Book of Days

This chapter of the Book of Days Blog comes to you from Table #12 at the Farmer Girl Restaurant on North Dixie Highway in Lake Worth, where I almost always see someone I know (this morning it’s Frank: Howdy Frank!) and where each Thanksgiving, Pete Roubekas, the owner, serves up a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce and all the trimmings, on the house, for anyone who has no place to go… be it no family to cook for or no invitation to accept or decline or even no home to call their own. Pete’s been doing this for 30 years now, but that’s Pete, and that’s the spirit of this town. Sure, there are plenty of not-so-great folks here (don’t fall for the story of the woman who says her scooter’s broken down and needs to borrow 20 bucks––her scooter’s been broken down for as long as Pete’s been serving free Thanksgiving dinners), but people like Pete make Lake Worth what it is: a solid community, filled with people who are willing to take care of you, even when you don’t necessarily feel you deserve it. We are content, and we are thankful. The two go hand in hand.

I love that Pete does this. Another thing I like about Pete is the fact that his place is decorated today with pumpkins and dried corn. It’s clear the man is ready for Thanksgiving. And there is not a hint of yuletide cheer to be found. Which, we heartily believe, is how it should be.

If you know us well, you know Seth and I refer to this as the Slow Christmas Movement. You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who loves Christmas as much as we do, but we don’t like seeing Christmas throwing its weight around and bullying lesser holidays. Especially Thanksgiving, which, each year, seems to get swallowed up by Christmas more and more so that it seems like one long holiday from our day of thanks all the way through the 25th of December.

Each year, we issue an invitation: Join us in the Slow Christmas Movement. Take your time. Enjoy Thanksgiving and all its autumnal bounty. What comes next––and this year it begins on the Sunday after Thanksgiving––is Advent, a time of preparation for Christmas. The nights grow increasingly darker and we acknowledge this by illuminating more and more candles on the Advent wreath as we approach Christmas. And each night we light our daily Advent candle during dinner. We watch it get smaller and smaller as Christmas approaches. And then, before bed each night, we open another window of the Advent calendar to see what surprise awaits us there. Here’s a secret: We like to hold the open calendar window up to a light source from behind, so the picture in the window glows.

If these seem like simple celebrations, they are. And that’s the point. Christmas is a big deal. It comes in with a bang and it actually lasts for another twelve days after Christmas Day. Those are the Twelve Days of Christmas we sing about in the famous carol, running all the way up to the 6th of January. So why rush now? There’s plenty of time to enjoy Christmas once it comes, but for now, enjoy Thanksgiving. Be like Pete. Be thankful and give each day its time and space.

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At our website, www.conviviobookworks.com, you’ll find all kinds of traditional German Advent calendars (the ones with lots of glitter you remember from your childhood) as well as British ones, and some very lovely Advent candles, two of which are handmade in England.

Image: One extremely beautiful Rouge vif D’Etampes pumpkin, given to me by a very kind person who knows how much I love heritage pumpkins. The world is full of kind people.

My neighbor Mr. Solderholm is a grumpy old Swede who can easily muster up a rant over just about anything. A good guy when you get right down to it, but you don’t want to get in his way or cross him, even accidentally. I am nothing like Mr. Solderholm and we both know this and we respect each other’s ways, but if there is one time of year where I sense a bit of Solderholm-style ire creep into my being, it’s usually about now: I find myself grumbling and shaking my fist at houses that are all decked out for Christmas in mid-November, a season for Indian corn and pumpkins, not holly and balsam. I think it’s because I am always championing the little guy, and Thanksgiving, it seems to me, is one of those little guys: an all around nice holiday that gets a bit trampled by the bigger holiday that follows it. I do not, however, want to be as disagreeable as Mr. Solderholm. What I want is to encourage folks to give Thanksgiving its due and to take the rest as it comes.

Today’s installment of the Book of Days is simply an invitation to you all: Join us in what we call “The Slow Christmas Movement.” Rather than rush headlong into Christmas the day after Thanksgiving (or even earlier), we invite you to take your time and appreciate the approach.

What comes after Thanksgiving and before Christmas is Advent: a time of preparation. We prepare our houses, we prepare ourselves––heart, mind, soul––we set the stage for joy to enter at Christmas by making it welcome and appreciating its presence. There are songs for Advent, our favorite being a carol called “People, Look East” that is set to an old French air known as Besançon. These are the lyrics for the first verse:

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.

It may be my instinctual desire for things domestic that makes me like that carol so much. If there was a verse about polishing the copper, I’d be right at home. What that carol speaks of, mostly, is preparing, and I think preparing is an important part of ceremony and celebration… which may be why I like Advent so much.

My grandparents used to get their Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. This is most traditional, and while Seth and I don’t wait quite that long, we are usually visiting our friends at the tree lot quite a bit later than most people. Here’s what you’ll see at our house before the tree arrives: candles in the windows, and an Advent calendar and Advent candles nearby. We light the traditional Advent wreath each of the four Sundays of Advent, we light a daily Advent candle each evening during dinner, and we open a window of our Advent calendar each evening, too. These are slow, simple and meaningful ways to mark the days as we approach the solemnity and the celebration of Christmas… which, of course, begins its own twelve days of celebration.

What’s odd nowadays is that the dominant culture celebrates Christmas before it actually begins, and then shuts things down well before Christmas is over. Old Mr. Solderholm once punched a man in the nose for tossing out his Christmas tree on the 26th of December. Granted, there were some other things going on between them, too, but it was the tree on the curb that instigated the argument that finally pushed Mr. Solderholm over the edge. And while I would never go as far as to punch a man in the nose over anything, there is a part of me that applauded Mr. Solderholm for that act as he stood up to defend the sanctity of old traditions. We may not see eye to eye on most things, he and I, but we do seem to agree on the importance of taking things slowly and respecting the traditions of the ceremonies we keep.

The Slow Christmas Movement means keeping Thanksgiving and keeping it well and keeping Christmas, too, but in its own time. Do so and here’s something else that happens: you almost magically have more time to enjoy everything. Thanksgiving retains its independence, Advent prepares you for “Love, the guest,” and sure, there may still be a frantic rush to the 25th of December… but once it has passed, there are twelve days of Christmas still ahead to celebrate with good food, good company, and good spirit. There is no rush.

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At our website, www.conviviobookworks.com, you’ll find all kinds of traditional German Advent calendars (the ones with lots of glitter you remember from your childhood) as well as British ones, and some very lovely Advent candles, two of which are handmade in England.