Book of Days

It is the First Sunday of Advent, and here begins our time of preparation for Christmas. I write this tonight from Chicago, where we’ve been visiting family since before Thanksgiving. 41.8369° North in latitude, which is more than 15 degrees further north than our home in Lake Worth. Darkness falls much earlier here; the increase in darkness is much more apparent, the cold weather more extreme. We awoke on our first morning to a land covered in snow. Here, there is no doubt of midwinter’s approach.

Advent itself is a season of the Church. It is a time of preparation for Christmas much like Lent prepares us for Easter, and in earlier days it was a time of fasting, just as Lent is. It began back then on the 12th of November, the day after Martinmas, the day after our time of remembering the dead, which had begun with Halloween, had just come to a close. This aspect of Advent is now in the past. But the value of Advent is clear even if your Christmas celebration is not one based in religion. It matters not whether we are celebrating the birth of the Christ child or the triumph of light over darkness at the solstice. In either scenario, Advent has its place, for to speak of joy and peace at Christmas seems a bit disingenuous without first setting the stage for needing those gifts, and this is where Advent comes in: Advent humbles us, opens our hearts to this need. Advent provides us a time to make amends, to right wrongs, to repair relationships, to make our house fair as we are able. The days are dark. Advent prepares us for the coming light of the child, of the returning sun.

Over the centuries, many beautiful ways of expressing this have come about. There are many old old songs for this time of year that are not the songs you’ve been hearing in stores for weeks by now. These songs tend to be darker and more reflective. (The Benedictines of Mary have released one of the best collections of music for the season, called Advent at Ephesus. I highly recommend it.) Candles are naturally a big part of the traditions of Advent, too, for their symbolism is clear. Tradition would have us build a ring of four candles, three purple and one rose. On the First Sunday of Advent, which is tonight, we would light the first purple candle. Come the night of the Second Sunday, we light two purple candles. On the Third Sunday, we light those same two purple candles and the rose candle, and on the Fourth Sunday, not long before Christmas, all four candles are lit––as the nights grow increasing darker on the approach to the Midwinter Solstice, we respond with increasing light in our homes and in our hearts.

More secular approaches to Advent include a daily candle that is lit for an hour each day. At our home, we light ours each night at the table with dinner beginning on the First of December. When the candle is nearly done, Christmas has arrived. This tradition is related to the German tradition of the Advent calendar, which is probably the most familiar of Advent traditions. My first Advent calendar was given to me by my sister in 1973. The glitter and sparkle of the nighttime winter scene captured my imagination and I kept that calendar, along with every one I’ve had over the years. It is this same magic that has inspired much of what Convivio Bookworks is all about, and this is a large part of why we sell the things we sell, because I love sharing that magic with you, too.

We want Christmas to be magical for our kids and for ourselves, and Advent is, to me, key to that magic. It’s all about taking things slowly, all about setting the pace, setting the stage. We open our hearts and minds to possibility; we become light bearers in a time of increasing darkness.

Image: close up view of one of the many traditional German Advent calendars we sell at our website. This one was originally printed in 1955. Seth and I brought it to my aunt’s house in Illinois to help her and my cousins prepare for Christmas once we head back home.

Thanksgiving has passed and for those of us who take things slowly, tonight marks the First Sunday of Advent, a time of preparation, and we begin our procession toward the joy of Christmas. Without Advent, Christmas very easily becomes that thing that people do not like: “A big commercial racket,” as Lucy Van Pelt says each year in A Charlie Brown Christmas. It very easily becomes too sweet, a bit sickening, and people tire of it quickly. This is the problem with Christmas.

Christmas is about joy, but it is Advent that sets the stage for that joy. It eases us into the celebration. And it does so brilliantly, by acknowledging that these are dark times, times that require a boost like Christmas, and the darkness is as much literal as it is figurative, for the nights now are growing longer and longer in the Northern Hemisphere, and they will continue to do so all the way to the Winter Solstice, which this year is on the 21st of December. Advent takes that darkness, becomes a part of it and casts light upon it. Tonight, this First Sunday of Advent, we will light one purple candle in our circle of four candles. On the Second Sunday of Advent, December 7, we light that same candle and another purple candle. The following week, the Third Sunday of Advent, we light two purples and one rose candle. And on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, the night of the solstice, just before Christmas, all four candles in the ring are illuminated. As the darkness of night increases, so does the light issuing from our ring of candles.

When I was a boy, we’d light the Advent ring, often late at night, with the whole family gathered, but quickly folks would go their own ways. There is always much to do, after all. But Grandma and I would sit there longer each Sunday, in the darkness with the candles glowing, maybe with a Christmas album playing on the record player until it reached the end of the record, be it Side A or Side B, and at the end, the arm of the phonograph would lift the needle and the music would stop and that’s usually when we’d get up and blow out the candles. A quiet ritual, but how special. And I still remember that clearly, clear as that candle glow.

Tonight as I write this for you, the music is coming from the CD player (even that is outdated now, isn’t it?) and it is a recording called Hymnody of Earth by Malcolm Dalglish. Choir, hammered dulcimer, frame drum, songs inspired by the poetry of Wendell Berry. Nothing particularly “adventy” about these songs, although there is one song for the solstice and its longest night. There is a song, though, called “Thrush Song.” It ends with, “I go amazed / Into the maze of a design / That mind can follow but not know, / Apparent, plain, and yet unknown, / The outline lost in earth and sky.”

Whether your approach to Advent is a religious one, awaiting the birth of the child, or a secular one, awaiting the return of light, I think the words of Mr. Berry are fitting. This is the beauty, the value, of Advent. We go amazed into the maze, we go together, and out of the darkness comes something really special.

Image: A maze of lights in the darkness, last Christmas, out the front door. Can you discern the kitty ears? Haden was looking out the window when I took that photo.