“Living the Season Well” by Jody Collins

We all complain about it. The Christmas season is too busy, too hectic, too commercial, too non-religious. As soon as Halloween ends, sometimes as soon as midnight, up go the store decorations for Christmas. And some stores start their Christmas decorations before Halloween.

Christmas has become about money. We want to take it back, but the usual suggestions for doing that look like even more work for people who already have crazy schedules.

Writer Jody Collins has a different idea, and a different approach. Living the Season Well: Reclaiming Christmas describes what that is. And it begins with understanding that “living the season well” may be as much about rest as it is about activities.

Observe the seasons, she says – Advent, Christmas, the 12 days between Christmas and Epiphany, and Epiphany. Help your family, and especially your children (and grandchildren) what those seasons means and where they come from.

Consider liturgy as a gift, she writes, a gift that explains, uplifts, and provides meaning and context to the Christmas season. Advent is a time of waiting and expectation, so build that idea into your celebrations with simple things and ideas. Don’t go all out on decorations – scale them back to focus precious time and resources on the people in your relationships – family, friends, acquaintances, and church. And completely rethink the idea of Christmas presents (I particularly like what Collins has to say about presents and “presence”).

Jody Collins

Each chapter has sections with a history lesson, word play, learning opportunities, and action ideas. These are tools designed to encourage you to reflect, consider, and possibly adopt – and preferably adopt in the place of something else. The idea is to reduce and simplify, not add to.

Collins retired from elementary education after a 25-year career, and has written non-fiction and poetry for a number of online sites, including Altarwork, Jennifer Dukes-Lee, Grace Table, and (in)courage. She serves on the worship team at her church, and she and her family live in the Seattle area. What she has included in this compact book has been distilled from lessons she learned from her students, her children, and her grandchildren.

Living the Season Well is a guide, but it’s more than that. Collins wants you to think about the Christmas season in all of its meaning and glory, and all of its core simplicity.

Top photograph by Gareth Harper via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Jerusalem's joy

After Nehemiah 10-12

Celebrating a wall

was not about brick

and stone and mortar

and barriers; it was

about return, coming

together, identity, safety

in the hands protecting us.

The noise went up, rising

in a cacophony of sound,

a union of music and voice

soaring upward toward

the hands wrapped

around the city, hands

wrapped around

the hearts.

How to Throw the Best Party Ever

In  Fight Back With Joy: Celebrate More. Regret Less. Stare Down Your Greatest Fears,  Margaret Feinberg discusses one way she dealt with the awful physical pain she experienced with chemotherapy for breast cancer.

She threw herself a party.

Actually, she threw herself several parties. She celebrated, by herself, with her husband, and with others. She partied, she ate good food, she grabbed on to savor everything good thing life had to offer.

The partying had a purpose. It was an act of defiance, defying a disease and a course of treatment that is devastating physically, emotionally and spiritually. But defy she did. She fought back with celebration.

All this partying and celebration brought to mind Mickey Easterling.

From the time I was 8 or 9 to my senior year in college, I spent a lot of time at my father’s printing business in downtown New Orleans. Most of that time was spent working – especially weekends and summers – and some of that time was spent partying, like at Mardi Gras.

During the work times, I learned how to do just about everything – operate the printing machines, the paper cutter (a small guillotine), the postage metering machine, the collating machine, the addressograph, and even a machine that tied packages in string. I made deliveries all over downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter. I took checks to the bank. After I turned 15 and got my driver’s license, I drove big bags of mail to the New Orleans Post Office.

And I met a lot of unusual people.

The office was often a veritable parade of politicians, candidates, socialites, businessmen, non-profits and others seeking printing and mailing services. Once (when I wasn’t there) a young man came into the office seeking to have pro-communist propaganda printed; my father showed him the door. The young man’s name was Lee Harvey Oswald. After the assassination of President Kennedy, the FBI was crawling all over the downtown business district, tracing Oswald’s footsteps and activities, and they interviewed my father because of that one short meeting.

The parade of customers included quite a few local “characters” and celebrities, and one of them was a socialite named Mickey Easterling. She was a small woman with a large (very large) presence, given to flamboyant clothes and a distinctive, loud voice recognized anywhere. I remember seeing her many times, in my father’s office as well as her own office and home. She was a gracious and friendly as she was loud. Everyone merited a “hello how ya doin’ dawlin” from her. And she meant it.

She was a “presence” in New Orleans, and knew how to get things done. As much as she mixed with the powers that ran the city, she tended to favor the poor and disenfranchised, never forgetting her own background and upbringing. She was known to African-Americans as a tireless champion of civil rights – not the easiest of things to be in 1960s and 1970s New Orleans and in the circles she ran with.

Mrs. Easterling died last year. Instead of a wake or visitation, she threw herself a party in the lobby of the Saenger Orleans Theater. You’d have to see the lobby to appreciate it. The ticket office is on Canal Street, and you have to walk a good marbled half block through the long lobby to reach the theater itself. Entering Mrs. Easterling’s last party from Canal Street, you’d walk up that marbled hallway to the area in front of the theater doors, where guests and mourners found the guest of honor waiting.

 I am not making this up. You can read the newspaper reports.

She was a character in a city famous for its characters. And while I still can’t decide whether that either the wackiest thing I’ve ever heard of, or the one in poorest taste, or both, it was vintage Mickey Easterling.

It was also an act of defiance. She couldn’t stop death, but she didn’t have to surrender to it. And she wouldn’t.

Margaret Feinberg defied illness and pain, and fought back with joy. And a lot of parties. She wouldn’t surrender to breast cancer, no matter what happened. And what she was learning was that the outcome was less important than the fight. She didn’t know how it would end, but she was determined not to be defeated. And she wasn’t.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Fight Back with Joy. To see more posts on this chapter, “How to Throw the Best Party Ever,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Kevin Casper via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Today is Poetry at Work Day!

I can tell you exactly where I was when I first heard poetry at work.

I was in a meeting, sharing a conference room table with seven other people. The meeting was a recurring one – every Wednesday at 9 a.m. The discussion was generally recurring, too; there is indeed nothing new under the sun.

I was restless; I get restless at meetings that ostensibly are about coordination and team buy-in but are really about avoiding blame by distributing responsibility. This particular meeting was a best practice in that regard.

As I listened, I began taking notes, notes in the form of a poem. I didn’t realize what I was doing until I was halfway down the page. It’s not an understatement to say I was surprised; stunned, in fact. I began listening in earnest, not to what was being said but how it was being said.

To continue reading, and join the the Poetry at Work Day celebration, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.