Noel

excerpt from Phyllis Tickle's book What the Land Already Knows.

It was 1980 and two Sundays before Christmas--the Virgin's Sunday, the Sunday of the pink candle that was waiting downstairs in the Advent wreath for me to come and light it. Earnest pleas were already coming up the stairwell. "Come on, Mama. Please come on and light it." What the voices did not understand--what I myself had not understood until only a few moments before and could not for the life of me have explained to them that morning--was that every Advent, by lighting Mary's candle, I also light that quiet place where my femaleness enters Christmas.

In the weak December light of that cold morning, our double bed sat in front of the bedroom's big windows, a disheaveled wad of blankets and quilts, a sea of wrinkles still warm from our bodies. As always, I began by removing the pillows to fluff them and pulling the bottom sheet taut again. I had folded back the covers to air, my hands moving in and out of the night's warmth and a life's memories. For twenty-five years we had slept there. We had conceived nine children on that bed and had brought seven of them to birth. Here I had always rested afterwards. And here they continued to join us in the morning, cold bare feet and knobby little knees hammering, innocent as Oedipus, against our mystery.

A shuttle of clouds blew over the lemony sun outside, and the gray pattern swam across the exposed sheets, moved up the bedroom wall, and disappeared on the ceiling. The wind was too cold that day, and I drew the drapes shut, blocking both the light and the cold for a while longer.

So it began again, the dying of our year. The long nights I yearned toward; the stripped trees and tan grasses; the graying of the sun. I tied a red ribbon around the lamp on the dresser, knowing that in a little while one of the children would bring a pinecone or a holly branch in from the field and slip it through the ribbon without my asking.

It was not quite two full weeks to the holy night; the children were waiting, and I had much to do. It was then that I first realized that I wanted to--in fact, had to-- pully the covers back up and smooth the spread before I could light the candle to which their voices were calling me. It was then that I at last perceived the pattern within my Christmas self. Always here, in this
place of beginnings, was my center, the order of my Advent days. This, first, must be right. A pillow or two set just so and then, on top of those, the special pillow that says Noel: "Birth". All over the world this fortnight people would wish each other birth; I would do it here.

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And to you, my dear blog friends, I wish you birth! Noel!