading/reconstructing bed frames for my five children, our friends truly blessed us with the light of their love. Suffice it to say, our Christmas decor was a little sparse, but we were happy to be together in our new home. What a gift!
This year, since we were not moving, I wanted to take our Christmas decorations up a notch. Not that I really felt like decorating — yet another Christmas THING — but the homeowner before us had left boxes of twinkle lights and garland behind. It seemed silly not to use them. I told myself decorating the front porch would only take about ten minutes, and I was wrong; it took most of the evening. (My husband can well attest to my unrealistic sense of timing.) But the end result — as imperfect as it was — looked quite beautiful and all the more significant because we now no longer live in a city.
In a city, there are lights everywhere. Street lights. Traffic lights. Sign lights. And a million houses with Christmas lights. But out here in the country without many streetlights and fewer than a million houses, it gets DARK. Really dark. So when someone takes the trouble to hang lights for Christmas, you can see them from across the valley. Twinkling like stars, they bring heaven close to Earth. It makes a big difference.
Amid such darkness, the simple act of decorating our front porch took on a new nobleness I hadn’t considered before. In my small way, I felt like I was defying the darkness through my little strand of twinkle lights.
There’s a third reason I don’t always love the Christmas season; Christmas can make me feel a little sad. With every passing year, I become more aware of my life’s transience and its awkward placement between Christ’s first and second comings. Things can get rather dark here in the in-between. Also, I can never return to my carefree childhood Christmases, and certain loved ones are no longer here to help celebrate my adult ones.
Homesteading has added yet another layer of bitter-sweetness when it comes to this holiday. When I contemplate the Bethlehem birth in a barn stall, I’m disgusted for Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. Try as I might (even with a modern pitchfork), I can’t keep my own stable free of cow pies, goat pellets, and chicken turds. It’s certainly not a very sanitary place to bear a child. And yet that’s where the long-promised Messiah was born because the world had no room for him? Yuck. That’s not how I would have written the Christmas story.
But God’s a better writer than I am.
At its core, Christmas is not a perfect, sanitized, tied-with-a-bow holiday; it’s earthy. It’s messy. With the exception of the angels singing to the shepherds, it’s kinda underwhelming — a teenager has a baby in an animal-laden garage-equivalent during tax season. Hmmm.
But when you trace the thread of promises and prophecies woven through Scripture about this particular birth, that’s when Christmas becomes truly luminescent. Christmas is not about having perfect family get-togethers in a perfectly-cleaned house, fabulous parties, impressive presents, or flawless decorations. It’s not even about making a list and checking it (off) twice.
Christmas is about God keeping his promises and willingly entering into our darkness so we can find true Light. And if we find Him, we ourselves can shine brightly no matter how great the darkness.
I’ll probably never have a perfectly-restful, perfectly-observed Advent season. But if Christmas can reignite my trust in God (if He came once, He can come again) and help me share a little light in this dark world, then I guess it’s worth all the trouble — even the decorating.
“Again, Jesus spoke to them, saying ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’” ~ John 8:12 ESV
You are the salt of the earth. Perfection is a myth. It’s fear in high heels! Enjoy your days, your hours, your animals and people. Don’t miss it. It will never be like this again. Relax and breathe and know you are loved for who you are. I love you!!!
You are the salt of the earth. Perfection is a myth. It’s fear in high heels! Enjoy your days, your hours, your animals and people. Don’t miss it. It will never be like this again. Relax and breathe and know you are loved for who you are. I love you!!!
Awesome work!