Love the Guest is on the way

The Resident Fan Boy has taxied out to the airport. Elder daughter left Heathrow at breakfast time in Victoria. Her bed's ready. Just gotta get out the towels, pillows and facecloths.

Peeping Mom

 I've run out of day again (which seems to happen more often in December; shall I blame the Soltice?), so here's my Advent calendar this year. It's the kind of Advent calendar I loved as a child: where you open the doors and windows and see what's behind them.

Or else something has changed.

I still love it.

Good night.

Advent-tageous

Have you ever had an Advent Calendar so witty, you've not been that anxious to open the doors?

This year is the year for me.

This morning, I was searching in vain for door #3, and I fell to perusing and enjoying the loopy titles, and rather wishing they were actual books.

So far, my favourite is The Red Nose of Courage.  My least favourite is the extremely unappetising Green Egg Nog and Ham.

(Door Number 3 turned out to be on the spine of Les Mistletoe.)

It is the best of times....

It is the worst of times.

It's Advent.

Today, I was especially reminded of friendships.

And I was painfully reminded of my shortcomings as a mother of someone on the autistic spectrum.

I was locked out of this blog. Again. This time, it's something to do with Chrome. However, I went to Safari, of all places, and got back in.

I'm tired. Can we do this tomorrow?

I like this Advent carol. I've mentioned this before, but I like it.


People, look east. The time is near
Of the crowning of the year.
Make your house fair as you are able,
Trim the hearth and set the table.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the guest, is on the way.

Furrows, be glad. Though earth is bare,
One more seed is planted there:
Give up your strength the seed to nourish,
That in course the flower may flourish.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the rose, is on the way.

Stars, keep the watch. When night is dim
One more light the bowl shall brim,
Shining beyond the frosty weather,
Bright as sun and moon together.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the star, is on the way.

A steller star

Our Advent calendars are getting to the part where Mary and Joseph are on their way to Bethlehem, so it's time to share this delightful video by New Zealand kids sent to me by a New Zealand cousin -- who got it from her Canadian cousin!  I'm very charmed by the exuberant young Joseph and the stellar performance of the star….

An Advent apple

April may be the cruelest month, but for younger daughter, November is the loooongest month, with little to break it up but Remembrance Day which isn't even a school holiday in Ontario. Last Friday, she came home from school and rustled around furtively in her DVD collection. I heard Christmas music and realized that she had noted that it was a month until Christmas and it is now permissible to break out the holiday movies. For someone with memory challenges and a radically different sense of time than the rest of us mortals, this was huge.

This morning, to younger daughter's intense relief, the Advent calendars came out: the permanent one that we set up in the living room, with books to be read aloud, then hung on the Christmas tree (when we set that up a week before Christmas); an online one this year sent to us by an Albertan cousin; tiny Christmas-card-size ones sent by Demeter, and the morning ritual of opening the large cardboard ones, in our bedrooms.

As a child, my very favourite Advent calendars were the ones where the doors opened to show what was happening behind; a meal being cooked in a kitchen, an animal hiding a present under a bush. I haven't seen those kinds in years, although this December I have a very traditional German calendar with rabbits and hedgehogs exchanging gifts under a brilliantly lit woodland tree and huge double-doors for Christmas Eve which will almost certainly reveal the Holy Family in the stable. Door Number One was an apple, which seems appropriately Lutheran somehow. (A casserole, perhaps, for American Lutherans?)

My shopping is only partially finished, and when I think ahead to the extra cooking and cleaning, I could almost wish November back -- except when I see the glow from the corner where younger daughter is. These are the most precious days of the year, a month when she is truly happy. When December ends, we will have to let go of Christmas to allow it to return. However, for her sake, and hers alone, I would keep Christmas all year if I could.

Set sorrow aside

Sad November thoughts pursued me through the night, disturbing my rest and making me resort to hippy-dippy rituals. But when we woke up, it was December and younger daughter has been longing for December, so begins her day with the Advent Calendar and gets herself through the interminable school day dreaming of which Christmas video she will watch when she gets home.

Starting on the long return journey from her school (made longer today by one bus being too early and the other late), I found myself between audio books and dinosaur that I am, tuned my personal player to CBC Radio Two which at that time of the day straddles their morning show and "Tempo" the classical music section. Just as we hit the Transitway, the host put on a piano setting of the "Bergamasca" of Otto Resphigi's Ancient Airs and Dances, (arranged by Resphigi himself) and any lingering November gremlins were swept away by one of my favourite pieces of music ever.

One idea I had for my memorial service would be to conclude the ceremony of tearful and mirthful testimonies about how wonderful I was (oh hush, this is my fantasy) with a reflection time during which the preceding movement of the suite "Companae parisienses and Aria" would be played, and then the Bergamasca would come on, signaling the mourners to get up and, remembering me happily, go off and enjoy a nice buffet.

If that's too morbid for you, imagine me on the bus this morning, as the ice pellets gradually became huge white flakes of snow whirling above the Transitway:
.

People Look East

People look east, the time is near
For the crowning of the year.
Make your house fair as you are able;
Trim the hearth and set the table.
People look east and sing today:
Love the Guest is on the way.

I used to love Christmas, and there's a part of me that still does. It's much harder when you have to grow up and be responsible for Christmas, particularly when suffering from homesickness in a place that really is supposed to be your home. It seems, though, to be the fashion these days to hate Christmas, and having never been cool nor fashionable, I can't bring myself to quite alienate myself from this festival. Besides, I have two young girls under my roof, and younger daughter in particular loves Christmas. Since December began, she has seemed to glow and vibrate from within.

Therefore, for the sake of my inner child and outer children, I have been doing what I can to redeem the days leading up to December 25th, and in particular, the twelve days following Christmas Day.

Advent traditionally has a mournful liturgical tinge to it, but I cling to the inherent hope associated with it, which I think reaches beyond Christian beliefs to anyone yearning for the promise of something better. That's why I love the words of the Advent carol People Look East, written by the same lady (Eleanor Farjeon) who wrote the lyrics for Morning Has Broken. Love the Guest can be Jesus, if you like, but surely Love by any other name is a welcome guest to any household.

Today, my Friend With Whom I Go For Coffee took me down to the Byward Market for the third year in a row to get a balsam fir to fill the house with the scent of evergreen, something I missed so much for the twenty years we had an artificial tree. The Resident Fan Boy put in his order for Cochrane's Dairy to deliver two glass bottles of egg nog with our weekly dairy order. (The supermarket stuff is rubbish.) He's also bought the first box of Mandarin oranges, another balm to my homesick heart. For our first few Christmases in Hades, we made do with Clementines, which seem to be what Ottawans think are Christmas oranges, seedy, sweeter and not smelling quite right. The scent of the Mandarins as the soft peel tears away mingling with the smell of the balsam and the creamy egg nog flowing under my tongue help bring snatches of remembered Christmases back, if only in tantalizing bits.

Furrows be glad, though earth is bare
One more seed is planted there.
Give up your strength the seed to nourish
That, in course, the flower may flourish.
People look east, and sing today:
Love the Rose is on the way.

The brown envelope containing younger daughter's latest assessment arrived yesterday, and I wonder when will be the best time to make myself read it. I know the gist, from our feedback interview which took place a couple of weeks after the Resident Fan Boy's accident. Assessments are never fun at the best of times, because they focus on what's wrong, and tests don't allow for hesitations or alternate interpretations. What the tests indicate are that younger daughter has dropped from the fifth percentile to the first percentile in expected performance for children her age. Whether this is due to developmental demands, the difference of testing a twelve-year-old versus the testing of a seven-year-old, the less-than-stellar results of trying to integrate her in her local school, the fact that the Resident Fan Boy was injured smack in the middle of the testing process, or a combination of any or all of the preceding, I'm in no position to judge. The fact is, comparing younger daughter with her so-called peers is never going to be a cheering prospect, although comparing her with herself over the past five years is rather more uplifting. I still feel squashed and smashed. I feel I have failed her.

But despair is a place I can only visit. I don't have the luxury of living there. This is another reason I'm not an atheist. As I reluctantly retreat to the kitchen for the extra cooking this season requires (I am an unenthusiastic chef, to say the least), I relieve the sting of the chore with audio books, this time, an old favourite, Alex Jennings' reading of The Dark is Rising. I first fell in love with this story, the second installment of a series of five books by Susan Cooper, when I was in my teens, and Alex Jennings' not overly dramatic rendering never gets in the way of the narrative. It's set in rural Buckinghamshire at Christmastime and is heavily immersed in British mythology. Two nights ago, the eleven-year-old hero learns of his status as the youngest of The Old Ones: If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law. And these words strike home as I gaze fearfully and sightlessly into the coming year, because the gift of a child is much like the gift of a power or talent.

Stars, keep the watch. When night is dim,
One more light the bowl shall brim,
Shining beyond the frosty weather,
Bright as the sun and the moon together.
People, look east, and sing today:
Love the Star is on the way.

In the damp, ocean-soaked cold that is the winter in Victoria, I would gaze east and think of this verse. Now I gaze longingly west through the dry, frigid Eastern Ontario air. It seems I've always seen Christmas and summer as bright harbours at either end of the hurly-burly of the year. It's even more so as I try to help my younger daughter navigate the perilous seas of her school terms. I pray we may keep afloat. Whatever your beliefs (or even lack thereof, I hope Love finds its way, more permanent than a guest, longer lasting than a rose, brimming your bowl with light.

(Here's what People Look East sounds like. I prefer to sing it slowly like a ballad, but it's based on a French carol and most choir directors take the sprightly approach:)