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Reinventing Advent
by Stanley Hall

Thanksgiving Day at our house was a glad and festive time. But then came December, quiet and dark. While other houses in the neighborhood were already lit up with the preparations for Christmas, our house folded its hands and held its breath and stayed very still. My maternal grandmother lived with my parents and me in those years. When I was very young my grandfather had died just days before Christmas. So our house went into a sort of mourning again, each year, right after Thanksgiving. My grandmother, my father said, was one world-class mourner. She's Irish, he said, and that seemed to explain it. I understood that I could slip away to the houses of friends to see Christmas, but it was not at our house. Not yet. We had to wait. We had to go just a bit farther, wait a while longer, before we could be glad again. At the time, I didn't realize that it was all a bit odd, compared to what the other families around us were doing.

My mother and father accepted my grandmother's heroic mourning, made room for it, just as they had for her in our household. And my mother, Catholic-become-Presbyterian, constructed a fine Christmas out of it all. Late on the 24th of December, we all went to church, the three of us to the Presbyterian church and my grandmother to her church, St. Boniface. When we all returned home, the tree my father had stored in the garage was put up straight away. I got to place the first ornaments on it, the hard-to-break ones that went low for the joy of the cats. Then I was sent off to bed. In the morning when I raced to the main room, the tree was transformed with its lights and all manner of new and old, store-bought and hand-me-down ornaments. And good gifts.

My grandmother gave us stillness and memory and waiting, my father gave us patience, and my mother drew from her Catholic childhood a memory that Christmas could go much farther than was known to us Presbyterians. So we reinvented our own cautious Advent, our own feast of Christmas and our own Twelve Days of light in the time of darkness.

But we also gave them away, since all the neighborhood children knew that Christmas got its second wind at the Hall house. By then, my grandmother had chased her daughter out of the kitchen and was expertly baking treats for the children of the neighborhood. Thinking back now, I'm sure that parents up and down the street gave a sigh and a silent thank you to my folks, for a bit of respite and peace.

Out of the darkness came this marvelous light. On January fifth, my father and I piled up as many of the leftover neighborhood Christmas trees as we could find, in the empty field behind our house. And surrounded by my friends and me and a few stray and curious adults, Dad sent up this amazing fire. So we did Christmas, a light in that season of darkness, this life that did not deny the memories of our deaths but rather made room for us to live with them. It turned out to be good for us. It was ages later I learned that we kindled the fire on the eve of the Epiphany.

Reprinted with permission from Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary, Spring, 2001.

Stanley Hall, is associate professor of liturgics, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Austin, Texas.

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