And thus begins Advent, a season of preparation for the coming of Christ Jesus (also known worldwide in English-speaking communities as “baby Jesus”). May we all find beauty in the struggles of our preparations for welcoming God into our lives wholly and newly this Christmas season. May God’s will be done among us all, and May we be our best selves. May our Advent be very advent-agious both to ourselves and to the world at large. Amen.
Post-a-day 2022
Today marked the beginning of my Advent and Advent calendar for this year, complete with presents and my mom falling face forward up the stairs to my room. Trust me, despite the fright in the moment of that final piece happening, it was all extremely delightful and quite festively fun (even the fall, while my mom was lying there, laughing on top of the pile of presents she had been carrying).
You see, firstly, I didn’t know my mom was coming over, and my phone signal was still off. So, when I heard a knock behind me, I genuinely thought it was a raccoon or possum doing some construction work in the attic (or the likes). But then, my bedroom door was opening – by the way, the door to my room is down a flight of halfback stairs, because my room is a converted attic – and I started to freak. out…..
“Hello?” I asked in both annoyance and trepidation. It was my mom. And yes, I had locked the door, as I always do – my fear was that I hadn’t locked it, and I was now about to be attacked. I heard her voice, relaxed, reminded her that I was tutoring, and I went back up the stairs. Just as I was finishing telling the student to log off and back on again to see about resetting her computer’s connection and sound, I looked back down the stairs to see my mother falling forward as she turned the corner to head up the second half of the stairs. She has similar stairs in her house, but there is no step on the turn at the midpoint. Hers are just half and half. Mine are four, then one on the half turn, then another ten in the last part. The light in my stairwell is minimal in the first place, and the baskets of presents she was carrying certainly didn’t give her much help in seeing that single turn step. But they did help her land more safely, fortunately. I rushed down carefully and, basically, lifted her up off the ground on my own, as she had almost no leverage to get herself back up, her arms still wrapped around the presents now beneath her chest.
Even as I lifted her up, we were both laughing. She had determined already that all was well and whole within her body still, and so we could not hold back. It was ridiculous and hilarious to the both of us.
Anyway, the whole unexpected arrival of my mother was due to a request I made of her weeks ago. Would she print out my Advent calendar for me to use this year? I had made one for my cousin years ago, and loved it. I wanted to use it again this year, but I didn’t want to risk seeing the days ahead of time by printing it all out for myself. I had wanted them to be a surprise as much as possible, but I wanted to be able to write down my responses, instead of just look at it on my phone, as I did last year. (Each day has a question/prompt of sorts to which I am requested to respond, you see.) So, here we are on the first day of December, which lines up with how I had created the calendar initially, as a 25-day Advent calendar. My mom has gone above and beyond, as is regularly her style when it comes to fun, creativity-related things – the exact reason I had asked her to do this for me in the first place – and come up with presents for each day, wrapped in Charlie Brown Christmas wrapping paper – the Advent calendar I made is based on A Charlie Brown Christmas – to go with each day’s paper prompt.
Today, I got a box of tea, from which I can have a cup every morning when I open the day’s card and present – again, the original calendars we made are referenced, as they were tea Advent calendars, with a different tea for each day – as well as a Christmas lights necklace and green and red jingle bell bracelets to give me extra festivity this month. Then, my mom proceeded to open up the box of tea and make us each some tea. She actually hung out with me in my room while we snuggled up to our cups in the cold morning air, and just hung out together. Oddly enough, those were two of the things on my list for the first day’s prompt, checked off unexpectedly just about as quickly as I had gotten them written down.
Then she went off to work, and I snuggled in my bed another few hours before going to work myself.
All-in-all, it was a beautiful start to my Advent and my Advent calendar for this year. I am extremely grateful, and feel a strong sense of love and care for me today (for which I also feel extremely grateful). Yesterday was an odd sort of reminder for Advent’s ideas for me, just perfectly timed. And I have a feeling that there is much value to be found for me in and through Advent this year. I look forward to it all with cautious and grateful optimism.
Grazie, World and God. Here we are. 🙂
Post-a-day 2020
Today, my Advent Calendar’s task for me was to identify somewhere where I have needed to speak up for myself, and then to be brave and to speak up for what I need in that area.
I didn’t know this until tonight, because I forgot to look at the calendar page until tonight.
And yet, somehow, it seems some part of me knew that this was today’s task.
Why do I say that?
Because that is exactly what I did today.
I’ve been wanting to go watch someone play soccer for quite some time now.
Supposedly – and I believe it – he is an amazing soccer player.
Since he is so good, I cannot imagine he would play on a team with players who aren’t also at least quite good players.
Therefore, I can only see one of his soccer games as being a very high and beautiful level of play – the exact kind of play worth watching, worth admiring, even.
When I initially asked if I could see him play sometime, he agreed easily, and he seemed unconcerned.
Yet, every time I would send him a message, asking about when his upcoming games are, there would be radio silence… he would reply to whatever I sent after that message about the games, but never to the message about the games.
After this most recent occurrence of said behavior – this past weekend – I felt myself at a limit.
Either he didn’t want me to come or not – whatever the case, I needed to be done with the wondering about whether he was avoiding my coming to a game.
I wanted first to give up altogether, say nothing, and do what I could to forget about it and to write it – and thereby him – off forever.
But then I noticed how uneasy I was with that plan, how degraded I felt, like I wasn’t good enough in his eyes for some reason, and then that my avoiding getting clarification was a personal admittance that I didn’t believe myself good enough.
Even if he somehow thought I was trying to go to a game because I wanted to date him, I was good enough – I am good enough – to date him.
(And, let’s be real here: He is quite possibly the most gorgeous man I have ever seen in real life… and that’s saying something.)
However, upon consideration, I am clear that I do not want to date him – I hardly know him.
I would need to get to know him a lot better before I could genuinely consider if I were genuinely interested in dating him.
And – super big star here – it hardly matters, anyway, since he’s already in a relationship.
And I am not interested in playing any kind of role beyond friend or acquaintance in that sort of situation.
But that’s a bit beside the point: the point was that I needed to stand up for myself and find out from him why he keeps avoiding answering my requests for soccer game details.
I prepared myself mentally last night, and went through what all I might need to say when I saw him today.
I set myself a reminder for just before I was likely to be seeing him, with my general comments, with what I wanted to say – I didn’t want to forget, and then have to live with that for the next month while I’m gone.
And I put the reminder in French, just in case it popped up on my phone when someone was around to see it.
There were two parts to the message, but I found that I only needed to use the one part, the part of simply asking why he always ignored the messages.
I had to work myself up to it, but I did it, and I walked right up to him, and I asked him.
And it was loud, so I actually had to repeat myself, which only encouraged me more, somehow.
And I stood my ground on my point that he always leaves me with no response; just a “read” message.
And he said that he sees it, gets distracted, forgets to go back and reply, eventually sees the next message, whatever it is, and responds immediately and directly to that (suggesting that he doesn’t notice what was just above it in the conversation).
And he said that he likely has a game tomorrow night.
And that he will let me know which of the two times it ends up being.
And he told me approximately where it will be.
I don’t know if I will be at a soccer game tomorrow night or not, but I accept this as 1) progress on the soccer-game-watching front, and as 2) a beautiful win for standing up for myself, and on multiple levels.
Also, it is a total bonus that it just so happened to be my Advent Calendar task for the day.
I guess, when we are doing our best and being our best selves, we tend to be in sync woh the world around us, and things like that are more and more likely to happen.
For that, and for my strength today, I am grateful. 🙂
Peace
Hannah
Post-a-day 2019
In third grade, my friend and classmate Kristin and I did a project together around Christmastime. We were to learn a bit about how other countries celebrated Christmas, and do a sort of write-up, and then a little presentation for the class. I imagine that everyone had different countries, and that we weren’t the only ones presenting something, but I really don’t remember.
Our specific project, as my mother and I recall, was over St. Lucia’s Day, a holiday seen as signaling the arrival of Christmastide. It is a Catholic and Lutheran holiday, mostly celebrated in Italy and Scandinavia. All I remember from what we researched was that the girls in a family traditionally wore white dresses, made rolls of bread early in the morning, and sang songs at home, while wearing this sort of crown-wreath on their heads, with candles on it. We dressed up one of my little wooden dolls to look the part. She had a green pipe cleaner head-wreath, with rolled up tissue candles, and a tissue dress.
Since we had talked about how the girls in a family would sing traditional Christmas songs, we were asked if we could sing one of the songs. We confessed, however, that we didn’t actually know any of the particular ones sung for the holiday. Someone asked us just to sing an English Christmas carol, instead, and we somehow ended up with “Silent Night”. So, Kristin and I sang “Silent Night” to the class together. The irony of singing a German song for a mostly-Scandinavian holiday struck me only in recent years. 😛
Post-a-day 2017
hannah ananas 