Dutch Christmas!

If you search through the archives, you'll find a photo of Talia playing with her first Dutch Christmas gift, a set of wooden stacking rings.  The next year, it was a hand-made, wooden fish puzzle.  Last year, a wooden dog on wooden wheels on a leash for her, and a wooden, rolling sports car for Nate.  This year, a wooden airplane for the boy and a top for T, also wooden and all hand-made.

Every year, I forget to expect this and every year, on December 6th one of us will open the door to go somewhere and trip across our Dutch Christmas wonderment.  Every year, I am humbled by the generosity of the gift, knowing as I do the maker, and the heart and time that goes into the making of each one. Every year, I am reminded that there is a miracle in being the receiver that makes us better givers somehow.

This year, obviously Advent has not been the roaring Today's Parent Magazine cover success I had planned for our little family.  We have used the box twice in six days, but have yet somehow managed to have a Christmas-almost-here moment each day. Despite my best efforts to defy history and family systems theory, I have managed to fall right into the deepest despair and bleakness that all my planning was meant to protect me (and my children!) from.  Nearby, friends' lives are falling apart in very un-merry ways and Heidi's words that Christmas is mostly a remembering of pain, heartbreak and loneliness feel all the more True, and required.

I pulled out our Advent book, "God With Us" and read up on Dutch Christmas tonight.  The feast is in fact a celebration of Saint Nicholas, about whom much is rumored, but very little is known.  In one story, Nicholas, having inherited much, hears of a family who has so little that the daughters will have to sell their own selves.  Under the cover of night, he throws three bags of gold through their window (or down their chimney?), saving them from all manner of evil.  In contrasting this giving with that of the saint's namesake, the author writes, "While Santa has his bundle of toys, the gift that Saint Nicholas gives is nothing short of freedom from poverty and desperation."

The gifts we received today were handmade in a shed about 8 blocks away.  No child was sold by her starving parents to a factory and forced to work 16 hour days in its making.  No child-poisoning toxins were disguised as colourful friends.  But mostly, a gift was given freely with great love and was received with greater delight and we got the best part of Christmas giving.  This has a hint of "freedom from poverty and desperation" about it for me, and I'll take it.

If you have read here for any length of time, you will realize that Christmas is no less fraught for me than any other time of year - my fraughtness just becomes more focused.  And every year I find myself believing that this will be the year I get it right and make Jesus proud. And every year, I learn again, one way or another, that that's not the point.  I merely get to do some receiving of the grace offered and then pass it on, just like the rest of the year.