Lawrence Hall, HSG
And This the Happy
Morn
This is the month,
and this the happy morn,
Wherein
the Son of Heav'n's eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and
Virgin Mother born,
Our
great redemption from above did bring
-From
“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” John Milton
The Bee Lady and her helper visited the other day, bringing
jars of honey to help us celebrate Advent, Christmas, and breakfast. We host some
of her hives, and it is a joy to see those bees working the seasons of
flowering plants and trees and sipping from the pools of fresh water we keep
for them. Bees are essential for our lives, for without their industry in
pollinating crops we would not eat. Flowers and honey are a happy bonus.
No one has yet messed up Advent (aka “The Christmas Season,”
which it is not), and so we are spared Advent sales and Advent gifts and Advent
movies and news stories babbling about The True Meaning of Advent. Advent is a
season that points to the Nativity, not to itself.
But this liturgical season of quiet anticipation is blessed
with quiet joys anyway: gifts of local honey, for instance, and folks sending
each other homemade cookies and homemade pies and homemade rum cake. A neighbor
gave us a bundle of lightered-pine kindling, now relatively rare. I’m not going
to start a fire with it anytime soon; simply to smell the scent, the East Texas
incense of lightered-pine is to be taken back to childhood on the farm.
Advent and Christmas are seasons in the liturgical calendar,
of course, but culturally they are also seasons of remembrance. This part can
go wrong because of the unreasonable expectations in our cargo-cult
sub-culture. Things are nice (I’m open to a Rolex, a Leica, and a new car,
okay?), but as an old saying goes, God is not at the end going to ask any of us
how much our car cost. I’m a
sentimentalist – I think that years from now a man or woman will remember
happily a childhood doll, train, Christmas dress, fire truck, or first purse
much more than expensive, look-at-how-much-I-spent, battery-powered gimcrackery
that was outdated even as it was manufactured.
I have such a happy Christmas remembrance of my Uncle Bob
giving us boys lengths of small, kid-size rope which he had worked into real
cowboy lassos. I was never good at lassoing anything other than fence posts and
my father’s deer-dog (and I got into trouble for that), but that bit of hand-worked
line is the sort of memory that stays with a man in a way that expensive,
plastic, made-in-Shanghai landfill cannot.
And then there was Aunt Lola’s divinity candy. And
Grandmama’s teacakes. And a Christmas tree from our own patch of woods. Bing
Crosby on the pickup truck radio. The Rug-Rat playing with her new Barbie in a
sunlit window. Sigh.
As Mr. Milton says, the center of Christmas is “the happy
morn,” but all the other joys are wonderful too.
Merry Christmas.
-30-
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