Snow Globe Village

Christmas is six days away. My kids remind me of this when they wake, over bowls of oatmeal, and mid-schoolwork. They stop whatever they are doing and look at me seriously with  saucer-shaped eyeballs and say, “Six days, Mom.” Just in case I had forgotten their past five announcements. It feels good to anticipate. And anticipating with children makes the wait pure gold. 

We anticipate by rolling out gingerbread men and icing their too often decapitated bodies. We wear fat wool socks and Youtube our computer screens into fireplaces with life-like crackling sound effects. We cry like babies watching Little Women and look forward to the chocolate treat that comes with daily advent readings. We sit together under blankets and reminisce over our eclectic ornaments, clustered primarily around our tree’s middle. 

In our neighborhood, there are no Christmas lights or decorations. No mall holding Santa captive. No festive grocery stores or bell-ringers. We can forgo the boots and shovel. The Christmas service will be small and intimate, followed by a potluck of the vegetarian variety, instead of ham and roast beef served in the church basement. No stage swimming in poinsettias or pulpit dressed in ivy, but believers sitting close on beds and floor mats, wearing hand-knit sweaters and sipping hot water to keep warm within the snow-covered mountains that surround them, reminding me of the frosty villages inside the snow globes at Macys.

I feel more like an observer and facilitator of Christmas this year. Part of it is because I am not “home” celebrating this holiday as I know how to. Instead, I’m watching and learning how believers here celebrate Jesus’ birth. The traditions are new and must be learned. Also, I feel outside the magic of some of it, because I now feel responsible to make it magical for my children. There is something unsettling about growing out of childhood. I used to merely wait for presents and the cousins at the farm with a light heart and energy to spare. Now, I work early and late to wrap presents, scrape flour off countertops, and make the house smell of cinnamon. I burn candles to be like my Mom, wishing our home to feel a smidgen like my own growing up.  

I always loved Christmas Eve service as a kid. The weather likely below zero, our Minnesotan congregation of hearty Scandinavians would sing “Joy to the World” with unusual charisma, followed by a skit of Jesus being born to a couple middle-schoolers in robes and flip-flops. I can still imagine my family there, like nothing has changed. My Mom, hair freshly permed, wearing a pretty sweater and that thin gold necklace, my Dad smelling of cologne and seeking out all the elderly to squeeze and pat on the back, my two little brothers looking itchy in their Kohls’ sweaters, and myself savoring everything in my heart with such romantic notions that the memory of these services make my eyes sting. I remember smiling at my friends in the pew over, their hair just as set in tight ringlets, thanks to a night sleeping in pink foam curlers. The best part of all were the brown paper sacks, stapled at the top, and distributed to the children at the end of the service. Inside was always a waxy apple, peanuts in the shell, and a candy cane. 

I find myself now singing Christmas carols in Hindi, pointing to each curly word in my songbook for my oldest to try and follow along. I am dressed in a bright orange Indian suit, Aladdin-style pants and all. I look around the room at the dozen people around me, each clearly cherishing the specialness of coming together with other believers to celebrate the birth of Christ. Nowhere else can they so freely sing and speak of what His incarnation means to them.  After service, my legs are asleep from sitting like a pretzel with two kids playing horse-rider on my lap. Chai and biscuits are passed out. Spicy samosas come next. Then the meal. Stewed lentils and heaps of basmati rice, as white and fluffy as piles of snow. We bend over plates and eat with our hands. Children run around, people laugh, and the night holds a hint of magic, though not the kind I remembered. I look at my blonde babies listening with clueless blue eyes to someone tell the Christmas story in a language other than their own and wonder what their memories will be. A part of me dies when I know they won’t get paper sacks or hugs from their grandparents. I have felt this sort of dying often the last few years. The pain of daily dying has not diminished over time, like I had hoped. 

When the dying feels like cruelty, dealt out by God’s own hand, I can drown in self-pity and enter a very ugly world. A world based on my memories of the past, but altered. Everything was right back then. Such good old days are often talked about in passing and most people agree how much better it would be if only we could return to them. We don’t realize the damage at stake in allowing our brains and hearts to live in this imagined land of yesteryear. Only the strength of God’s grace has snapped me back into reality, allowing me to see the miracles in front of my face, like my children, the food on my plate, or the way the goats follow the voice of their shepherd down the valley with the sun dripping into the horizon. 

Solomon said in Ecclesiastes that it isn’t wise to always consider the past better than the present (Ecc. 7:10). This is something fools do. While I daydream about past gifts, my present gifts are going unnoticed, unopened. Like the Israelites, I am not to put yesterdays’ provisions in a Tupperware to eat later. No, the Lord will give me what I need for today and only today. And this will be true for tomorrow, as well. 

Today is full of Christmas magic, if I have the eyes to see it. Although I will undoubtedly weep in six days over things I’m missing, as strongly as a severed body part, I will also rejoice. Even if my Christmas feels lacking in its jazziness and sentimental value, I will have the substance. The best of holiday moods hint at the warmth inside the comfort of Christ’s nearness. And I will have that, guaranteed. It’s been promised. He has come. Emmanuel, God is with us.