The Best Gifts

Like the deep humming of a great engine starting up, you feel it before you hear it. Today is the first of December, and the buffer of Thanksgiving, which these days barely slows the onslaught of candy canes and red noses, is but a memory and a sinkful of leftovers containers. It's on, people.

But here is a little secret. This turning I've been writing about, the shift others have been musing on, has a bonus. Yes, we're saying yes to fewer gifts, fewer time commitments, simpler decorations. So thus we say yes, to fewer moments standing in line, less stress, fewer wardrobe concerns. Yes to less hurry. Yes to more cups of hot chocolate with our kids, yes, to another read aloud chapter. Yes to making room for the coming One in our hearts.

One of the things about having the sort of year I've had is that the way we've always done things doesn't work this year. And as we are re-imagining how we can incarnate hope and celebration on the landscape before us, I'm realizing the nature of the best gifts. They're unasked for, unexpected, not so much received as experienced.

• the tenderness of a Pop pop making pancakes and bacon with a six year old grandson
• a brave nine year old swinging out on a vine, his face pure joy
• "Me and Juilo Down By the Schoolyard" coming out of the speakers in the van, bringing non-stop smiles ("I'm on my way./ I don't know where I'm going./I'm on my way./I'm taking my time but I don't know where.")
• A shaft of light, making a photograph I don't even need to compose, just click the shutter and whisper a thanks.
  
• Arriving at the in-laws just in time to salvage a solid wood door to replace our very ugliest hollow one.
• Four Kemps laughing out loud at old Cosby Show episodes on DVD.
  
• A little brother laying aside a piece of his candy to save for his big brother.
• "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming," sung with gentle yet thrilling grace by a quartet, and singing "I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light" as the first Advent candle at church is lit.

Just a list, a motley patchwork of delight and reverence, glee and grace. Every single day has these moments, moments we cannot plan for, that cannot be bought or wrapped, gifts in the purest sense.

And let's face it, Jesus is the ultimate gift no one could have expected. The prophesies were there, but who could have imagined God clothed in silken baby flesh, the Word made inarticulate, Creator helpless in the arms of an unwed teenager? And yet as we stand at the stable door, as we put down our packages and our busyness and our expectations, the utter perfection of this Gift, sent from the Father, shines.

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Hebrews 4:14-16

Wrapped in our skin, with hands that would do work and share bread and lift in prayer, with feet made for dusty roads and the wooden hulls of fishing boats and for nails, He is a double gift: an empathetic Redeemer. He shatters and exceeds our assumptions; He is outrageously more than we try to make Him, because He made Himself less for our sakes.

Even a glimpse inside such a package, and the vision we long for our children to see demands we make room, clear the clutter, claim the time, be willing to be revolutionary by embracing less than we could own, to receive the More that awaits us.

Better Together

Counter cultural life change is hard. In the midst of turning, nothing can provide more encouragement than someone saying, "You know, we've been thinking about some of the same things, and wondering what changes we could make." Community can breathe life and staying power into our best intentions.

Please come be a part of an interactive online community at Christmas Change. C0ntent is still being added to the site, but there are already challenges and encouragement to spend less and give more, places to share you own story of change, and some special bloggers will begin tomorrow to add their voices.

Coming will be a family page and curriculum, and as each story is added to the site, we can benefit from the richness of shared experience.

As Amber wrote yesterday, shifting our celebration of Christmas is really an admission of reality-- we can only begin to conceive of the glory of the gift we've already received. As we draw close to the Gift Who is also the Giver, we are free to become the open handed people He created us to be.

So come and share your story, and read the stories of others. I'll be writing over there in a couple of weeks. Let us encourage each other, to dwell with joy in the Story this season is telling.

A Woman With a Plan

As I wrote in A Modest Proposal, a Christmas season more focused on the gift of presence and perhaps a broadened sense of who our neighbor is requires not just stopping. Stopping overfilling the shopping cart, stopping overfilling the calendar, stopping the frenzied rush toward collapse on the 26th. It requires turning. Turning toward a new way, and especially if our homes include small children, paving the pathway well for them.

So about the time the toy catalogs thump into mailboxes, about the time the trees go up at Stuffmart, about the time turkey and cranberries go on sale, we sit down together. Over dessert after a family dinner, we ask our boys what their favorite things are to do during the holiday season. From that first conversation, we set the tone that what is most important about these precious few weeks to come is what we do together during them, not the things we give each other on Christmas morning.

The conversation ranges all over, from riding around to look at Christmas lights to when we're going to Poppop and Grandma's to watching Charlie Brown, to baking for neighbors and Christmas Eve service. We contribute ideas too, and before long we have an embarassment of riches in planned outings and evenings in together, and most of them free or nearly so.

Now, the boys are still pretty excited about those plump toy catalogs, and their heads can often be seen in early November, close together over a page of LEGO sets, Sharpies in hands. And we enjoy those shiny pages for a few days, and then recycle them. Just as I find that hanging out at Pottery Barn isn't good for my contentment level, weeks of ads for thousands of toys would make any Christmas morning look paltry to a child's eyes. Our boys almost never see television with commercials, and this serves us very well the last two months of the year. As we curb other media sources, I'm exposing them to sites like Advent Conspiracy, and we're talking about the service projects popping up at their schools and at church.

There is one place I'll be spending a little more. From past years' experience, I've learned that avoiding the Stuffmart is a really good idea for me from Thanksgiving to New Years. It is far better for me to pay slightly more for our food at the grocery store and skip the crowds and temptations "where Christmas costs less." (Ugh) So I'll be planning meals and clipping my coupons. By avoiding the big box stores, I avoid those impulse endcap purchases, that nagging sense that whatever I've purchased or made isn't "enough." The Wall Street Journal says retailers spent $17.2 billion on holiday advertising last year. Why put myself in a position to pit my willpower against that kind of funded message?

Of course, this is all the planning that the kids can see. Behind the scenes, we've set our budget, placed orders for the toys we will be buying, and gathered materials for handmade presents. But it isn't too late to begin those things now.

To recap:
A Plan of Turning

• includes the whole family, and emphasizes shared experiences over purchased gifts.

• sets kids up for contentment and gratitude by limiting exposure to advertising and gradually exposing them to empowering information about giving to the least of these, appropriate to their ages

• is honest about temptations and stresses and creatively plans to reduce their influence

• reinforces budget and spending plans already in place, or makes those first, thus limiting financial worries and beginning planning with an honest picture of what is possible for spending and giving
  

With a clear vision of how this year can be different, and the recognition that intention in the little things is what makes that vision reality, the turning can begin today.

A Modest Proposal

Thursday night is our one TV night, and as we settled in with our popcorn bowl last night, it was already everywhere. One lone commercial mentioned Thanksgiving, but the rest had coasted right along to jingling bells, red and green, and promises that "it's like getting paid to shop."

Sheesh.

Last year I discovered this movement and found at last articulated and artfully presented the nagging disappointment and revolutionary possibility of the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day I've sensed for years.

Because of limited budget and home size and knowing deep down that "Christmas doesn't come from a store," we've never pursued making every material dream come true on December 25th. But what I'm realizing more and more, in many aspects of life, is that it is not enough to simply abstain. Tonia and others are inspiring me that is is possible, it is needful, to move with purpose in a different direction.

I'm all about practical application, so here's what we're doing this year, and perhaps some ideas to consider. We are continuing our practice of Advent, using a pottery Advent wreath we've had since our first married Christmas, and this book, purchased when the boys were tiny. This helps remind us that we are expectantly awaiting the birth of our Savior. But of course, no book needs to be purchased, and an Advent wreath can be made with five candles in holders and a bit of free greenery snipped from the yard. We're trying to adjust our heart focus, not trade "secular stuff" for "Christian stuff."

We will still exchange presents, and Santa still visits our home, but we are scaling back even further, and thinking more carefully about meaning and usefulness and remembering and evaluating the inevitable dud gifts from years past. We will be donating the money we aren't spending on each other to a cause we choose as a family. More restrained gift giving also opens up money in the budget to participate in seasonal giving opportunities, like Angel Tree and restocking our local food pantries. We're involving the boys in all these decisions to convey that our decision to worship and give instead of consume is a lifestyle shift we want to make, not merely a guilty impulse. And letting them know as we plan our Decemebr that the real treasure for us is the time we'll spend together.

So that is the home front. To celebrate beyond our little family, we are making many gifts for others. We're planning days of cooking and baking to express our appreciation to bus drivers, teachers, neighbors. We're opening our home to others, rather than going out or buying that prewrapped forgettable impersonal thing on the endcap at the Stuff-mart.

So here's my idea. You know those gift exchanges? The bunco group, the Bible study girls, the coworkers, the scrapbookers? The gatherings where we go out to lunch and exchange a dizzying number of candles and bottles of bath oil? I love candles and bath oil, but perhaps this year when names are drawn, each person could designate a favorite charity. And the giver could then take the dollars she would have spent on that trinket, and reach out in honor of the recipient, to clothe, feed, nourish the needy. Or the group could choose one relief organization for a multiplied blessing.

Still gather for that meal, still celebrate being with each other. But maybe, instead of a lunch out, gather for a pot luck and bring items for your local food pantry's wish list. Take the time you would have spent in traffic and standing in line to buy that gift, and write your friend or coworker a card about how much she means to you. Have a cup of coffee togther and lean in close, taking a picture with your cell phone. Accept that the greatest present we can give each other is our genuine presence.

I love to give gifts. I'm just feeling a need to transform and broaden my definition of what it is to give. To trust that the ones I love will be receptive to doing things differently than we've always done them. I know real encounter with the relentless Redeemer cannot be swaddled in tissue paper. This Christmas I want to live what I know is true.

This Girl's Guide to Gratitude

I have a date with my heating pad tonight. This is my last hurrah at the computer for the day, after a long morning of culling, editing and uploading pictures. This is a big time of year for this shutterbug, and my shoulders and back are no fans of photoshop.

There is an advantage to spending a few hours filling my eyes with the faces and places that have been filling my days. Despite the difficult parts of this year, the tears and questions and wrestlings and griefs, clearly, irrefutably, my life is crowded with blessing, strewn with wonder. Laughter and play and hope and smiles and goofiness brush shoulders with beauty and grace and peace and homemade joys. Bread has risen in the kitchen while the mornings have acquired that particular bright blue snapping air, leaves have turned and boys have grown and outgrown clothes and shoes and even our wildest dreams. I'm rubbing eyes tired from the screen, but dazzled and dazed with my riches, my wealth unearned, unpurchased.

Becuase here's the thing. Because these days have been mine to live and not just document, I know the truth of the matter. Despite all these images I hold up, the Halloween costimes and first days of school, garden blooms and family hikes, they are surrounded by millions more moments lived and not recorded. Like light breaking around the edges of a hand held up to the sun, their glory blooms beyond what I could capture. Though they've stopped me in my tracks with gratitude, my pictures are just crumbs from the banquet I have a seat at every day.

So through whatever medium you use, look at your life. Listen, ear to the ground.

Rustics ReBorn Reborn

I was so happy to learn this morning that our friend Doug is back at work, salvaging old hardware and barn wood to create his wonderful coat racks. He's been on hiatus for several months as he and his wife Rachel welcomed their third son, but his etsy shop is stocked again.

We have known Doug and Rachel for years, celebrated with them at their wedding, and rejoiced with them at each addition to their family. So the coat rack Doug created and gave us as a gift is a treasured piece in our home. It is equally happy holding sun hats and dried lavender, or pinecones and winter coats and hats.

Doug's inventiveness is best expressed in the objects he uses for the hooks themselves. There are old coathooks, to be sure, but also aged doorknobs and casters. Weathered brass, black metal and porcelain and cut glass doorknobs are set off against the weathered grays and browns of the barnwood. I see one even features a candle sconce.

If you're unpacking your jackets for cooler weather and would like to combine utility and art in your home or want a one of a kind gift for a loved one who appreciates pieces of the past and recycling in its purest form, pay a visit to Rustics ReBorn.

Plenty

It happened Friday night as we slept. Friday had been hot and sunny. Oppressive, even. But while we were sleeping, autumn swept in. Rain and mist, and a chill in the air.

These first days of a new season are a blend of pulse-quickening joy and slight melancholy. A balance of lasts and firsts. The blossoms of summer are clinging to a few stems, but most petals are ragged. The garden has that crumby, wild-eyed look of an over-tired preschooler who badly needs to be tucked into bed. The chimes strung from the eaves no longer hang in a humid stillness, but sing to me as the breeze cools at the end of the day.

Many bloggers have been writing about the move inward, making space for living more inside, and I'm doing it too, even as we savor some of the most glorious weeks given to someone living in the upper South Carolina foothills. I'm preparing, cleaning, reordering bookshelves and drawers, washing all the blankets and hanging them to dance in the brisk wind and be warmed in the midday sun. I'm stocking the cabinets with baking supplies, even as I roast the last tomatoes we'll get from my in-laws' amazing garden, blending them with basil and olive oil, parmesan and cracked pepper-- a bit of summer to tuck in between pizza crust and cheese some frosty family movie night.

I was sleeping in the moment Autumn came, but this year, when I am awake, I want to be really awake, soaking in every golden moment as it passes.

"September fattens on vines.
Roses flake from the wall.
The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.
This is plenty. This is more than enough."
- Geoffrey Hill, September Song