'Tis The Season

"The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear." Buddy the Elf

 I carefully lined the students across the stage to practice the Reindeer Pokey. With antlers secured and their familiarity with the lyrics and actions, they were ready. The rehearsal went off without a hitch. Concert day arrived and the gymnasium was full of anticipatory parents and families this time.  When it was our classes’ turn, Mark planted himself in the small chair out front, ready to prompt anyone who forgot which part of the reindeer needed to be “put in”  and shook. His guidance would not be needed for the turning around each time as students did their own version of what they thought the hokey pokey looked like. As the song began to play, tears erupted closest to the stage exit. One little one stood like a true reindeer in the headlights.  It was clear that they were overwhelmed by the crowd before them and the huge expectation that they would now sing and dance.  Our student intern tried to help comfort them but when it was clear it wasn’t helping and the class was well into, “You put your antlers in”, the little person was helped off the stage.  When I later heard this story, I thought how brave and uninhibited it was to stand before a crowd of people, including her very own family, and communicate with her tears, that this was not for her.  She also created a  Christmas story for her family, me, and maybe those watching that would touch our hearts and find its way into a special memory.

My husband tells us the story every year of how in his home in Saint John as a small boy, he climbed up high on a shelf in the basement where a box of Christmas bulbs was stored for safekeeping. He found a way to open the box and remove one of the said bulbs and drop it to the floor below. He loved the pop sound so much that he continued to make his way through the box until his mother, hearing the sound, came to discover him.  I also have heard his mom’s laughter as she remembered this moment as well.

Together, Mark and I reminisce, each year about the time Maya, at four years old was playing one of the three kings in the children’s Christmas Eve service. Having to adjust the very large crown she was wearing several times, to keep it on her small head, she was more than a few steps behind the other Kings, so picking up her pace as she entered from the back of the church, she said in her loudest voice, “Wait for me! I’m coming with Jesus’ gift”. The sweetest part of this story is that she really believed she was as she carried the carefully wrapped empty box.

Inevitably, someone in our house mentions the year we came home to the fallen tree adorned only with the heads of gingerbread babies, pierced with a hook to adorn the tree.  The bodies all missing while our golden retriever, Zoe, lay close by shining her big brown eyes at us. The story is also retold of when we were students finishing our education degree and waiting for the trees on the corner to go on sale on Christmas eve and after finding the perfect one, to us, walking home three blocks while dragging it behind us as it snowed.

These are the memories we all have of how Christmas unfolds in its own way and time. They remind us that they are the real stories of Christmas. The memories of those unplanned moments, unexpected happenings, and the veering off of the perfect plans, that make their way into our hearts and are shared with others again and again.   It is not the perfectly set tables and elaborate gifts, the smoothly executed travel plans, or the ticking of boxes while preparing for traditions that often drain us or don’t serve us anymore. They all unfold without the heavy burdens often self-imposed to hustle and bustle, overspend, and over-prepare.  They are the simple moments of real living and loving that can be messy, unexpected, and full of joy and meaning. 

In the season when nature is blanketing itself in white and slowing to its own magical pace and society is asking the opposite,  may we allow our own meaningful experiences to unfold as they will while letting the season come to us. Instead of chasing unrealistic expectations, may we feel into our own stories and the memories that emerge there to remind us of what brings true meaning to the season.   And if we find ourselves succumbing to the outside pressures, cradled in exhaustion and disconnect, to live out some perfectly designed holiday, may we be our own kind of brave, and exit stage left.

(photo courtesy of Maya and her Kindergarten concert fifteen years ago)