Without One Christmas Decoration in Place, We’re Already Having a Good Christmas

Almost every year for the last 14 years, I have offered a 24-hour Advent retreat of silence during the first week of December. Advent, on the liturgical calendar, is the beginning of the church year that follows the life of Christ for 12 months. This retreat felt like a perfect way to begin centering the minds of Christ-followers and provide a decent antidote, if taken, to protect against the consumerism, the commercialism and the secularism of the world that surrounds us. It’s easy to be sucked into all that, if we’re not careful.

For me, the Advent retreat is always a gift of love. I generally come home after it ends, physically blasted from hauling and designing and interacting. Nothing in my home speaks of Christmas, and often, by early December here in Chicago, some early snow and dropping temperatures mean that the barrel by the mailbox, which I always decorate, including some message for passersby, will be frozen. This fall, corn shocks and wild grasses, dried allium heads and pumpkins and gourds and three signs proclaiming “Count Your Blessings” and “Give Thanks” adorned the barrel beneath the postal box. As I anticipated, two snowfalls have come this year, and the weather is 10 degrees outside. Everything is frozen, and I will have to carry buckets of boiling water across the street in order to dislodge the now rather sad-looking arrangement.


This year, we held four (four!—what were we thinking?) 8-hour Advent retreats of silence in the 1920s restored barn-house of my daughter and son-in-law, Melissa and Doug Timberlake. Something about this place embraces people. It has been beautifully decorated with garage-sale finds. The high lofts (which are great for people to tuck into and to go deeply into silence) lift the eyes. There are all kinds of nooks and crannies where people can sit and be still, where they can follow the guided instructions we work hard to create, where they can pray and listen in the silence.

However, it takes about a month to hang Christmas decorations in this huge place. Since we are not going to a retreat center with paid staff—crews that set up and tear down and clean up after the retreatants leave—we are the ones on whom all this work lands (and more so, on my daughter, Melissa, and her family, since this is their home).

For our recent retreats, treats needed to be prepared and arranged on two coffee-and-tea bars, and a hot-chocolate center in the basement needed to be readied with homemade cookies (everything gluten-free due to guests’ dietary constraints), carafes to hold hot milk, and various kinds of powered chocolate to make the drinks.

The barn needed to be cleaned, stalls mucked—one horse and three sheep and a stall full of chickens all contributing to the task. Due to guests’ allergies, cats were stored in a room in the basement, and two Great Danes and an aging shih tzu named Supreme were temporarily kenneled at our home, some 50 minutes away, while two young-adult Timberlake grandchildren supervised this arrangement for the four days, two Thursdays and two Saturdays early in December.

Why go to all this trouble? (May I also mention that the fees for the retreat just barely covered the expenses.) It is worth the effort and the resulting fatigue when, as a retreat leader, you feel that movement of silence settle on the house and on those who are inhabiting it for eight hours, when people ooh-and-ahh about being quiet with so much surrounding beauty, when tears come due to the persuasion of the Holy Spirit and the power of the Scriptures and the chosen theme, and the reality settles in that we have so little time to simply be because of the cacophony and hurriedness of our modern living.


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