A joy that hangs on

I think about definitions a lot. This surprises no one. All the careers I’ve had lean heavily in the linguistics. I’ve been thinking a lot this Christmas season about the word “holy.” Holy means set apart. When we call something sacred we just mean: we are declaring this special. We wear our special clothes and declare things too important to miss. I think that is why some of us love Christmas so much. We get to set things apart, we get to declare things we do in our own places with our own people holy. Very often that is holy laughter rather than quiet solemn moments. I think both are good. I think both are deeply pleasing to God. 

Friday night was set apart. In November one of my regulars started talking about his favorite Christmas tradition. Every year he goes to a dive bar that plays through the Charlie Brown Christmas Album live with back up singers and jazz piano and the whole thing. It is his favorite thing, and this year he took his favorite bartenders (plus my husband who graciously drove us all in the mini van). It was magical. It was beautiful. For me and this regular it was sacred. Joy is sacred. Especially when it shows up in a dive bar with a friend who is trying to share a thing he loves with some people who have cared about him in what was maybe the hardest year of his life. 

This week I was working on my advent picture again. What in the world symbolizes joy that would not also overtake the work I was doing on the other weeks. We didn’t have the metallic paint I was thinking about. I had no other good ideas. But then I noticed the package that the bamboo sticks came in and thought about the tin foil we were likely to have in the kitchen. If I used very small pieces I could foil the discarded bits onto the painting. Suddenly I was seeing shiny things on the floor everywhere. The ornaments we had received from a church that merged and had twice as many as they needed had dropped some sequins on the floor. The chocolate wrapper a kid had carried from the advent calendar to Sunday school was in the hallway (full confession it was probably my kid). There were tiny bits of joy everywhere. I didn’t see them till I had a good reason to look for one. 

Joy is, I think, the most commercialized of the advent candles. It is sold to us on glittered pajama tops and sugar cookies. We are sold the promise that two more presents under an already stuffed tree will be twice as much joy, that seven kinds of cookies will buy you seven times the amount of joy if you just get to baking. I’ve chased that joy before, the one they sell you. It left me with some cute pictures, a huge pile of garbage, a stomach ache and some deeply over stimulated children. 

The concert in the dive bar with the beloved regular, that I think is more like Christmas joy. I think it is the kind Joseph had. 2023 may have been exceptionally hard for him, but 2022 was not my best year. Looking through old blogs and sub stacks. I was crying almost every day. The ache of missing my dad was constant. The same people who watched me cry and sat with me at work were the same folks who watched me squeal like a child and dance myself silly to the Charlie Brown Christmas album preformed live. We talked a lot about Mary the mother of God this Sunday as we lit the joy candle, but my mind was on Joseph. Joseph who joined in Mary’s cultural humiliation even though he was entitled to money and an easier life by law. Joseph who we never see holding baby Jesus, but who was there for the first steps, first words, the hilarious first time baby Jesus realized he could blow raspberries all by himself. He was there for the hard stuff too. Of course he was, the crying and the sickness and the terror of running to Egypt for their lives. 

It isn’t that the sorrow needs to be swept away for the joy to be there. It is that the joy is there. It is right there. It is the promise of the good tidings and GREAT JOY that have been promised and came, and promised and will come again. The world sells us glitter and pretends it is joy, but they have one thing right. Once it gets out, that stuff gets stuck everywhere. That kind of joy hangs on.