Zeal for Thy Gingerbread House Consumes Me

Advent and Weight Watchers

I continue on Weight Watchers, losing weight realllly slowly (heading towards 40 lbs total since May). They say it's a process, not a diet, and they're right. Some weeks are easier than others, and I'm getting the hang, sort of, of "balancing" a day: go out for a big festive family brunch and eat fruit for dinner, contentedly.

But man, is this a hard time of year. For two historical reasons:

1. I don't think I've had an adult year until this year when I didn't hit December first and think "Well, there are about twenty days until Christmas. I could lose twenty lbs! Or ten lbs! I could be down a whole size and fit into that whatever on the hanger, or that size in the store....." On December second, I would get up, do a 1/2 hour of aerobics, pack six celery seeds and an eyedropper of water for lunch, park eight miles from the office and walk briskly.....then all the flurry of aerobics and calorie-counting and whatnot fades off nearly immediately into another grim status quo, another "fat Christmas." (This was even in years I wasn't overweight by more than ten pounds - sheer habit.)

2. Chocolate chip cookies! Aunt Mary's candy! Mom's Hungarian horns! My peanut brittle! My stollen! Homemade this and special that comes rolling into the house, and even worse, into the office. It doesn't seem like Christmas unless there are some red and green Hershey's Kiss wrappers in the cupholder in the car....

The grace of Advent helps with both these issues, I'm finding, with God's help. First, we WAIT for the feast, we don't fall face forward into it. We give up lesser things and wait upon the Greater. When we do arrive at the Holy Day, we do enjoy the happy tastes, smells and sounds of life, but in reflection of His Gift, not just because. Second, if we trust, whether it be in the Weight Watchers Points System or in the Word of God, and stop making every last little damn decision ourselves, we will prosper. This is not to make God into a system, but He did give us a system, a model, a path, a Way. I think adults just don't trust enough, in anything. We are super-competent and judge all for ourselves. It's good to trust in God, and the gift He has given me of Weight Watchers.

The biggest revelation of all to me is that, if I firmly believe that God has given me my life, my gifts, and the meal in front of me, that it would be piggish to be, well, piggish. If what is in front of me is of MY OWN DOING, that I got it, made it, bought it with my money, then if feels like it's MINE, and I can treat it as my right and can consume it, spend it, eat it, give it away, even, using only my own satiety and sense of status as a measure of "enough."

So, I'm making the usual stuff (maybe I'll post a few recipes as we go along), to give much as gifts, but to leave some for home, for entertaining and for myself. I'm very comfortable for some reason in putting it all away, without leaving out one or two or a hundred: I am promised that we will feast, on Christmas Day. Why that's making the difference, I don't know - guess it's that Grace thing.

I'm also not obsessing over what I shall weigh on Christmas Day. I'm losing weight, I'm working to look and feel better, and with God's Hand on me, it will come in His Time.

I don't want to make it sound like this is totally easy, but it's certainly joyous around here lately.

Wishin' and hopin' and thinkin' and prayin'

Dusty Springfield, did you guess right?

We are ready to celebrate Advent as a time of anticipation of the blazing fact of the Incarnation of God in real time on real earth. I spent part of today writing many times on Christmas cards "best wishes for" whatever blessings I thought the recipient would need.

However, wishing is an easy step downwards from praying. Wishing, viewed within a life of faith, is kind of suspect. It's asking for something without the requisite acceptance of God's Will for whether we get it or not. Wishing is usually pretty specific and demanding: we wish that we don't get a cold before Saturday, or that the football team wins this Sunday. Of course, we should pray to be open to God's decisions for us instead, since He has a plan for us for good, not evil (cf Jeremiah 29).

It's scary how shockingly evil wishing can become, a silent mental weapon. "I wish that skinny little size 4 would gain thirty pounds and see how she likes it." "I wish that old so-and-so would lose his job he's always bragging about." "I wish that the cops were around that corner and pull over that rude driver." Maybe we know wishing can be a mere incantation, so we can lapse into these awfulnesses....but they do our souls no good.

So I'm working on banishing the phrase "I wish that" from my vocabulary, even at this wishy time of the year. However, I still retain a few wishes that I won't bother God with:

1. I wish there were fewer Brazil nuts in cans of mixed nuts. They take up valuable cashew space and they taste like wax-infused chalk.
2. I wish I liked goat cheese as much as I like Cheez Whiz. It tastes like they leave pieces of actual goat in it, but it's so damn classy.
3. I wish I could find a color of lipstick that doesn't make me feel like I'm walking into a room mouth-first.
4. I wish office Christmas parties were fun.
and finally
5. I wish the leaders of all the world would require, by force of law, that car manufacturers put the gas inlet on the SAME SIDE of every single blessed brand and model.

What do you wish for?

Waiting for it, part II

The bareness . . . has a different bareness than Lent. It's a rich bareness, if you will . . .

That's it exactly, Therese. A rich bareness. Stepping back from complexity into simplicity for a time isn't necessarily self-mortification. It blesses us by amplifying the contrast between the paucity of what comes before and the abundance and glory of what comes next.

Some people I know refer to Christmas as the Feast of the Incarnation. We need to be reminded of its astounding significance. Creation was transformed that day, never to revert. In C.S. Lewis' Perelandra, another world is at stake as Satan tempts its newly created First Couple, who surprisingly resemble earthly humans. The hero, a visitor sent to help them vanquish the tempter, wonders about what appears to be a coincidence; he learns from them, however, that after God was incarnate on earth, there is no other form in which he ever would create beings intended to be in his own image. A corner has been turned. "Can my little world make that big a difference?", the hero wonders. The woman is gently puzzled. "I don't understand. On my world, 'corner' is not the name of a size."

As a devout Reformed friend of mine loves to say, the best words in the Bible are "But God!" There are many times in Scripture when things are bleak and without hope. But then comes the mighty phrase, "But God . . ." followed by the corner to be turned -- what God intends to do. Sometimes I think that the Incarnation must be heaven's biggest joke on hell. Leave glory behind, taking up squalor and pain? "Never!", the devil would say. There's no math in the world in which losing equals gaining, right? But God!

So, we wait. We wait in hope, knowing him in whom our hope is placed. We immerse ourselves in the "before" so we can fully enter into the "after".

Wait for it....

We're coming to the First Sunday of Advent. We begin another penitential season, awaiting with joy a great Mystery, the Incarnation of God as Jesus Christ, in real time, in a real place.

When I was little, my parents, more from ethnic memory than religious conviction, made our Christmas especially wonderful because when we went to bed on Christmas Eve, there was NOTHING in our house. No tree, no glass Santa heads full of ribbon candy, no red stocking caps covering the spare toilet paper roll on the biffy, no plastic angels and reindeer (we were real style-makers, make no mistake), no Christmas linens, no nothing. With only a small celebration on St. Nicholas Day, finding oranges and chocolate coins in our shoes, we spent the rest of December with an Advent wreath, an Advent calendar, and whatever Christmas decorations we'd made in school. We made cookies, and wrapped presents, and those were put away where we could see them, but Santa brought everything else after we were asleep.

This was especially generous of them because my father, as a police patrolman, was usually working a lousy shift, and still everything was put up and put around and decorated after we went to bed. To keep us from passing out with concern that Santa hadn't been to our house, a specific little elf was placed at the base of our staircase, so we could peek over at 5 am and see it, and know Santa had come, and go back to bed and vibrate until our parents gave the word that we could go downstairs. (I still have the elf, and I still put him near the door.) First, we went to Mass, passing the shut parlor doors (the advantage of a drafty creaky 1895 house is that we HAD a parlor with big sliding oak doors), smelling the tree in there, and then coming home to everything lit up, glowing and beautiful. I give thanks to God for their care and generosity, because the excitement was a great gift to us!

All these years later, I've finally realized the beauty of keeping to this custom. I do put up the outside lights (just as my parents did), because the weather will be getting harsher, but I don't light them. I'll put the tree up the weekend before, because of practicality, but I won't light it, either, until Christmas Eve.

The bareness of the resulting Advent decoration (a wreath of candles on a purple table runner, a Nativity scene without the baby, and a real wreath on the door), has a different bareness than Lent. It's a rich bareness, if you will, with the closet full of presents and the pantry filling with homemade gifts and sweets. Glitter and color and memories are packed away in boxes, but will come forth at the proper time.

If you are planning when to put up the decorations, will you consider waiting a little, as long as possible? It is really necessary to have Christmas decorations up so long that they get dusty? It's exactly analogous to our birthdays; do we put up the "Happy Birthday" garland a month ahead? If we do, we may be saying that our birthday isn't a specific day, an exact event. It is, and so is the Birthday of Jesus. Don't rush it, I beg you, at the risk of insulting your family traditions.

Happy Advent! We are preparing our hearts, lowly mangers that they are, to become the throne of the King!

Shopping, chopping and mopping

Everyone's cooking tonight, and cleaning ("Oh, the house always looks like this!"), and dusting off dishes. Happy Thanksgiving to all of you!