Christmas all year round... or at least for two months or more.

Christmas is the very best time of year. I will disagree with anyone who dares to tell me differently. Christmas season in my life starts quite early in the year…. Like Halloween early. It’s fabulous. Not Christmas season like the consumer chaos season, but the grateful, spend time with the family and hope for the peace that Christmas brings to reach the entire world kind of season. This season includes family left and right. I think most of our traditions are all packed into the last couple months of the year…. Birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years…. All of them are just packed with the spirit that Christmas requires to be Christmas. As of now, I’ve already started singing Christmas music (thank you Women’s Chorus for starting Christmas music on Halloween), watched A Christmas Carol, pulled out Christmas stories and made a traditional family dish just for fun.

I love Fall. I love Christmas. And I love that they are right next to each other. It is so beautiful as the seasons change and the holidays come. The last time I was home I went on a drive to the neighborhood where my grandparents lived. The colors were absolutely gorgeous. The only other time I have seen a picture perfect scene like the one I found… well, it was a photoshopped picture – a work of art kind of like this except real… the vibrancy and contrast were really there. Add the charming houses from the township of Millcreek in Salt Lake City framed in great old, colorful trees and the emotional attachment of beloved family memories and that was the scene. Next time I will make sure to take my camera. Maybe I will live there someday. I very much want to.

As I mentioned, I’ve already watched A Christmas Carol…. Not the Muppets version if you were wondering (as good as it is, it doesn’t compare to the real story). Every time I read, watch or listen to A Christmas Carol one quote always stands out. “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” This is moment of great internal change for Scrooge and I believe that it is possible for the scrooge-self that pops up every now and then to have this change as well. What does it take to honor something with your heart? Not the mind or out of customs or ethics, but the heart… fully and intentionally honorable every moment because you feel the necessity to make it an irremovable part of your life, like the heart to the necessity of the life of the body.

This season I’ve been finding different perspectives on Christmas. Have you ever considered what the Wisemen felt as they searched for the newborn Messiah? How about the Shepherds in the field? What about the people throughout the ages and their Christmas experiences? How about Mary and Joseph as they held their newborn son and began to fathom the importance of that moment? How can it be captured or understood?

(Can you tell what is coming? Yup… a music analogy and choral experience.) I am blessed to be a member of BYU’s Women’s Chorus again this year. Auditions may have been stressful but I can attest that it was worth it… especially since we’ve started Christmas music. We are singing “The Candlelight Carol” by John Rutter – I believe that the lyrics may have begun the thought process of a Christmas perspective. We have been challenged to “sing the language” rather than the music or the words of the song and I had to ask myself how I could sing the language if I did not spend the time to understand what they meant. Here are the lyrics to The Candlelight Carol…. (the other Christmas pieces will probably come later.):

How do you capture the wind on the water?

How do you count all the stars in the sky?

How can you measure the love of a mother,

Or how can you write down a baby’s first cry?

Shepherds and wise men will kneel and adore him,

Seraphim round him their vigil will keep;

Nations proclaim him their Lord and their Saviour,

But Mary will hold him and sing him to sleep.

Candlelight, Angel light, firelight and star-glow

Shine on his cradle till breaking of dawn.

Gloria, Gloria in excelsis deo!

Angels are singing the Christ child is born.

Find him at Bethlehem laid in a manger:

Christ our Redeemer asleep in the hay,

Godhead incarnate and hope of salvation:

A child with his mother that first Christmas Day.

Candlelight, Angel light, firelight and star-glow

Shine on his cradle till breaking of dawn.

Gloria, Gloria in excelsis deo!

Angels are singing the Christ child is born.

We’ve discussed a couple different concepts in class: the significance of the different types of light and the meaning of the first verse.

I have not held wind as it traveled across the water, nor can I count all the stars. I am not blessed as yet to be a mother and I have never heard a child’s very first cry. BUT I have felt this wind as it has flown across a great body of water. I have starred up at the night sky and lost myself in the beauty of the stars and how numberless they are. I have a mother and am beginning to understand how much she must love me and what she must feel like when she heard me for the first time and held me that first birthday. These nearly unexplainable things may not be the experiences I know or have had, but some things I will hopefully be privileged to experience and maybe someday fully understand. If the expert in anything had to start out knowing nothing then at least I have started somewhere.

Concerning the lights mentioned. My first thought – what do they have in common? First, they are all natural. Second, they dispel darkness. Third, they are guiding lights. Fourth, they are comforting, hope-giving and sustaining until greater light returns. Finally, they were probably all present during the first Christmas evening. I find these lights rather unexplainable as well – kind of like the taste of salt, possible but difficult. What a event to have all those types present in the same location at the same time and place! I personally can consider only one time when this was so… this one time on the first Christmas eve. Does this not increase the significance of the moment, made even more special by the circumstances?… a celebration… an international celebration. Gloria, Gloria in excelsis deo! Angels are singing the Christ child is born!

I hope this season means something more for you, dear reader, than it has ever meant before. Share it. Let it grow and spread. Let it make a difference in your life and then go and make a difference for someone else. Learn to love as a mother loves her child. Learn to yearn as a mother desires to comfort her crying child. Learn to love as the Savior loves all enough to be born and die for them. Learn to live Christmas all year round.

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

Let the Christmas season begin!

Guess what? …I’m back!

I know it has been quite a while since I’ve written. I sincerely apologize for my absence. There was a period of time that became rather dark making it hard to write of happy things. Luckily life finds a way to brighten itself and come full circle back to happier times. Well, now I have lived through the experiences life has brought me and I am beginning to understand more the finer details of how to live happily with joy and love and even some sadness and grief. I will attempt to share some of them here.

Now on to some better things: I truly hope that you have had the opportunity to read Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. It is such a fantastic tale – simplicity and genius in one. In the beginning Peter Rabbit’s mother tells Peter and his sisters Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail “you may go into the fields or down the lane…. But not into Mr. McGregor’s garden”. The whole world was out there for the little bunnies to roam and explore, only one man’s garden was off limits. Isn’t it interesting that when we are offered two choices we first try the one that will hurt us and cause setbacks in our progression. Would it have been different if Peter’s mother had told him that he could either choose freedom, hope, and happiness or fear, misery, and captivity? Which would you choose? Surely the garden looked like an adventure and good idea without weighing the dangers that also laid waiting behind the fence but what about the rest of the world. What great adventures does it hold even though it is not ‘off limits’? Well, Peter got what he asked for, adventure wherein he lost his jacket and shoes and received a cold and a bellyache. “But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper.”

I’ve found in life that there are places we are recommended to avoid and yet sometimes those are the places we go and find. The Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontails of my life are my heroes. Life must be a bit more beautiful if the entire world is their adventure and each day the reward. My new goal is to forget about Mr. McGregor’s Garden and find better, more rewarding adventures…. And I dare you to try it as well. Make every day a spectacular adventure and Mr. McGregor’s garden will no longer be appealing. Which choice will you make?

Hope: this way. :)

Signing off for the day.