ADD-vent 2019: Delight is Ever Green
By Anne-Sophie Olsen
I remember the yearly childhood delight of unboxing our Christmas tree. We stored ours in the basement, its branches organized by size: the largest ones crammed at the bottom of the box, splitting their plastic needles, then the second largest, then the second-to-second largest, all the way up to the final rung of stubby top-branches, nestled beneath the cardboard flaps of the lid. In another box, like a skeleton waiting to be reassembled, was the tree stand: green metal slabs and a rod, for roots and a trunk.
Every Advent, I pestered my dad to bring up these boxes. He would set up the stand in the corner of the living room, and for the length of an evening, I padded back and forth between the stand and the box of branches until Christmas was assembled in the corner (the once bare skeleton now sprung with green needles). Then we’d decorate, and for the final touch: the gold star, which was heavy and glittered under the light, and which I could only place on top of the tree if my dad lifted me high. Then we would stand back and gaze at the tree spangled with lights and ornaments, the star its crowning glory.
An ever green memory.
Long ago, many different civilizations used evergreen boughs in their religious worship and home decorating, particularly during wintertime. The trees’ eternally green needles reminded them in the cold darkness of winter that summer would eventually return, and symbolized a spirit of new life. [1]
When Christians began to use these trees during Advent and Christmastime, they saw in them a different representation of this “new life”: not summer, but the birth of Christ. In this wondrous event, mankind’s longing for deeper communion with the Divine was made possible: God walking among us as man, giving us the opportunity to commune more intimately with the Divine. Even 2,000 years after the fact, we can still regard these trees as signs of the continual gift that is the birth of the Christ child, the remembrance of which is given to us every Christmas.
It is significant that this gift came to us not as a man, but as a child:
“And [Mary] gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”
I wonder to myself, in this season of Advent, if there is room in the inn of my own heart. Have I kept a place for Christ when He comes, a little child and fast asleep? Will the child in me, eager to delight in the same ritual tree assembly year after year, recognize Him? Perhaps I have grown old and gone blind to the gift that He is. Have I tired of being delighted?
My family buys real trees now rather than plastic — thick, lush firs, and wiry pines that crook their trunks with attitude. But despite them all, I still remember our old one fondly. I remember that when I started to get taller, it became shorter and shorter year after year, until I no longer needed help to put the star on top — a deflating occasion. It was a wonderful thing, to be lifted up high. I find myself longing for smallness again, not merely smallness of stature but of attitude, wherein something so seemingly ordinary and ritual as a plastic tree contains in its branches manifold delight. Wherein a child laid in a manger may be the secret to knowing the Divine.
This Christmas, whether we are ready for it or not — for Christmas Day is approaching, regardless of how we’ve prepared ourselves — let us adopt an attitude of wonder. Let us be like children standing beneath a dazzling evergreen, gazing up at the gold star, never tiring of delighting in the gift of the Christ child.
SOURCES
1.) www.google.com/url?q=https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-19/the-history-of-the-christmas-tree/8106078&sa=D&ust=1577064515519000&usg=AFQjCNE5OUhmPWmUhGTRoNRZ232VtpfrDg.