ICE BOUND ADVENT

We are icebound again today.  Our front garden, all patio slabs, is a skating rink. Our next door neighbour has phoned to warn us not to risk going down the steps to put our rubbish out. I doubt the council vans will make it up our steep narrow hill anyway. Its tight turns have always reminded me of a mini alpine road; now it’s more like a bobsleigh run.

So, no going out. Coffee with a friend, blood test, and a planned trip to buy Christmas decorations and rock salt all postponed. On top of yesterday’s Christmas services and market cancelled for the same reason. If only I’d thought to pick some grit up with the Christmas tree on Saturday.

It’s easy to feel despondent.

And I’m feeling more unanchored than usual this year. I’ve lost my usual Advent preparation routines. I’ve been focussed on finishing my MA modules with my first assessed submissions coming up. Nowhere at the university has any decorations up to mark the season. One person wore a robin jumper at our last seminar. And I took mince pies in the week before. But that was it. Like a Narnian winter under the White Witch.

We missed the official lights switch on here in Looe, the lantern parade, and the community carol singing that accompanied it. Our decorations are back in Hampshire for our boys to put up. I forgot to bring our Jesse Tree back with us and our sons commandeered the family Advent calendar with Bible verses I wrote on cut outs from Christmas cards when they were little. No extended family pre-Christmas get together this year because we’re more widely spread across the country now. And I hadn’t realised how markers like the Light Up A Life tree going up, Secret Santa, or the constant supply of festive treats at work had rooted me in the season.

Rituals and repetition hold us in place like anchors. I feel disoriented without the December ones I’d grown used to. And that’s not a comfortable place to be.

But perhaps it’s also a chance to look at Advent anew. To consider what’s essential, what’s helpful, and what’s just decoration. To make different choices about how we spend our resources. Dare I say it, to recapture the spirit of the original Christmas.

Do we need to do something differently this year? Or has change been forced upon us the season? And if so, what is God saying in it? If He has taken away old opportunities, what is He directing us to instead? And what traditions and values does He want us to maintain?

And how does this impact our writing this December?

Do we need an Advent writing ritual to start or end the day? Do we need to postpone writing to January without guilt because other service is more important? Is this the year to start that story, poem, article about Christmas that could be a candle of good news for our community? And does that mean letting go of something else in order to do so?

If your plans for today or this month have been derailed, Immanuel is waiting in their space for you.

Liz Manning lives in Cornwall and is doing a Creative Writing MA at Plymouth University, where she’s exploring fiction, poetry, and screen writing possibilities. She hopes to have something ready for publication by the end of the academic year.

She blogs regularly at https://thestufflifeismadeofblog.wordpress.com/