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Advent and Christmas at the FarmGRACE LEE BILLINGSFar Fields Farm is a hundred-acre family farm on a hilltop in Washington, Connecticut. It is secluded, at the end of a long dirt road, and seems barely touched by the world. It is there that Grace Lee Billings and her husband Jack Johnson raised their three sons. Like many young families, jack and i stumbled into celebrating the holiday season—the Christmas tree, opening presents, and then crossing the road to Grandma and Grandpa's house to join the rest of the family for a festive turkey dinner. Between family living near by, and the "selling of the holidays," the religious meaning of our Christmas deteriorated in direct proportion to the increase in the number of our children. What had been ten presents under the tree for Alex burgeoned to thirty or more presents after the twins were born. On Christmas morning two exhausted and grumpy parents watched the children thoughtlessly rip through the pile of presents. The culmination of a year had descended into a spectacle of hollow commercialism. Then came the "darkest Christmas of them all." The boys, tiny as they were, sat in their jammies Christmas morning surrounded by their loot—trucks, hamsters, tricycles, books, games, clothes, candy, stuffed animals—when one of them said, "Is that all there is?" The question was probably an innocent request for information, but Jack heard it differently. He was furious, a rare happening indeed. Jack erupted in a tirade on their ingratitude, and called them spoilt brats. At the end of this colorful explosion the boys were convinced that this was their last Christmas. They told us a few years later, remembering the famous diatribe, that even one package under the following year's Christmas tree would have seemed lavish. In reflective hindsight, Jack and I saw Christmas as a disaster of our own making. But was there an alternative? The next November our friend Seton suggested that we celebrate Advent. For four years he had lived as a Benedictine monk at Mount Saviour Monastery in upstate New York. There he was known as Brother Aelred, but I preferred to call him by his baptismal name. When he left Mount Saviour he settled for a time in a house known as Sheepfold, near the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, and later he established a small non-canonical monastery in a house called Dayspring, also in Bethlehem. A number of people in our area of Connecticut—the Farm is in Washington—liked to join him and his confrères for worship. Some of us were regular church-goers, some not; I was raised an evangelical, Jack and the boys were members of no church. Seton and Mark, who had also been at Mount Saviour, had always observed this season in their years in the monastery. They wanted to add it to the Dayspring celebrations, but they felt it needed to be done outside of "the Sunday Mass." Most of the regulars in the Dayspring gathering said that they couldn't participate in four Sunday evenings, but a small group—our family, Nancy and Tom Ware, their three sons, the McDermott family, Seton and Mark—made the commitment. As our twins, Eliot and Nicholas, were still little, and might need to be in bed early, we decided to have Advent at the Farm rather than at Dayspring. The change of venue focused Advent on family rather than on church. From this small start we found our way. In preparation, Seton, Mark, Nancy, Maureen McDermott, and I met at the Farm. We knew each other well, knew the Dayspring style, and enjoyed singing together. Now we needed to flesh out a program that was simple enough for the children but meaningful enough for the adults. We decided to follow the same format each of the four Sunday nights, establishing a rhythm. The first Advent program that we devised worked so well that we kept it for the seven years that we celebrated together. Four adults were chosen to prepare a "homily," one for each Advent Sunday, keeping a single theme through the season. Our first Advent theme was the nativity scene. Each Sunday was to focus on a different part of the story: the angel's part, the shepherds' part, Mary's part, and finally the three kings' part. After planning some Advent music, and promising to meet to practice, we ended our meeting. As Seton went out the door that night he said, "Oh by the way, don't forget the feast of St. Nicholas." In Switzerland, where I grew up, the sixth of December was a special day. All of the bakery shops were filled with gingerbread cookies covered with a bright paper picture of St. Nicholas dressed as a bishop. My friends put their empty shoes at the foot of their beds on December fifth, and prayed that St. Nicholas would fill them during the night with candy. Rather than candy, disobedient children were given a bundle of twigs (called une verge) to be used for disciplining them during the year. Parents warned their misbehaving children, "If you are not good, Père Noël will bring you a verge." The Swiss tradition celebrated December sixth as a feast day, while Christmas was more somber, a religious day, with a few presents. I decided to celebrate December sixth with a high English tea. Eliot asked if there was a feast of St. Eliot so that he too could have a celebration, but we couldn't find one. In truth, we always celebrated December sixth as the feast of St. Eliot and St. Nicholas. By celebrating Advent and the feast of St. Nicholas, all of December became a very special month. At the end of the tea, the boys wrote to Santa asking for only a few things. A French friend explained to her children, "Christmas is not your birthday. On your birthday you can ask for all that you want, but on Jesus' birthday you should think of others." Somehow our children understood this message. After some discussion and comparing of notes, Alex wrote out the short letter, usually beginning, "Dear Santa, How are you? We are fine. We would like..." He addressed the envelope to the North Pole, and the boys ran it out to the mailbox. Jack and I made a point of retrieving this valuable letter before the mailman took it away the next day. This simplified the Christmas shopping, as Jack's parents and my mother each gave an item from the list of three or four things, while we gave the most important items (new skates, a radio). With the joyous and fancy St. Nicholas tea, Christmas was now both launched and limited. Sometimes the boys and I went to the Abbey of Regina Laudis to see their Neapolitan crèche. To get to the barn where the nuns permanently displayed this Renaissance treasure, we had to walk through snowy woods. Inside the gray barn, and behind a huge plate glass window, we saw a miniature Italian village displayed on a hillside. Before us, in the most beautiful detail, were cottages, doves in cages, peasants sitting at tables with tiny tankards and plates, ox carts on the road, woodsmen cutting logs, children at play, all against a background of distant hills and valleys. In one corner, inside a half-open barn, was the Virgin—resplendent in pale blue and pink satin—showing her newborn son to the kneeling shepherds. Outside, under a magnificent Star of Bethlehem, the three kings approached with their camels and horses following behind. Every detail enchanted us. How we wished we too could have such a diorama in our barn! But our barn told a different story. The boys and I rarely visited the cold and forlorn hayloft in winter. We did go up to collect hay to put around our own small crèche, displayed on a table in the living room. The loft, with its sweet smell of summer, was caught in the icy cold of December. In our plain cold barn we imagined the original manger scene with the Christ child lying in his swaddling clothes in a humble shed, with the holy family gathered in awe around him. In our hayloft there was no place for the satin, gold, and velvet of the Regina Laudis manger, but the hay bales had tiny field flowers caught in them, and this seemed very festive to us. |
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