After attending an accordion pocket book class at Lulu’s Barn with book binder Joelle Webber of Mermaid Bindery, I was inspired to adapt the project to make an Advent calendar for everyone in my weekly writers’ group, plus two poets in my monthly book group.
I came up with a writing prompt for each day, printed them, and cut them into little slips I tucked into each slot, along with handcrafted tea by my friend Kate’s Merry Auld Tea Company.
I got them in the mail just in time so everyone received them by Dec. 1. I told myself this would be my only Big Make of the holiday season because, as I’ve mentioned, I set out to be properly sad for a change.
(I had so much fun coming up with prompts and making these little books that I plan to do it again. If you would like to be on the list to receive one in time for Advent 2024, please email me and I will be in touch when I work out the design. I will likely charge a small fee to cover the cost of supplies and shipping, just to be totally transparent.)
I handed out Trader Joe’s Advent calendars to my family at Thanksgiving. Even the cat got his own box of daily delights.
Each day, I opened my own Advent calendar. It was filled with promises for future together times, reminders that I am loved, chocolate, and baubles given by my husband, a dear friend, and my oldest son. My middle son who was away at school added a song to special Spotify playlist for me every day, and my youngest surprised me with occasional Italian pastries and bougie chocolate. They even cleaned their room!
It was no small thing for me to ask for my family’s help celebrating Advent in this way, but it was worth feeling a little vulnerable so I wouldn’t know what was behind each door. That they happily obliged was a tremendous gift in and of itself.
This Advent and Christmas season also brought me unexpected gifts every day, or as the little Advent book refers to it, “evidence of God’s grace.”
I set out to grieve during the holiday season instead of ignore it’s dull ache by endlessly doing. All these years, I thought I was avoiding the emptiness Christmas brings because my mother isn’t here to make it special the way only a mother can. But I’d probably have been sad even if she was still alive. I have an endless capacity for bleak thinking.
In my unwrapping of all I box up and keep out of sight, my own expectations and disappointments probably hurt me more than anything else.
Maybe that’s why the unexpected gifts meant so much (and will forevermore).
I won’t itemize all of them, but a few stand out.
There were no farm animals at Our Lady Queen of Peace’s Live Nativity in Boothbay Harbor on Dec. 2.
Where were the lowing cattle? The sheep? And goats?
But, of course, live Nativity meant real people dressed as Mary and Joseph, King Herod, the wisemen, all clustered around a manger with an actual baby in it.
I already mentioned I’m a sketchy Catholic, but I felt utterly daft for expecting some kind of holy petting zoo. I laughed out loud at the absurdity of my mistake.
An unexpected gift. Usually, I crumple with embarrassment when I get something so completely wrong.
Another bit of grace came from a woman who tried to help me help my college freshman who was overcome by chronic tonsilitis and a terrible cold at the end of the semester.
She said, “What would we do without Mummas,” as she scribbled a name and number on the back of a business card and sent us off with hope of salvaging some grades.
Indeed.
I don’t often feel very effective with my well-intentioned but fumbling support of my third kid in the ways they need most, so I appreciated the nod that perhaps I was getting it right. In that moment anyway.
A couple of school cancellations arrived as miracles that made it possible for me to finish the final assignment of Organizational Behavior, a graduate class I took as part of the Certificate of Advanced Study in Adult Learning I am working on.
I also sent my adult ed brochures to the printer on time, thanks to the focus working from home on them allowed. The office is often the last place for getting anything, especially like this, done during the busy lead up to holiday break.
Thanks to limiting overdoing I was present enough to notice these surprises in the moment.
Something else snuck into my awareness, too.
I tell myself a story that I fell from grace when my first marriage ended. That’s no big deal really. I just made it more awful by blogging about it because at the time I was a successful pro blogger and that’s what bloggers did. This post originally veered way off course – and into dangerous emotional territory for me – detailing that tailspin 13 years ago. None of which needed to be said.
The short of it is that I’ve lived with a lot of shame over the last decade. Shame is even more painful than sorrow.
“Shame,” Brene’ Brown writes in Dare to Lead, (my book choice for Organizational Behavior) “is … the fear that something we’ve done or failed to do, an ideal that we’ve not lived up to, or a goal that we’ve not accomplished makes us unworthy of connection… Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.”
That’s been me for over a decade. I’ll completely unpack that box someday, too. But not right now.
I’m busy unwrapping my heart, the most amazing unexpected gift of all.
Thank you for reading along with my Advent and Christmas writing project. I’m about to launch a busy spring semester. It’s my intention to blog again before summer break, but we’ll see. Stay tuned and feel free to stay in touch!
Raye S. Leonard 