Tree Story / Advent Day 1

Marin came home Saturday with a sleeping baby (we drive Teo in the car to get him to relax enough to go down) and with a Christmas tree. Turns out it was shipped up here from Oregon. And it had to stay inside the house so it wouldn’t freeze. So it was in the entry downstairs.

Matteo was enthralled, it was the first thing he said after rousing from his nap on Saturday, "where the tree?" drawing out the final word as if he were chanting, which is how he talks just now, learning language hand over fist.

Later she came back from mid-afternoon Yoga with a tree stand. The ritual circumcision, baptism, and resurrection of the tree followed, before Marin and the Toot took off for an evening visit to friends, giving me sermon time.

We wrapped the Teo-sized, full, elegant (what we’d never find in a baby tree up here) fir with lights and hung many traditional Kuizenga things, like sewn and stuffed fruit, on Sunday evening.

Then Marin pronounced the moment. Matteo was enlisted in turning off all the house lights. We stood back and sang. Silent Night. O Tannenbaum.

Later we opened a Christmas tree shaped Advent Calendar made of little boxes, which Marin found at Starbucks. Each box holds a chocolate, and when the drawer is removed and re-inserted, the tree begins to mosaic together a new picture of something. I’m still not sure what it might be. I know it’s definitely not a nice picture of a mother and child and donkeys and moo-cows and all that. It’s something less "specific."

That’s one of our dilemmas, we post-Christians. The good stories get lost.