Each Christmas morning, my oldest brother Mark made an announcement: he was saving a gift to open at night. I sighed, confident my exhale would be hidden under the crumpling of wrapping paper. He was the oldest and I was the youngest — 15 years between us. He was practically built of stone, a fullback in American football; a position that required wide shoulders, a ramming helmet, and churning knees. I wasn't about to say a word.
Mark's decree bypassed our other siblings and landed squarely on me. Perhaps they, residing in the middle, had built up some nerve, but I was convinced through either guilt or fear to follow the eldest's lead. (He was a gentle giant with me; a protector. But still.) He set aside one gift, and I did the same, angling for some rectangular box that housed a sweater or trousers. I was careful to never choose anything in the shape of a book, or a game, or a basketball.
A perennial American complaint is that stores and homes are adorned with Christmas decorations earlier each year. Thanksgiving, at the end of November, was traditionally an ironclad border, but that has now fallen. Christmas is marching its way towards autumn, and perhaps summer is not far behind.
Critiques of material and capital aside, I’ve become less swayed by arguments against ornamentation. I want more Christmas. I want it earlier, and I want it later — until its proper conclusion on Candlemas, 2 February.
“We must recognise at times that we have lost the ability to wait,” Pope Francis said in 2024 at the feast of the Presentation of the Lord. As a child, with that one gift set aside, I struggled. Yes, I was almost certain that box contained a sweater, but what if it held something else, one of those wild gift requests that we make as children before we know better, before we understand money and sacrifice.
I would sneak glances at it from the kitchen and the dining room. The gift glowed under the lowest hanging lights on the tree. In the weeks prior, I had been in its place, laying under the lit tree and staring up through the branches. I had long been drawn to that glow, even walking around my house in the cold night, feeling new in the outdoor lights. The world is alit during Advent, and why not? We are steeped in joy during Easter, as We should be, but let’s extend that joy during the colder months, when the heart might harden a bit.
My brother’s wisdom, of course, was to not merely extend the exchanging of gifts, but to extend the anticipation. We have been awaiting Christ’s arrival; we know that we need him.
The poet Jane Kenyon, who died 30 years ago, is a poet of waiting. I find in her work a language and structure for these protracted moments of Advent. In 1980, Kenyon had a Blakean vision: “It was like a waking dream. My eyes were open, and I saw these rooms, this house but in my mind’s eyes,” she said. “I also saw a great ribbon of light and every human life was suspended. There was only this buoyant shimmering, undulating stream of light.” She told her husband, the poet Donald Hall, that the Holy Ghost had been in the room with her.
Kenyon captures waiting in her poem “Mosaic of the Nativity: Serbia, Winter, 1993”. The first stanza begins with a lamenting God: “I made them my joy, / and everything else I created / I made to bless them.” And yet: “see what they do! / I know their hearts / and arguments.” Descended from Cain, they have become comfortable with evil. It is habit. In the final stanza, though, Kenyon turns: “God thinks Mary into being.” She is above them all: “she curls in a brown pod, / and inside her mind / of Christ, cloaked in blood, / lodges and begins to grow”. Those final lines are thick; a bit mired in paradox. And yet the meaning is clear: we await the bodily Christ, the greatest gift.
In the evening, when the music started to die down, and the dishes were cleaned and back in their cabinets, I would sit next to my brother — a boy next to a man — and open my gift. I was thankful for it. I am even more thankful now.
