First Sunday of Advent

Thanks to Angie F., who invited various writerly folk to do reflections for the Vineyard Central Advent gatherings this year. This is what I contributed for today.

My family’s Advent wreath has a wire base, four metal candleholders, plastic holly leaves and berries. The greenery is splotched with purple and pink wax from, oh, probably forty years’ worth of candles. The candleholders likewise are well and truly blackened. We could get two years out of Advent candles, since we only lit them at suppertime; in the second year, on Christmas Eve, Mom liked to keep the candles burning until they melted to nothing. So the flames charred the sides of the candleholders which are four-petalled, like flowers.
The Advent wreath had to be fetched today, the first Sunday of Advent, from the basement, from wherever it had been stashed—someplace we’d put it with the thought that of course we’d remember where we put it, and of course we never did.
The Christmas decorations also live in the basement. The tree, the lights, the ornaments, the crèche would all be brought forth three Sundays from now and would not return to their homes until Epiphany or, if we were feeling particularly liturgically correct, the Sunday after that—the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord. From January until the fourth week of Advent, I could visit them down in the basement.
Go there with me now. We’re in the basement of the house I grew up in. I’m a little kid, seven, eight, nine, ten. I’m wearing roller skates, and I’ve been skating for hours—goodness knows how the rumbling of the metal wheels on the concrete floor has been reverberating through the house. But I’ve taken a break from racing a circuit around the main room. I’ve gone back toward the washer and dryer, turned left at the wooden drying rack with its spokes like a turnstile, past Dad’s workbench with its ancient tools that none of us, Dad included, have the handyman wherewithal to use well. Back here is the water heater, the furnace, and a shelf of Christmas decorations—also a tiny squeeze space granting secret-passage access to the main room.
I’ve turned on the bare bulb above the workbench and I’ve dug out the crèche. I don’t unwrap any decorations or fiddle with the box of lights. I don’t get out Mary or Joseph or a shepherd or sheep, Wise Men or their camel or the angel Gabriel. I leave the stable empty of everyone, but I turn a key on its side, feeling the resistance of the gears, and when I let go, a tiny metal spool unwinds, and even tinier metal teeth on a metal comb catch on the bits of spool that are raised like Braille letters. The music box in the crèche plays “Silent Night.”
I listen a while, and then I return to skating, stopping or slowing at times to listen for the chime of the song. I go back upstairs and wonder through the day if I am really hearing it still or just imagining it. A music box, as it slows, sounds out its chimes at longer and longer intervals. When you think it has run out of faith, as if an Advent candle could melt to nothing before its vigil is complete, another note will ring, sweet as any that came before.