Wait

Today at Native Meadow #43

I can feel it warming up. Thanksgiving week is when our culture really pumps up the holiday urgency. Only this many more shopping days until we all explode into a confetti of late stage capitalist bits.

It isn’t what we want or need. To be further hurried, indebted and distracted. To have further glitter guilt in the face of so much suffering. What we want is a miracle, a symbol, some sign that the light will come again. What we want is to gather and delight those whom we love.

Today Black Friday shouts and hawks its plastic and electronic wares, its savings that do not save. Equal shoutings call for a Black Friday Boycott which has, perhaps, a better chance to save something. Two days from now Advent begins in the Christian tradition and in the earlier nature centered traditions Christianity absorbed.

“It is Advent and, along with nature, we are a people waiting. Far out of the south, the winter light comes thin and milky. The days grow shorter and colder and the nights long. Try as we may, we cannot fully dismiss the fundamental feelings that lie deep at our roots, a mixture of feelings dark and sweet. Will the sun, the source of our life, ever return? Has the great light abandoned us? We are anxious from the separation and feel an obscure guilt. We know there are vague disharmonies that keep us at odds. But our longing for union is passionate. This year we want our Christmas to be different. We want to be touched this season - moved at a level that lies deep in us and is hungry and dark and groaning with a primal need. Like the receptive fields, we lie fallow and waiting.” —To Dance with God: Family Ritual and Community Celebration by Gertrud Mueller Nelson

Early Nordic societies greeted this annual darkness by taking the wheel off their wagon and bringing it inside to be decorated as the Advent Wreath. They waited by stopping. Can you imagine our taking a wheel off the car for the month before Christmas! That would surely change things, slow us down, allow us to rest and seek a sun or a son.

I’ve always done it up royally for Christmas here at Native Meadow and at all the other households I have been a part of. In the past this would be the week to walk the land and tag the tree, to place narcissus bulbs in water and fairy lights and begin the daily task of keeping their little butts wet, to lift down Mama’s Christmas Spode. This would be the week to haul down the full 20th Century Fox production of my Mama’s Christmas things, all of which, like everything she bought once she had money, are gorgeous.

This would be the time to gather ingredients for our St. Nicholas Day breakfast, one of the rituals from Gertrud Mueller Nelson’s fine book that we adopted and enjoyed for many years. School night or not, we baked on December 5 and next morning our shoes were filled with cookies and every Santa in the house showed up in the dining room for a cookie breakfast. What I loved most about this tradition was how it helped us define and defend Santa. On this day, we welcomed Santa’s spirit into our hearts and hands, noting that he was a spirit and that he needed others to do his generous work.

We told the children that all the Santas they might see were just elves. They were never going to see him because he was a spirit. One we believed in. This saved us from the awful disillusion moment when most children are informed that Santa is not real. Balderdash I say. I have felt that spirit and it is very real, leading you, like the 4th century Greek monk from Myra, to give good presents, ideally anonymously.

This would be the week to set up Santa’s Workshop in the craft room (also known as the make-a-mess-and-leave-it room - a glorious thing), the week to sink the amaryllis bulbs into red and green crocks, to decorate and hang the outdoor wreaths, to plan travel and parties, to get real real busy. It’s a part time job for months and this year I am just not doing it.

I vibrate with the effort of not doing it.

As a creative and a mystic, I go for ritual and tradition. I thrive on making the old new. So why stop now?

Because the expectations were kind of killing us. Some members of our family repeatedly crumpled under the weight of the bright beribboned promises for a “perfect” time. And then the bitterness of all the work coming to naught was dark.

“Taking sacred time out is a giving of equal rights to being over doing. It gives the sacred ‘no-thing’ a value equal to the sacred something.” —Gertrud Mueller Nelson

The telescoping of significance onto just selected moments is both the essence and the opposite of the sacred in a paradoxical way. To stand in awe of a single sunrise or the opening of a single bloom or smile is to connect to the sacred within each moment, however ordinary. And, it is also true, that elaborate cyclical symbolic repetition on certain days, in certain moments, can gather power over time and open a channel to sacred awe and help us to dance with God.

So yes to our some day return to our family’s traditions of the past. And yes to leaving them as well. Sometimes you have to break things up to start anew. Sometimes you have to stop and wait longer for the light to return.

Certain kinds of light are returning to our family now and we want to give it space to incubate, even hibernate, to grow slow. This year, my children and I will go on retreat in the desert. Together, we will wait.

Here’s one Advent ritual from To Dance With God that I remember so fondly from when the children were little. We placed a little “manger”, a doll bed or box and beside it a basket of straw. Every kindness, every patient waiting, every helping or job well done allowed any of us to put some straw in to soften the bed for the baby Jesus. Even though it was designed for children, I liked that one best.

I will keep that one this year, maybe just for me.

Sources & More:

Why is it called black Friday? https://www.britannica.com/story/why-is-it-called-black-friday

What is the latest Black Friday boycott and will it work? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/24/what-is-the-latest-black-friday-boycott-and-will-it-work

To Dance with God: Family Ritual and Community Celebration by Gertrud Mueller Nelson https://bookshop.org/p/books/to-dance-with-god-family-ritual-and-community-celebration-gertrud-mueller-nelson/4b06e7a8feb3fc15?ean=9780809128129&next=t&

St. Nicolas: Brittanica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Nicholas