I've recently gotten to thinking about what we have done for Christmas all these years, since this year I have discovered the amazing and beautiful Advent blogosphere. We haven't usually made a lot of special homemade foods or crafts, and don't think the relatives with whom we spend Christmas would particularly enjoy them if we did. And what we do doesn't look like much of the intentional Advent preparation that I'm seeing elsewhere. In fact, I confess that I have sometimes thought of Christmas as the sort of last frontier of simplicity--that is to say, I can live the rest of my life simply, but Christmas? It lives me.
But, we do prepare for Christmas, and these are some of the things we've done:
First of all, we always, always go to Georgia for Christmas itself. Georgia is, in my memory, the land of plastic nativity scenes, tattered street decorations, plastic toys that require batteries, Jingle Bell Rock, and the Pink Pig at Rich's. To be fair, it's also handbell choirs, carolers, poinsettias and some really nice home tours. But all of this is more sentimental than faith-building to me. We enjoy our visits, and are quite ready for them by the time they occur, but there's a definite crowd factor. We don't really choose what we're going to do. We just do what our families have always done.
So we start our Christmas season in New York. When C.Z. was small and we were new to New York, we sampled most of the usual events. The first year we went to Midtown to see the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree and have a look at the windows at Saks. And we poked our heads into FAO Schwartz. But since no one in our small family likes shopping or crowds, we were happy to say "been there, done that" and move on. And we never went back.
Someone once gave us Rockettes' Christmas Spectacular tickets. We appreciated them, and we went, but we never went back to that again either. As Bob puts it, we tend to shy away from anything with the word "spectacular" in it.
We took more permanently to The Nutcracker. Though it's a completely secular event, we did find that our little girl naturally enjoyed graceful dancing snowflakes and giant Christmas trees that rise up out of the stage floor. And she always shook with silent laughter as the purposely-comical dead Mouse King was carted off the stage, pot belly up. And since New Yorkers inevitably become acquainted with the world of real child performers, we speculated how the little Marie/Clara/whatever-her-name-is felt at having to be whirled around alone on that bed barefoot and with her eyes shut for quite some time. Did she ever get cold or dizzy?
One year we even took a small nephew with us, who despite his extreme youth, masculine persona and general exhaustion, stayed awake admirably during the entire performance. Admittedly, he was also quite perplexed about why he couldn't hold his blankie during the show, since it seemed simple enough to him that he should be able to leave it in the cab and get it back after the show. But I digress.
At some point, Handel's Messiah performances began to overlap with our Nutcrackers. When the New York Philharmonic began to perform it again after a twenty-year hiatus, Bob wanted to see what that was like. In preparation, he played the Sir Colin Davis/LSO version every day from Thanksgiving until the performance the week before Christmas. This tradition stuck, and we went for years, especially after we moved to the same neighborhood as Riverside Church and it became a local event. And since we only listen to Messiah during December, I still get chills every time I hear it. I tested it out again last night while cooking dinner, and found myself involuntarily conducting with a wooden spoon.
And last but not least among the classic New York Christmas observations is the Angel Tree at the Metropolitan Museum. We no longer live in that neighborhood as we did until 2004, but we still go see the tree at least once every season. This year it coincides with the re-opening of the Medieval section of the main museum, so I'm especially eager to go. (Next week, I hope.)
The Angel Tree is a giant Christmas tree decked with real Baroque angels, and surrounded by a Neapolitan Creche. And of course, being properly Baroque, it's under-lit. It's blatantly Christian (even if the museum only touts it as artistic), extremely popular with visitors, and they play real religious Christmas music. I hope it lasts!
When C.Z. was smaller, Bob would try to prolong her interest in the Angel Tree and Neapolitan Creche by playing "find the..." so that I could admire the scene for longer. Her attention span is nice and long now, but they still try to memorize the layout to discern whether the curators rearrange the townsfolk of Neapolitan Bethlehem each year or put them in exactly the same spots as before. The problem is, they never can quite figure out which it is because there are just too many figures to memorize and the museum doesn't allow photos. At least, they didn't until last year. Last year the usual forbidding sign was missing, and having of course hopefully packed away my camera anyway, I whipped it out and took several dozen photos. So, this year we're going to study them first and see whether we can solve this mystery!
And on a couple of occasions, we've gone through the Medieval hall just before Thanksgiving, or just after New Year's, and found the whole tree area enshrouded by folding partitions, and glowing from within. Of course we peeked through the cracks in the folds, and saw conservators carefully brushing off angels and packing them away in boxes, under brilliant lighting. Oh fun! I felt like Claudia in The Mixed-Up Files.
And besides the Angel Tree, the Metropolitan is a wonderful Advent resource generally if you just want to go and contemplate the Incarnation. They have a Duccio Madonna and Child, for instance, and also one of my favorite Madonna and Child statuettes ever (see below). Historian Barbara Tuchman said that Madonna and Child statuettes before 1350 portrayed little maternal affection between mothers and children, because the Christ child was supposed to be separate and the Virgin abstracted. But one look at this statuette rather blows that hypothesis out of the water. I don't think Ms. Tuchman cared much for the Medieval Church.
Mid-14th c. French statuette at the Metropolitan Museum (and one of my favorite pieces in the museum)
As for our own tree, since we always go out of town for Christmas itself, we usually buy it early. We bought one this weekend, in fact. But the first few years we lived here we only had a table top tree, because we really didn't have room for a bigger one, and perhaps I was also in denial about where "home" was. Then there was the year that Bob first tried to buy a full-sized tree, from a French Canadian on the corner of 2nd Ave. and 80th St. "Fiftee(n)? Non, I said fiftee!" When we got home, we crammed the tree up against our living room storage unit, which also doubled as our dresser, since the living room was also our bedroom. To get clothes out, I had to reach behind the tree. Needless to say, I was still finding needles in my clothes until May. But at least they smelled good!
Some of the shoe ornaments
When we finally started getting a real tree, I started buying those shoe ornaments from the Metropolitan Museum, on sale after Christmas. That's kind of odd, because I'm not a big fan of shoes. I think, in retrospect, I must have liked the idea of having souvenirs from the museum. (Since of course we weren't going to be in New York much longer). C.Z., meanwhile, was accumulating a collection of silver bells from Bob's mother each year. And we have various other ornaments from other museums, or of other personal significance, as well. We all like the fir smell, and the evening that we decorate, we have cider or hot chocolate while listening to Handel's Messiah or some other Christmas music.
And of course, there's our own nativity scene. My mother started C.Z. on that. At Christmas time, I would let C.Z. play with the figurines, and they used to be among her favorite toys. The first Christmas we lived here, she holed up under the desk with them for hours, where I heard her mutter things like, "Once there was Mary, Joseph, Baby Jesus, a goat, and a donkey. And it was fine, and it was good, but their only problem was the goat couldn't fit in the barn..." The next year, she stared and stared at the Baby Jesus figure. She stared so intently that I finally asked her what was on her mind. "If I stare at him long enough," she responded, "I wonder if he will become real." Indeed.
Our latter-day Christmas seasons have been marked by moms' group parties and violin "winter concerts." At the moms' group (now co-op) parties we've done everything from re-enacting the nativity to playing carols on recorder, but since they're church parties, they're Christmas parties. And since C.Z. originally took violin from a teacher at a nearby parochial school, some of the string concerts were happily religious, too. But there is always something about a Christmas performance--the last minute rush to get new dress shoes, the jitters right before the performance, going to everyone else's performances, and the mad dash to the airport, usually only a day or so afterwards. Anyone who has a child who performs knows what I mean. My friends whose children dance in repeated performances of The Nutcracker really know what I mean.
Now that C.Z. is in a conservatory program, her string concerts have nothing to do with Christmas except that they're given right before it. I'm just glad that they're not the day after! (This comes to mind because I used to have friends who traveled for college bowl games.) And my mother-in-law, brave soul, frequently flies up from Georgia for C.Z.'s concerts. (How many women do you know who will cheerfully spend four days out of town the week before they serve Christmas dinner for the extended family?) C.Z.'s orchestra concerts now have precluded some of our other celebrations, including Messiah, which has moved back to the much less decorative Avery Fisher Hall this year anyway.
But the "winter concert" will never preclude the Lessons and Carols service at Redeemer. We try very hard to stay in town until Lessons and Carols, and even go to our old location on the East Side to see the full-dress version. Not only does it have an orchestra, choir and (need I say excellent?) soloists singing excerpts from Messiah and other oratorios, but native speakers read Advent passages in many languages, including many from countries that are not traditionally Christian. There's nothing quite as thrilling at Christmas as hearing Luke 2 read in, say, Farsi.
So, this leaves me with an opportunity to arise to the challenge of Advent personally, to prepare amidst all the bustle. We've done Advent wreaths before, but we rarely remember to start them the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and we're never home to light the Christ candle. Not a problem--we'll do what we can, even if it's just C.Z. and myself reading Isaiah and singing a carol alone at 7 p.m. before Bob comes home. But I think we'll limit it to Sundays this year.
Now, I can see how someone reading this post might get the idea that our Christmas celebration is all about tickets we purchase, and in fact, about events we can attend only because we live in New York. This is possibly true in some sense, but these things always involve trade offs, don't they? For years we celebrated each New York Christmas as though it would be the last, because we thought it would be. Because we go visit family, we've never spent a Christmas day at home. We never did the Santa tradition, except to tell the story of St. Nicholas, and never had room (or sometimes money) when C.Z. was young for more than the tiniest and most essential toys. Quite honestly, for many years as I watched the cousins reveling in their Santa bounty, I wondered if perhaps we were too austere. But I never wondered once we got home. We are all thankful for how we've celebrated Christmas, even C.Z. We may not have celebrated with the same traditions each year, and we may not have always been the most diligent with our readings, baking, and crafting but we've always had plenty of Advent expectation in our hearts as we've approached our Lord's birthday.
