Discovering Music with Professor Carol

Is anticipation of the “end of Advent” in full swing at your house? Probably your children won’t express it quite that way. Christmas is coming! That’s more likely the cry. Things may be getting calmer, or busier, depending on your family. Either way, the long season of anticipation is drawing to a close.

In these four weeks, we’ve explored beloved traditions – many of them ancient. We’ve considered specific aspects of Christian history and worship. We’ve examined seasonal songs, paintings, and poems. Perhaps today we can take stock.

No matter how hard we try, we aren’t likely to create the “picture-perfect” Christmas. We have to remember that professional photographers a film those perfectly designed rooms and décor to dangle before our eyes in the December magazines. Not parents of active families. The magazines have a staff of cooks to try out the recipes that inspire us to greater culinary heights.  These are the  recipes that remain plastered (untried) to our refrigerators beneath magnets until April.

Meanwhile, many of us are stuck in last year’s promise to purge the broken ornaments and untangle lights that have lain in the attic for years. Except, we didn’t get to it this year either.

Our first consolation is spiritual: Christ gave us the perfect Christmas. And every tradition, song, painting, poem, or gesture we’ve considered in this Advent Calendar is a human expression, inspired by that gift. All of the power and strength derives from the light of Christ.

Beyond that, your children may develop fond memories of traditions that we don’t even realize we are establishing. Maybe it’s the fact that, every year, you pull out the spices and leave them on the counter for days . . . until you face facts, give up on the cookie-baking-from-scratch, and head for those wonderful slice-and-bake rolls.

Or maybe it’s a scramble you have every year as your children try to figure out who has the scissors and tape. It could even be the annual discussion as to whether the Nativity Set is so badly cracked, you really shouldn’t put it out, but need to get another. A thousand tiny actions will strike your children as special, predictable, comforting. These will remain in their memory.

I remember my mother sitting me down each year to grate blanched almonds for the one cookie she enjoyed making. Enjoyed is the wrong word: she was committed to baking these cookies. And she made them for everyone in the whole world, it seemed (i.e. endless batches). I complained bitterly. It was hard, churning that handle. I remember sprays of grated almonds flying around the kitchen and her accompanying distress. Picture-perfect it was not. Yet it was, in retrospect, a cherished annual event.

Years later as a young adult, if I went home during cookie-baking week, I took my same place at the table, and my mother and I had nearly the same discussion as to whether I was grating the almonds finely enough, or missing the bowl. That was our tradition, and I recall it with a tear in my eye today.

Look around at your family’s traditions. They don’t have to be designer-perfect.

Those people who first strung popcorn or assembled to sing carols for the downcast and homeless didn’t worry about the photo shoot. They expressed what was in their hearts. They were anticipating the Advent of our Lord.

Tomorrow, for the last day of Advent, we will offer a final post. It’s a short video from a Christmas Eve service in Weimar, Germany. You may recall in an earlier post that I mentioned a Christmas Eve pageant in a German church used as a hospital during the Napoleonic Wars? Well, this clip comes from that pageant.

But that’s for tomorrow. Today, take stock of all that you have prepared, rather than those things you didn’t. Embrace the old traditions you are following, and the new ones you create for your family, even in their oddest forms. And rejoice.

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