I’m a planner. A researcher. A know-all-the-things-before-you-make-a-decision person. So when my friend Katie invited me to her home for an afternoon of gingerbread house decorating, tea and pie, and relaxing with her and her three-year-old (does one ever really relax with a three-year-old?), I had plans. My gingerbread house would be cute and prim and neat: red and white stripes. Multi-colored candies edging the roof and windows. Candy stepping stones leading up to a red door. I had never made a gingerbread house before, so I didn’t plan anything too elaborate. 😉
Cut to the actuality, after two hours of work: my little red striped walls caving in for the fifth (sixth? seventh?) time, and the frosting badly smeared on the gingerbread panels from my fingers attempting to press them into some semblance of an edible edifice. Fine, I thought. I’ll compromise. I took a butter knife and smeared the red and white stripes together. It will be a pink frosted house with marshmallow trim. It will still be cute and tidy. (Ironically, Katie and I had been discussing the frustration of Christmas’ expectations on women: to be the perfect decorators, gift-givers, party-throwers, etc.)
But even my smudgy pink frosted walls refused to hold up. At this point, we’d been working and chatting and taking turns distracting the kiddo (who was happily alternating between painting, eating marshmallows, and singing) for a couple of hours. I was disappointed and tired. I had worked hard to ensure my little house was beautiful. But it wouldn’t even be a house, much less beautiful. (It should be noted that Katie’s decidedly craftsy little gingerbread house was quite upright and adorably decorated, but she had very graciously pretended not to notice the sticky multi-colored puddles of frosting on my corner of her dining room table.) I pushed the plate of now-pink-frosted panels, which had collapsed onto the marshmallows again, away from me. My attempt at a Christmas tradition had literally fallen short. My general grinchiness increased. Bah humbug on gingerbread houses and expectations and decorating and all of it!
“Would you like a dinosaur?” my friend’s voice pushed away the whispers of failure and shame that dug themselves like splinters into my brain (It should be noted, of course, that the gingerbread house was only a physical manifestation of how Christmas has often involved a great deal of disappointment for me).
She knew. She knew how I had worked, knew how I had planned, knew how the frosting had oozed more than piped, how the walls had refused to stand up. Knew how the Christmas season was already overwhelming me. And she knew what I needed.
“Yes!” I responded, relieved and grateful. “Yes, I do.”
She disappeared for a moment, and returned with a yellowy-green scaly plastic T-rex. I planted his little feet in the pink gooey frosting on the pile of gingerbread slabs. One bit had broken off, and I put it in his open mouth. He looked satisfied. Chaos and destruction were his wake, and now gingerbread was his lunch. And my gingerbread… erm… pile, was given new life. Not a tidy one. Not a prim one, certainly. But it felt right. My attempts were validated. My hard work and intentions were not for nothing.
The Advent season, for some of us, comes with expectations of perfection. Perfect behavior. Tasteful and artfully-placed decorations. New Christmas outfits. Several courses of perfectly spiced and appropriately-temperatured dishes. Perfectly behaved families who only have perfectly loving conversations (ha!). But Advent is not meant to be a Hallmark movie–with lavish sets and superb lighting. Advent is wading through normal, often discouraging, unexpected, messy life, with people who make space for us at their tables. We wait together, in the dark. We journey together when it is light enough to do so. Advent is swooping in with a sympathetic shoulder squeeze and an “I’ve been there,” as we validate each others’ feelings and experiences, and hunker down with the ways life did not go to plan.
Advent is Mary and Elizabeth wondering at the way the universe had interrupted their lives, and sitting next to each other with swelling bellies, discussing pregnancy and their plans for their babies. Advent is waddling next to a husband and a donkey for miles at a time. Advent is making a birth plan that involves privacy and tidiness, but ending up panting and straining and bloody next to a cow. Advent is enveloping both dirty shepherds and majestic strangers from foreign lands into your baby shower. Advent is packing up your family and escaping to a place where you have a chance at a future.
Advent is the coming of one who would turn so many expectations, and plans, and prim, proper things upside down. Maybe a bit like how a gingerbread house might look, if a T-rex smashed and ate it.
Marjorie Ellenwood is a Social Studies and English teacher at Valley Adventist Christian School in Moreno Valley. She loves cats, cool weather, tea, green, growing things, stories, naps, and the community of kindred spirits she has found here at La Sierra.
