Before today, I don’t think I’ve ever woken up on December 1st and thought: this is the day to start making Advent preparations. When I think about WHY this is so, I guess the term “living Advent,” comes to mind. It seems that every December for the past 11 years, we have been in some kind of transition and/or medical crisis and so Advent crafts and stories have taken a back seat.
One particular Advent four years ago this coming Monday, our little Patrick Gabriel was induced three weeks early and air-lifted quickly to San Francisco to be treated for liver failure. His liver problems resolved after some worrying weeks and he was able to come home on Christmas Eve. We have such nice pictures of his meeting with his siblings for the first time! Christmas was very meaningful for us that year, especially since we didn’t actually decorate the tree or have the present-opening until Epiphany, the feast of the Magi.
Last year was a fairly smooth Advent for the first time pretty much since we’ve started homeschooling. We checked out some St Nicholas books from the library and I brought out our stock of Christmas books and Kieron, then a relatively recent literate, pored through them with fascination. We also had an Advent calendar, thanks to my mom, who is faithful about sending these. But I didn’t find the wreaths until after Christmas 
.
This December 1st I managed to:
- Get out the Christmas books
- Get out the wreaths, hang the hanging one, and find candles for the candle one.
- Get out the Advent calendar my mom sent last year and have Aidan open the first window.
- Make ginger cookies.
- PLUS walk to the Post Office with my husband and daughter and dear 7 year old in his purple wheelchair, AND
- sled with my three youngest on the driveway since the snow has nicely turned into wonderful ice tracks where our car’s treads melted it.
I think I’ll sit back now and drink vanilla coffee until Christmas — ha!
Realistically, my plans for Advent even during smooth years are probably going to be relaxed compared to many others’. But it’s nice to have some sort of plan for this season, even if it is a very quiet one. And it’s nice that as the Bookworm says, others have done so much planning so that I can browse and be inspired and set aside ideas for the future.
Not that I regret those years when life planned our Advent for us — I’m clipping below a post I wrote back in January 2003 — wow, does it bring back some memories:
——————————–
An update on our little boys:
Patrick — at one month of age, he is fine to all appearances. We haven’t had any follow up labs since he left the ICN on Christmas Eve so I can’t categorically say “He is fine”. He is a great baby –we couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present. He has enough older siblings that he is hardly ever put down, and he is just starting to
Aidan — he had to have a biopsy the weekend between Christmas and New Years. We both were with him during the day of the procedure — we brought dd Clare, who was invaluable as a Mommy’s helper for Patrick since poor Aidan took 7 tries to get an IV started this time. Kevin stayed with him overnight at the hospital — the preliminary results of the biopsy showed no rejection but they haven’t received the final word back from SF. He is still pretty yellow. This is the first time he has been jaundiced since the transplant and that has been scary. But his bilirubin has stabilized and his other numbers are also stable though still high.
Poor Aidan has been coping pretty well with what has to be the worst sibling displacement in history. …his mom disappearing for 3 weeks, constant driving back and forth from Fresno to SF, then a whole set of medical procedures of his own. Plus the seizure meds he has been on have affected his personality a little.
He thinks Patrick is a big joke — every time Patrick sneezes Aidan literally falls over laughing. Other than that, I’m not sure if he really understands that Patrick is not just a rather realistic stuffed toy! As for me — physically, fine except for not losing the pregnancy weight, maybe because we have been living on pizza and hamburgers and holiday food??; and except for waking up every 2 hours on the dot to warm bottles
and administer them. Sleep deprivation has taken on new shades of meaning. Plus it seems to take 2 hands to hold a baby and a bottle (Patrick needs to be on a low-iron diet) so that leaves me needing a third hand in order to type emails ;-)
Emotionally, I have 2 tracks playing at the same time — one joyful “babymoon” melody and one, a creepy one like in a horror movie when something horrible is sneaking up behind the main character. I never know which one I should be listening to, and it’s confusing trying to listen to them both at the same time! There is so much to worry
about that one could spend all day and not scratch the surface. I can see that Jesus was making a practical as well as a spiritual point when He told us not to be anxious about anything. We could do it endlessly, there is so much to worry about, but what good does
it do?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of Christmas. When I picture the Nativity, I picture the “silent, holy night” and the stillness of Bethlehem described in the carols we all grew up with. Now I have a mom’s eye view of what went on before and after that blessed night. Mary started her pregnancy with a real prospect of having her beloved betrothed divorce her for adultery; she spent the next couple of months serving her cousin Elizabeth throughout the last stages of her pregnancy; then in her own last trimester, a strenuous trip to a strange, crowded city to fulfill civil obligations… and going into labor, with no refuge to count on.
Then afterwards, more travelling for the Presentation, fulfilling religious obligations; and then a life and death flight out of country and the wrenching, undeserved fate of the Holy Innocents. In those few months, she went through about every difficulty and inconvenience a mom could go through, at a most physically and emotionally vulnerable time of her life.
If Jesus hadn’t understood tragedy and stress as God, He would certainly have learned it and how to deal wisely with it from His earliest days with His Mother. That peaceful stillness in Bethlehem was an isolated moment won at great price, by many unrecorded “heroic moments” on the part of the Holy Family. I am going to ask Our Blessed Mother for help in this since often I let the effect of the diificult times seep into the precious,
eternal times. She is portrayed always as peaceful and calm but this peace wasn’t due to ease, but was hard-earned through many trials.
Sorry this got away from me. I’ve been thinking a lot about it. Do the hard times make a mockery of the moments of joy and peace, or turn them into precious jewels? Can all our imperfect efforts add up to more than the sum total of their parts? Have any of you seen The Two Towers? my kids really like the “samwise the brave” speech and maybe that is another way of saying the same thing. We fight and stumble and fall in order to preserve what’s really good. God in His grace redeems our efforts.
