The Lutheran church I belong to is part of the mission territory called the Indiana-Kentucky Synod. This year they’ve created a photo-a-day event to mark the Advent season, with a different theme word for each day. Being a poet and not a photographer, I’ve taken a small liberty with the idea. 
Darkness
falls in soft folds, settles
into corners, wraps in muffled
layers that I tuck around
myself for the warm comfort
of unknowing
I’m a couple days late in posting this — Sunday 30 November was actually the first day of Advent — but I decided it was better to post late than not to post at all.
Advent 3
sometimes you gotta wait
for it: the punch
line, the other
shoe to drop, and even
when you know
it’s coming, it still catches
you by surprise
This is an Advent tree, not yet a Christmas tree. Last Sunday we wove two types of lighted strands through its branches: warm incandescents, whose light reminds us of stars in the sky, and cool LEDs, whose light appears Advent blue and whose bulbs make us think of icicles.
For a week now the tree has cast a soft glow over the living room, the space in our house where we work and play. When I was a child, I would spend hours beneath our tree, staring up through the branches and imagining I was looking at the stars through the canopy of an evergreen wood. The enchantment of tiny lights has never entirely worn off; I suppose it’s one of the reasons I also love fireflies in summer.
Tomorrow we will add another layer of meaning to the tree in the form of ornaments or garland, depending on what box comes out of storage. When the children were small, we made paper chains for garland every year. They drew pictures or wrote on the strips of paper, and I tore off countless small pieces of tape for them to secure the ends of the links. It’s a kind of miracle, you know: simple circlets of paper interlock to form a chain of any length. Sometimes we each made our own chain before joining them together to create a single chain long enough to encompass the whole tree. You wouldn’t have seen it in Better Homes and Gardens, but our garland always seemed more beautiful to me than the most elegant tinsel.
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Tagged Advent, family, garland, lights, paper chains, tinsel, trees
The tree stands in a corner of the room, majestic in its solitude. It brings with it a wildness: the sharp tang of winter air, the soft contours of evergreen foliage. This tiny piece of northern forest seems doubly incongruous in a home in the Shallow South, its firred limbs a striking contrast against the tangle of leafless branches outside the backdrop of windows.
A horticulture professor has discovered that Fraser fir can be grown even here, at the extreme limits of its climate zone, if the soil conditions are ideal. Six days ago, this tree stood in a field of its fellows, just a couple rolling country miles down the road from here.
For the first week of Advent, it remains unadorned in our house, reminding us that life is always there, waiting, even when the world seems flat and grey. As the tree adjusts to the indoor temperature and humidity, we spend the week admiring the elegant beauty of its shape, getting to know the curve of its branches and the spiky softness of its needles.
This Sunday we will weave lighted strands through those branches, and the tree will sparkle as the night sky above the North Pole itself. But for now it is a shadowy and mysterious presence in darkness, a slim figure of patience in the light, exuding a faint air of balsam that I always associate with wonder.
The Daily Compost 