• "Oh, if I could only put things into words as I see them! Mr. Carpenter says, 'Strive, strive -- keep on. Words are your medium -- make them your slaves -- until they will say for you what you want them to say.' That is true, and I do try, but it seems to me there is something beyond words -- any words -- all words -- something that always escapes you when you try to grasp it -- yet leaves something in your hand which you wouldn't have had if you hadn't reached for it. ... I have written myself out for tonight, and am going to bed."
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    This is my place to "write myself out" -- sharing both my day-by-day thoughts and my artistic output. Thank you for visiting! - Carmen Pauls Orthner
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As it was, it will be

Filed under Christmas • Written by Carmen @ December 9, 2010

I’m hoping to work backwards (appropriately enough, considering this post title!) today on Shimelle’s prompts, but I figured I’d get the one for today (Dec. 9) done first. So this is about traditions — and I know this is really long, but the “artistic challenge” on the prompt is to do hidden journalling, so I figure I can tuck it away. ;)

“It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.” – Charles Dickens

There’s something about the celebration of Christmas each December that has a way of turning back the clock – whether for good or for ill – so I feel fortunate that I have so much good stuff to draw upon from my own past, as well as from Bryan’s, when it comes to marking the season.

This, of course, is Sara’s first Christmas, and as she will only be 10 months old (and that just three days before Dec. 25), she has no expectations yet. So while she won’t remember much of it, I feel a certain responsibility to enfold her, right from the very beginning, in the blanket of warmth and sweetness and happy anticipation that I associate with Christmas.

So, we have done (and will continue to do in coming years) the photo-op visit with Santa Claus, whether at a local elementary school like we did this year, or in a big shopping mall with one of “Santa’s helpers”. And her Grandma Pauls has bought a fuzzy, colourful felt stocking that she and I picked out. It will hang over our fireplace, just like the white ones Sara’s uncle Curtis and I excitedly dumped out on the living room rug in our house on Motherwell Crescent on Christmas mornings. There will be candy canes inside, and mandarin oranges, and little gifts (though not likely camera film). And I want to curl up on the couch or on the floor by the Christmas tree with Sara and read to her our battered old copy of “The Night Before Christmas”.

This year at least, Sara will experience Christmas the way her daddy did growing up, in a small town nestled in northern Saskatchewan’s forest, and watch the snow drift down on the evergreen trees from our front window or from her bedroom window at the back of the house. I am grateful that she will spend at least one whole Christmas season in Saskatchewan. She, like both her parents, will have a cold-reddened nose when she comes inside on a December day. And even if all goes according to plan and we move to Toronto, she will come to know the joys of a mug of hot chocolate or apple cider (preferrably with a cinnamon stick “straw”). Perhaps some day we will be living overseas as SIM missionaries – even in Africa?! – and that won’t seem such a sensible thing to do, so better to have it ingrained now!

Gifts will be opened on Christmas Eve, after supper and the candlelit service at church – or at the very least, at nighttime – with stockings and feasting reserved for the next day. My own family’s tradition was for supper to be Mom’s clam chowder, made in a large orange cast-iron pot, with potatoes and bacon. With a son-in-law who finds the taste of bacon abhorent, the recipe has been altered (but a bowl of bacon is available for those want to add it!), and another soup option has been added in deference to my brother’s wife Pauline’s dislike of seafood.

This Christmas Eve will be the first one I’ve spent without my parents and my brother since 1995, the year I was working at Lithuania Christian College and spent a somewhat tearful evening opening the gifts my family had mailed. I imagine there will be at least a few more such occasions ahead, with the distance, the cost of travel (especially on reduced incomes), the needs of small children and my parents’ health and their own commitments. I am glad that we will still be with family, namely Bryan’s parents, siblings and in-laws, and Janelle and Jake’s two kids, and hopefully that will be on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Darcy’s shift cycle has finally (after 7 years!) allowed him to be home from the Key Lake uranium mill site for the actual holidays, and Nelson and Ruth won’t be in the southern States with their mission agency, RVICS (Roving Volunteers in Christ’s Service) this year, because of his diagnosis of prostate cancer. Once we are in Toronto (or elsewhere with SIM), the schedule may have to change – and if we are able to travel, we will likely only see one side of the family per year. Perhaps we will follow my parents’ example, and celebrate our own “Little Christmas”, opening gifts at home with just our immediate family, before driving (or in our case, flying) several hours the next day to a family gathering at the home of one set of grandparents.

We also have traditions around gift-giving, food and drink, visitors, music, decorating both the tree and the house, and what happens after Christmas, but I will talk about those later in this journal. What I do know is that this Christmas – and each coming Christmas – will have its own unique moments that we will laugh about, cry about or just “keep them and treasure them in our hearts” as Mary did that very first Christmas. But it is in honouring the traditions we’ve established that we connect to and rejoice in “what was” and bring it forward into “what is” and “what will be.”

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