christmas – Mama Needs Coffee

advent, Catholic Spirituality, christmas, decluttering, ditching my smartphone, feast days, minimalism

A minimalist guide to the last week of Advent

December 17, 2018

Today marks the beginning of my absolute favorite period of time of the whole year: the O Antiphons. It’s the beginning of the end, the final countdown till Christmas. Advent’s last hurrah.

I have not strictly observed the Advent action items – or inaction items, as it were – which I laid out for myself back in November. I never did quite get up the self discipline to cut off the Christmas tunes in the car, so we’ve been thrilling in hope and wearily rejoicing all these past long weeks. I did limit our options to the Christian station and the 24 hour Christmas station, so we were at least constantly being filled up with positive noise, if indeed we had the radio on at all.

It has been glorious. No toggling between NPR and catchy-yet-slutty pop music that my kids probably don’t understand yet, but that I honestly shouldn’t even be listening to myself. No negativity streaming into my ears from another breaking news world report detailing some heinous atrocity half a world away.

I’ve also been steadfastly abstinent from social media, save for a brief click on Facebook to drop a link to a new piece of writing I’ve published, or to highlight some truly interesting and important bit of information.

I don’t flop down at the end of a long weekday of mothering and writing depleted beyond all recognition, capable only of streaming and scrolling. I’m still very tired, but it’s the normal kind of tired from caring for people and performing the day’s labors. I’m not overstimulated and hyperactive, looking to my teeny screen for my next dopamine hit.

So if I could make any sort of suggestion for you, gentle readers, as we cruise into this last week of Advent and preparation for Christmas day, it would mostly revolve around reducing your screen time.

Leave your phone plugged in on the counter at night. Crawl into bed with a book – electronic or otherwise – and leave the notifications and blue light downstairs/in the kitchen/far from your sleeping quarters.

Turn off the radio in the car, or, if you must drown out the ambient noise of screaming children (and I must) turn it to K-love or pop in a Christmas CD. Matt Maher’s new Advent album is phenomenal. These two tracks in particular.

Take a fast from social media from now until December 26th. Nothing bad will happen. You will not miss anything. Anyone who desperately needs to get ahold of you already knows how to do so, using the numbers connected to that tiny screen in your pocket that you’re going to plug in downstairs tonight.

I have missed literally zero important things in my month and some change fast from Instagram and Twitter. I’m more present to my family, have enjoyed connecting intentionally with friends and neighbors, and have been forced to confront some lazy habits which were preventing me from investing in relationships with people in my immediate physical proximity.

I’ll never abandon Voxer and the digital connection it allows me to enjoy with far flung friends and relatives, but social media is only a one-dimensional substitute for real connection. Anyone who has ever had a heartbreaking conversation with a friend and then experienced the cognitive dissonance of scrolling through their cheery Instagram feed later that day knows exactly what I mean here: social media only tells one side of the story, and a curated side at that.

Pull away from the 24 hour news cycle. If you absolutely must stay up to date for your job’s sake, then pick one or two trusted sources and go directly to their homepages to check the news, once a day. Declutter the dozens of apps and any and all push notifications. You do not need to know when a new related story pops up, or be alerted every time you receive a text message. If someone needs you badly enough, they will call you. Obviously work is work, but the average Joe or Jane probably doesn’t need to be 24/7 available and plugged in. Be honest with yourself in this regard.

Commit to a nightly family rosary/decade/reading of the scriptures associated with that day’s O Antiphon with your family or roommate(s). The Hallmark movies you haven’t watched yet will still be there when you’re finished. Dim the lights, light some candles, and make space for quiet reflection in defiance of our frenetic culture.

Stop buying stuff. Seriously. You probably have enough gifts for everyone in your life already. Your teachers/principals/service workers/coworkers/neighbors/distant acquaintances don’t need anything from you that you can find on Amazon. If gift giving is your love language and you are horrified by this suggestion, then go to Trader Joe’s and buy some nice dark chocolate and a few mid range bottles of wine and pass them out. Nobody needs another cheap (insert item here) in their home. They just don’t. Give a bottle of wine, a nice chocolate bar, some homemade cookies, a coffee gift card, or a great hug. Let each other off the hook to partake in the frantic consumption cycle. Make a donation to a morally sound and meaningful charity in someone’s honor. Pray a rosary for someone and present them with a beautiful hand-lettered card letting them know about it. It is so good for our hearts to stop shopping before Christmas. (And I’ve never met a teacher who didn’t want a bottle of wine or a gift card for coffee or burritos.)

If you’re still really itching to shop, try a decluttering spree instead. Grab a couple trash bags or discarded Amazon boxes and fill them with broken toys to recycle or toss and gently loved or new toys + clothes to donate. It never ceases to amaze me how similar the surge of happiness is between buying and giving away. It’s the novelty that fires the good feelings, I’m sure of it. Plus you’ll have a beautifully pared down playroom/basement/garage/living room come Christmas morning.

Give something up for this final week of Advent. Maybe it’s chocolate. Maybe it’s wine. Maybe it’s one of the above mentioned practices. Make a little space in the inn of your heart for the baby savior by pushing something aside, even – and maybe especially, a good something. The king is coming. He is coming to personally enter into each of our hearts, and He will come again in glory at the end of time, when we won’t have the luxury of a season of preparation to ready ourselves.

He is coming.

Catholic Spirituality, christmas, Family Life, liturgical living, motherhood

Motherhood + Holiday Magic

December 10, 2018

I love this time of year more than any other. I look forward to this particular stretch for months, such that when it does finally arrive most years, I’ve perhaps overplayed my enthusiastic hand just a tad.

This year, being that I am neither nursing, pregnant, nor newly postpartum, I’ve had the chance to look around and take an honest inventory of where we’re at as a family and come to the conclusion: I can try adding in some little extras this year.

We were talking customs and family traditions as an office the other week and I maintain that mine was the weirdest and least liturgically sound: my siblings and I would gather in the family room on Christmas Eve after the littlest kids had been put to bed, and we would crowd around the newest non-believer in Santa and let them in on the secret. Wrapped in an unfortunate poinsettia apron and knighted with a roll of wrapping paper, we would solemnly induct him or her into “the Christmas club,” making them promise to protect the secret of Santa for the little ones who still believed, and just generally making a big fuss over their entry into adulthood. There was a real oath we made them swear and everything.

Were my parents even aware of our antics? Did they model the Christmas Club for us in any way? No. No, I really don’t think so. If memory serves, they were probably crashed out upstairs with a newborn, my mom exhausted by the previous month of effort to find, buy, and wrap presents for everyone.

In fact, a significant focus of the Christmas club in future years would come to be our procurement of trinkets and the stuffing of all the stockings, the last-minute late night wrapping of some – and eventually, most – of the family’s presents, and of course the careful gnawing of reindeer carrots and the splashing and nibbling of Santa’s milk and cookies.

So my expectations for holiday season 2018 are … modest.

I can plan and execute the perfectly curated holiday scenario, but I can’t select which memories will make their way down into their little hearts.

That’s part of the beauty of childhood, I’m coming to find as a mother of slightly older kids. There are so many sensory experiences to choose from, especially as a Catholic, and different things will stick with different kids. And the things they’ll stubbornly choose to hold onto? Totally not my call.

One might remember the sticky wax dripping from the Advent candles we’ll light every night at dinner, singing a verse of “O Come O Come Emmanuel (yes, again, put your fork down and stop eating until we’re done) Another will just remember that mom didn’t really seem to cook for the entire month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and gosh, we ate a lot of crock pot chili that time of year.

Like, a lot.

Which I’ll totally present to them as a our small effort to scale back and simplify and make the little sacrifice, and not solely due to maternal holiday fatigue.

Some of the tried and failed activities of years gone by: making personalized Christmas ornaments, and homemade Jesse tree + ornaments crafted lovingly each morning as the corresponding Scripture passage was read aloud. We got 17 days in before everybody’s enthusiasm evaporated, mine first. Now we have a ziplock bag of tattered yarn and construction paper creations that has spent 4 years in Advent decor exile, and this year I’m giving myself permission to toss the thing and admit Jesse tree defeat.

My sister and I were recalling our childhood advent calendar – a quilted fabric banner which hung on the fridge with numbered pockets for each date, a traveling star moving from space to space until finally arriving at the top – baby Jesus! – on Christmas eve.

I can’t believe mom made that, my sister recalled with awe, shaking her head in wonder.

“Mom didn’t make that, she bought it at that weird craft fair held at the high school every year.”

We regarded each other solemnly and laughed. Our memories, too, are tinted rose by the beautifying and forgiving mists of time.

Absent are the Christmas mornings filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth over awful presents or unfairly distributed loot; the indignity of being prodded and brushed and stuffed into itchy tights to suffer through a long, cold Dan Schuette-fied liturgy in the gym, exiled to the overflow crowd of which we always seemed to be a part, shifting our feet miserably in puddles of dirty melting snow as we stood on the edge of the basketball court.

I dreamily recount my own fond memories of “the Christmas club” which, at the time, was almost certainly born of necessity, my mother tossing up her hands in exhaustion and flinging rolls of scotch tape and dollar store wrapping paper at her adolescent children at 9 pm on Christmas eve. Which, if you’re reading, mom, is deeply comforting to your now thirtysomething daughter who is exhausted by the prospect of providing your grandchildren with all the comfort and joy this holiday season.

When I say I can do more this year, what I mean is that I can be somewhat intentional in my direction for our family celebration. But I can’t guarantee that the highlight of the season won’t be yogurt tubes for breakfast, lunch, and every snack between.

“Remember when mom used to give us Go-gurts to help us enter into the penitential season of Advent? So we’d always be a little bit hungry and think of the Holy Family journeying to Bethlehem, unable to find shelter?”

I can imagine my extremely literal 6-year-old pointing out to his brother one December night in the future, perhaps over beers, that “mom was probably just really tired and all she bought was yogurt that year.”

Touche, future John Paul. You found me out.

Some plans for executing said intention?

More family time doing spent nothing more than snuggling on the couch with candles lit. Maybe we’ll pray a decade of the rosary. Maybe we’ll just stream the James Taylor holiday station each evening.

More nights where I surprise them with thermoses of hot chocolate and we jump in the car for an impromptu drive through the fancy neighborhood for light peeping.

More focus on little details like candles always lit, Christmas jammies worn for a month straight, the occasional daily Mass as a family, and tiny fake Ikea Christmas trees in bedrooms.

I want to sit back and enjoy this season, in order that they get to really enjoy the season. Less planning, yelling, and scrubbing, and more saying yes to marshmallows and requests for movies and my participation in coloring time. Letting them touch the nativity scene figures if they want to, the real ones from Italy, and smudge up my perfect holiday decor.

They’ll still probably choose to remember fondly, during Christmases to come, the butt joke we weren’t quick enough to bleep out from the beginning of Home Alone instead of a charming homemade craft their loving mother slaved over, and that’s okay. This time of year was never about me, after all.

Motherhood is nothing if not a slow suffocation of the ego, the self annihilating and oddly liberating realization that you are not, after all, the center of your own universe.

No better time to put that knowledge into practice than the most wonderful time of the year.

Catholic Spirituality, Family Life, feast days

A Simple Advent Plan

November 27, 2016

And I do mean simple. In years past I’ve delved deep into the Church’s liturgical traditions and a mish mash of my own childhood to begin piecing together what our little family’s observation of the season would look like. Last year I even hosted an Advent series detailing other families’ traditions. It was awesome.

This year I have no tiny baby. I am not 10000 weeks pregnant, or pregnant at all, in fact. My kids, at 1, nearly 3, 4 and 6 are mostly sleeping through the night. And I am still tired.

It’s not the same kind of tired, but it’s of a quality that has me slowing down and looking for ways to scale back. To relax into the small t traditions of our own family, to discard what hasn’t worked in the past, and to adopt practices that will be truly helpful this year, in 2016.

It has been a long, hard year. I think the Year of Mercy was aptly named and excruciatingly effective. I know countless people for whom this has been true. Now that it has drawn to a close and we’re on the threshold of a fresh liturgical year, today in fact, it seems like the right moment to exhale deeply, to look around and see what might be simplified, and what might simply be superfluous, and to show it to the door.

This afternoon I spent some time decluttering our kitchen and living room. I loaded two large trash bags with unused dishes, unwanted vases, mismatched plates and too small snow boots. I know friends who could use some of this. I know the thrift store down the road could use the rest. Might I someday regret not having saved a pair of girl’s snow boots, size 4, should God send another daughter and should she be that size come wintertime?

Perhaps. But I doubt it. I doubt that holding onto the excess – even if it isn’t excessive by any stretch of the imagination – will bring me more peace, or bring more beauty to our small home.

I find myself craving silence, both visual and auditory. We played Christmas music on Thanksgiving day and it was warm and wonderful. And now we’re waiting until those big feast days in December to turn Kosi 101 back on when we’re driving. My James Taylor holiday playlist is sidelined. Not because it’s morally wrong to listen to Christmas tunes in Advent. But because I don’t have the stamina to carry that football from November through mid January. And every year I tell myself “this year we’ll celebrate all 12 days of Christmas. I won’t kick the tree to the curb on December 27th.” And every year I fail. Because I really don’t have the stamina for it. I’m not my sanguine 6 year old son, whom we’ve actually nicknamed Kringle, who gins up enthusiasm for Christmas lights come Labor Day. And since it largely rests on me to set the liturgical tone in our home, I’ve gotta do what works.

So limited Christmas music before the big day. St. Nicholas Day (Dec 6) for sure will see me cranking the Pentatonix. And the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (Dec 8) will be bumping, too. And Our Lady of Guadalupe on the 12th. And St. Lucy’s on the 13th. And, and…there’s no lack of feast days in December. The Church is good to her children like that.

In addition to shunning the tunes, I’m going to try to keep to a strict grocery budget these next 4 weeks, planning simple meals and resisting the temptation to stop for Chipotle or run through Chicfila. It will help our bottom line and waistlines, and it sets a more subdued tone for what is a season of sober preparation, if not penance. The readings from Mass today were sober, somber, and warning. If the master knew the hour the thief would come, he would be prepared. So too must we prepare for His coming – as a little baby, and at the end of time in glory, and in each of our lives at the moment of our own deaths. Forcing myself to plan and execute dinners that don’t involve ripping open a back of tortilla chips is a level 1 mortification I can practice that keeps my head in the “pray and prepare” game and doesn’t let me get too far into the “already party let’s party” game.

Finally, the tree. O Christmas tree. What a point of contention you have been in our young marriage. 7 years my husband has made the bigger compromise and let me acquire you early. And 7 years you have almost (and, once literally. Long story.) caught on fire, so dead you are come Christmas Day. This year we’re getting the tree on Evie’s birthday, which is December 15th. Still probably too early for some of the liturgical rigorists out there, but seems like an eternity to me, coming from a family whose tree was proudly twinkling over the Thanksgiving spread more years than not.

But I’m seeing as I settle into my 30s – well into them now, I might add – that I don’t have to fight to force traditions to appear, and that it isn’t necessary to duke it out over our respective family of origin practices. We’re never going to have a Thanksgiving tree, neither are we going to be running from tree lot to grocery store parking lot on Christmas Eve, looking for Charlie Brown’s foliage. We’re somewhere in the middle, and it’s working out pretty well.

Meanwhile, our kids are concocting traditions out of memories that I didn’t even realize they were making, that I wasn’t even aware were that important. The Jesse tree that I’ve failed to complete every year is gathering dust in the garage, and there it will remain. But the little manger and a box full of straw beside it, almost an afterthought last year, elicited shouts of joy when I brought it into the family room this morning.

I forgot to buy Advent candles or, um, a wreath, but we’ve got 4 black candlesticks lined up on the dining room table waiting to be filled, and somehow we have four separate nativity sets sprinkled throughout the house, all sans Bambino Gesu till the big day, and the kids are so excited about them. Again, not a tradition I painstakingly planned or executed to perfection. Just something that has sort of happened, and now they treasure it.

I hope this Advent season is a chance for spiritual recalibration and rest. And for you and yours, too. And if I am tempted to drum up a newfound devotion to St. Lucy so that I can put a crown of candles on Evie’s head, which is an adorable tradition but hasn’t found it’s way into our family liturgy, I hope I can chill instead. Sit on the couch with some candles lit and pray a Rosary. Read the Blessed is She devotional for the day and spend 4 minutes in silent mental prayer. Close some browser tabs on the computer and admit to myself that probably that thing I was thinking about buying isn’t really necessary. That maybe we can drop a meal off for someone or buy a coat for a kid who needs it with the money I would have spent.

I want to have the chillest Advent ever.

Who’s with me?

(But for the record, we’re still totally going to sit on Santa’s lap. He’ll be expecting us, after all.)