Christmas Baby

This day has been a lazy one: sleep in, eat, make morning tea, check email. Crazy week at the office, and I took a day off on Wed. to be at a birth in Tri-Cities. It was amazing, intense, exhilarating, made me teary-eyed (or maybe that was the effect of staying up most of the night-babies never seem to come at normal hours).
I was prepared for the intensity, the long hours, the strange facts about birth. I wasn't prepared to see my friend change so quickly from a woman laboring through a hard birth to a peaceful mother holding her child. There is something completely disarming about a baby being held by its mother. It can make baby-talking idiots of the most serious of us. It cuts us deep, somewhere that we don't understand. You can't argue with it or even explain it. But nothing else on earth can compare to it.
Perhaps that is why Christ came to earth in such a way. The Jews were living under harsh Roman rule, a conquered people descended from a powerful nation. Likely, many of them were bitter, wanting a Messiah to come and exact vengeance. God sent a baby, a tiny, helpless infant. As Dr. Leithart might say, it was subversive. It turned the presuppositions of these weary-eyed Messiah seekers upside down.

First Sunday of Advent

It's hard to believe that tomorrow will be the First Sunday of Advent. I am trying to continue one the tradition of setting up four candles and lighting one each Sunday until Christmas. We've also started our Advent calendar, which is made out of felt with small felt illustrations for each Messianic promise.
Last Saturday my neighbors and I set out on a trek to hunt down the perfect snow-covered Christmas tree. After various wrong turns, a consultation with two locals, and a near encounter with a cranky eccentric, we found a small forest of trees that we could search through. Hiking through the snowdrifts, we dusted off several trees, then each cut down our favorite. Hightailing it back to the car, we turned on the heat to full blast to counteract our wet pant legs and socks. My tree, I'm sorry to say, was ignominiously dumped in the bathtub to dry out. It is now completely decorated, and installed in front of the fireplace, from which is casts lacey shadows over the room at night. It is topped by a small but dignified yulebok (Swedish for a Christmas ornament, made of straw, in the shape of a reindeer).
I highly recommend The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, a classic that rates in the top ten for any Christmas book list.