Grateful for: Our bed, which is oodles more comfortable than the hotel bed.

Watching: The Simpsons from last night. I loved this exchange:

MARGE: Come on, Homer, Japan will be fun. You liked Rashomon.

HOMER: That's not how I remember it!

Third Week of Advent

At dinner last night we lit the third candle of Advent, the only pink candle amid three purple ones. The third candle stands for the joy we feel in anticipation of Christ's birth. Purple and pink, penitence and joy. Christ is born but to die, and dies yet rises again. The circle of life and death and life again as symbolized by the Advent wreath.

Seven or eight years ago I finally realized Advent was more than just the prelude to Christmas and began to understand its purpose as a time of quiet waiting and contemplation. Celebrating Advent has helped me to avoid getting caught up in the commercial hype of Christmas and to stay focused on its true meaning.

That's the theory, anyway. I don't always manage it, but lighting the candles on each Sunday of Advent, I am reminded of its purpose.

Denise Levertov quoted that Steindl-Rast line at the beginning of her poem, "Wondering." She writes:

Just to light the candle, just to draw the breath of a sigh towards the match, is an act?                         A prayer? Can it bridge the gulf between our sense of being-- node, synapse, locus of hidden counsels --and the multidinous force of world?

Matthew has become obsessed with singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas" in the car. I think he likes it because of the counting aspect and the repetition. He starts with the partridge in the pear tree and works his way through all the verses, right on up to the twelve drummers drumming.

It was very cute at first, but we're all growing weary of it. If one of his brothers interrupts Matthew, causing him to miss a line, then he starts again at the beginning and sings the whole blessed thing over again.

Why oh why did I ever teach him that song?

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