Tag: Advent calendars

Epiphany: Unexpected Gifts

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.

A writing prompt for every day of December … or whenever.

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.

This Trader Joe’s cat Advent calendar could satisfy a small colony of cats. Each door contained a handful of salmon and seaweed treats. More than one cat really needed, however, this cat managed just fine.

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!

I don’t know if this Advent calendar is meant to be used year after year, but if you don’t bust out the paper doors, it’s totally refillable. Thank you, Etsy!

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.

John Leonard, husband of my stocking sister Donna, was a fine King Herod, even if there were no chickens in his box of gold.

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.

Lulu’s Barn on an early December night.

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!

The House That Love Built

Every year I unpack the log cabin Advent calendar my mother gave us when my oldest son was my only son. I wanted to bring a new holiday tradition to my own little – and soon to grow – family. After a year or so of punch-paper Advent calendars filled with waxy chocolates, a box arrived from one of those mail order specialty gift catalogs.

Merry Christmas, the card read, May this house be full of joy each year. Love, Mom.

Every year it is.

The wooden Advent calendar in its attic storage box.

If I go hard for anything at Christmas, it’s the Advent calendar(s). Christmas stockings, too, but that’s a post for a later reflection.

What I love about the Advent countdown is spreading out the glad tidings over 24 days instead of saving all the cheer for Christmas morning. It lasts longer and it may be just that simple. I mean, who doesn’t want more merry?

When my kids were little, I had to be pretty strict about whose turn it was to open the numbered door or drawer of the log cabin. Otherwise they might tear each other’s hair or rip each other’s arms out to be first. Usually, they found foil-wrapped chocolate Santas or ornaments from the Bath Sweet Shoppe, back when a bag of holiday candy – enough to fill the Advent calendar of three greedy little boys (and their stockings, too) – cost about $25.

A smart four-year-old in 2009 takes a closer look in case there is another treat behind the door.

Over the years, the Advent calendar also held other surprises. Playmobil pieces dispersed among drawers as clues to the bigger set Santa might leave under the tree. Legos that built a Ninjago thingie a handful of bricks at a time (yes, my kids fought over these, too). As they grew, each day might be filled with candy leading up to one bigger surprise each week, like cinema tickets the years Star Wars premiered a movie.

There was the year of kindnesses (plus chocolate). I leave one of its prompts behind the door to find over and over again when I unbox Christmas. It’s an evergreen reminder.

Let this serve as a Advent gift to you. Pass it on!

The Advent house is empty now, though I still take it out and set it up. Memories spill from it. I unwrap them in my mind, swallow them in my heart.

The kids are grown up, but I honor Advent anyway. I give them each a punch-paper calendar with slightly better chocolate from Trader Joe’s. These simple cardboard boxes might get tossed in the backseat of a Jeep, tucked in a messenger bag and lugged from one lab meeting to the next. No one’s looking so someone might eat all the chocolate in their calendar in a single day. Another might find theirs in May completely intact under a stack of books.

It doesn’t matter how my family encounters Advent as young adults. I hope, just as my mother did, that when they do, at Christmas, or when they clean out their cars, or in a melted mess in August, they will know how very much they are loved.

The house that love built.