(no subject)

[rivka]

I don't think I've mentioned here before that I'm helping put together the early Christmas Eve service at my church. It's a short 5pm service which is principally designed for families of young children; there's another service at 8pm which is more suitable for adults and older kids. (And a potluck in between, which I think is a fabulous idea. I remember how tense my mother always used to be about squeezing Christmas Eve dinner between the early church service and early bedtimes.)

The 5pm service is a new innovation by our RE director. As usually happens in these cases, I suppose, she was put in charge of running it herself. The problem: she doesn't personally celebrate Christmas. Because I love Christmas, I volunteered to give her a hand with the planning and arrangements.

I think it'll be a wonderful service. Tons of singing: every reading or spoken element will be followed by a carol. We've chosen to do the first verse, or first two verses, of several carols rather than complete versions; that way even pre-readers will be able to participate in most of the singing. The centerpiece of the service will be one of Becky's justly famous stories, a folktale she's adapting for the occasion. And we're going to end the service just the way the adult service ends: making a circle around the sanctuary, lighting candles, and singing "Silent Night." I persuaded her that even small children deserve a taste of that magic, and that parents are perfectly capable of deciding whether their children can hold a candle themselves.

I haven't contributed much beyond general ideas, except that I wrote the litany. It's based on one I remember from my childhood church, in which the minister would evoke the joys and excitements of Christmas and the congregation would respond, "We can't wait!" I don't remember anything that our minister used to say, but I remember the fun of being a small excited child shouting out "We can't wait!" on Christmas Eve. So we got some of the kids in the congregation to contribute the things they look forward to most about Christmas, and I wove them together with ideas of my own into a litany. I'll be reading this on Christmas Eve, while a first-grader friend leads the congregation in their response.

Christmas Eve Litany

For tastes and smells of Christmas: fresh pine, hot apple cider, cinnamon, peppermint, and Mom's coffee cake; for special cookies we look forward to all year; for sucking candy canes down to a point and then biting them off,

WE CAN'T WAIT!

For presents: for the moment we wake up and see that Santa has come; for fuzzy new flannel PJs on Christmas eve; for the complete surprise that opens up a whole new world and the long-wished-for gift that fulfils our heart's desire; for toys which delight our imagination and video games which stretch our skills,

WE CAN'T WAIT!

For giving: for the joy and satisfaction of finding exactly the right present; for the fun of sharing our favorite things with our friends and families; for hanging mittens on the mitten tree to warm tired hearts as well as cold fingers,

WE CAN'T WAIT!

For family: for pilings-on of sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins, until the house is spilling over at the seams; for the chosen families of our hearts coming together with bonds closer than blood; for sweet memories of the ones we miss,

WE CAN'T WAIT!

For the gift of the idea that a tiny, helpless baby could contain the most powerful force in the universe,

WE CAN'T WAIT!

I'm not happy about how some elements of our Christmas holiday have fallen out, but one thing I have absolutely no regrets about is that we'll be in our own church, celebrating in our own faith tradition, on Christmas Eve. In recent years it's felt increasingly weird to not be with our religious community then.

Comments

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Beautiful. And enough to make me wish there was a UU congregation in Dunedin. (The only one in NZ is in Auckland, at the other end of the country.)