Advent 2025 : day five

 

In our home, we build up our Christmas decorations slowly through Advent, bringing out a box on each of the four weekends. It begins with just a few changes: a figurine of a pregnant woman, symbolizing Mary, placed on one end of the mantlepiece, with an attending angel; our Advent calendar opposite. I bring my wife a mug of coffee in bed every morning before we get up (itself another ritual) and on the first day of Advent we swap out our usual mugs for ones we only use in Advent: simple markers. The tree does not go up until week three.

In this way, we build up a sense of expectancy, ready to celebrate Christmas when it arrives – a twelve-day feast; we are not sick of it all by the afternoon of Boxing Day, desperate to pack everything away for another year.

But this might also help us to wait expectantly for Christ’s return: recognising – learning to recognise – that Jesus breaks into our lives in many often small and accumulative ways; that the victory of justice and mercy over exploitation and oppression is not, usually, dramatic – and yet, little by little – gradually – comes around again and again.

 

Advent 2025 : day four

 

Advent has its very own soundtrack, a mix of songs in a minor key, filled with longing for the light, and stirring carols focused more on Christ’s return than on his first coming as the Babe of Bethlehem.

I love more traditional Advent carols, like Hills of the North, Rejoice and People, look East. But in recent years, my go-to Advent playlist has included the albums Advent Songs (2021) by The Porter’s Gate; and Good News (2016) and the earlier In the Town of David (2006) by Ordinary Time. Check them out.

 

Advent 2025 : day three

 

I have a memory of a childhood Advent calendar. Card, with (probably – here, my memory is shaky) a picture of the hills around Bethlehem for backdrop. Doors opened carefully, re-opened year after year. Each one revealing a picture, depicting some character or item relating to the nativity, and a verse from the Bible on the back of the door.

These days, the Advent calendar on our mantlepiece is a wooden box, with twenty-four doors that lift upward, not to the side. Behind each door, Jo hides a piece from a jigsaw of an icon from the Church of the Nativity, for her, and a fairtrade individual ‘taster’ bar of chocolate, for me.

The practice of opening a little door every day through Advent, a door that is linked to the story of the incarnation, might shape how we open larger doors. So far this Advent, I have opened my front door to a neighbour, shut out of her own home and in need of help, and to delivery drivers, dropping off Bibles I had ordered for friends who are exploring faith. The vicarage doorbell is loud – I cannot adjust the volume, and it makes me jump whenever it rings. It does not predispose me to welcome those who come to my door. Yet the Advent calendar might resist that move; might predispose me to see Jesus coming to my door in the face of a neighbour or stranger. Coming to me, in need or in response to my own need. (In the Gospels we see Jesus ministered-to by others and ministering to others.)

    

Advent 2025 : day two

 

Warning: mention of suicide

The Advent candles are not the only candles we light in our home throughout Advent. We also light a frankincense & myrrh candle. One of the smells of Advent, along with cinnamon biscuits—for smell connects deeply with memory and so has a key role in keeping traditions alive—is frankincense & myrrh. Two of the three gifts (along with gold) presented to the infant Jesus and his parents by the magi/wisemen/kings.

This is a dark time of year. The sun does not rise above the horizon, here where I live, until 8.00 a.m. (by mid-December, not until 8.15 a.m.) and sets mid-afternoon.

These are dark times, at the best of times. Not a week goes by without news of another life taken in violence by its own hand. Lives that have run dry of hope, carrying a burden of pain they just don’t think they can continue to bear. Tragically, often longing to be reunited with family members who have died too soon, carried away by illness or accident or suicide.

For some, this darkness, this void of despair, is evidence against the existence—or at least the efficacy—of God, of a god who is good and loving and strong. And yet, for others, it is in the darkness that Light and Love shine most brightly. How, then, might we side with the Light and Love?

Those gifts—made to a child who all too soon will find himself a refugee, his peers butchered by hardened soldiers at the orders of a fragile king—just might hold a clue, a key. Incense, symbol of prayer rising; prayers rising, even when we can find no words. And myrrh, used to prepare a body for burial, a final act of tenderness, of kindness, of dignity; and though these days embalming is undertaken by professionals, we still might embrace the bereaved with tender touch.

In the darkness, we light a frankincense & myrrh candle, and breath in what it means to wait, until our eyes adjust, until the clouds pass over and the stars are revealed, fierce pinpoints of light in blazing glory.