Zen Dixie
  • Home
    • About >
      • Contact Form
      • About Jas Faulkner
      • A (Sort of) Brief History of Zen Dixie
      • Legalese and All That Jas
  • Emily Dickinson Is Sick Of Your Shit
    • Plague Life >
      • We Closed The Door Behind Us
      • We Do Shakespeare With Tin Cans and String
      • We Get A New Tenant And Keep The Kid
      • We Go Into Quarantine
      • We Lose Our Patience
    • An Open Letter To Marcus' Mom
    • Are Doctors Getting Paychecks From Big Pharma?
    • Everyone Should Feel Safe
    • Guns 'n' Scrunchies
    • I'll Take My Stand
    • Ray Chased The Rain Away
    • Smile For The Tennessee DMV
    • WWJD? Probably Not Create An MLM
    • Your Third Grader Does Not Need A Sports Bra
    • We Need A Witness
    • When God Wants Your Attention
  • Arty Stuff
    • My Marker Rant
  • Belle Lettres & Mylar
    • Books >
      • Book Reviews >
        • Danny's Doodles
        • Review: The Life of Lou Reed: Notes from the Velvet Underground
    • Links For Bookish Folk
    • Reading Life/Writing Life >
      • Our libraries as expressions of who we were, who we are, and what we wish for the future.
    • Watch This! >
      • Coming 2 America
      • Watching Star Wars >
        • Watching Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
        • Watching Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
      • TCCO: The Grand Tour
  • The Front Page Blog

Making Do

11/29/2020

0 Comments

 
​      For those of you playing at home who are not Episcopalian or Roman Catholic or Methodist, today is the first day of the Christian year. It marks the end of Ordinary Time and the start of Advent. 
 
     Waitwaitwait. Isn't Advent that thing where you get a calendar that has little doors and you open one every day and get a chocolate or a little bottle of wine or an ornament or mascara?

     Dale: Can you imagine a Cheech and Chong Advent calendar?
     Me: Really, Dale?

     Let's try this again.

     You know how you'll start buying things for the holidays and you'll see someone in the candle aisle muttering and fussing because they can't find pink, purple, and white tapers? You might be thinking they are going for a different color scheme for Thanksgiving or Christmas. If you're really clueless, you might assume they're trying to fill up their menorah. Nope. Those people waited too long to buy their Advent candles and will either have to pay quite a bit more for a set from the cathedral store, settle for a different set of colors or votives, or suck it up and get them from Amazon. 

     Advent is, as I have already written, the start of the new year on the Christian liturgical calendar. It is the first in a series of four Sundays when we panic because we haven't made our Christmas cards and... okay give me a minute to breathe.  Advent is when we celebrate the birth of the Christ Child and reflect on how to bring the example of His life into our day to day living. 

     A typical Advent wreath has greenery and four or five candles, depending on which tradition you follow. (Mom is Methodist, so I added one in the middle. I'll have to ask my priest because I am not sure why we use four. Maybe one got lost when we set fire to Guy Fawkes.) 

​
Edit: I just got a call from a fellow former member of the Student Interfaith Council at one of my alma maters. She said, "Episcopalians use five candles. Even I know that, you yutz!" She was the president of our sister religious house, the Jewish Student Union.

     What I described is what happens when you don't live in a state experiencing uncontrolled spread during a pandemic. Here is what our Advent setup looked like earlier tonight:
Picture
​     I am not sure if these candles were purchased last year as a backup for Advent in case the dog managed to chew one up or if we just happened to have a number of candles that were close-ish to traditional Advent colors.  I annointed them during a break from work. (Sunday is one of our busiest days, so yes, the ox was in the ditch.) We just plain forgot to cut some holly until it was already dark and decided not to risk disturbing our local raccoons, possums, and Rizzo, the unwed pregnant squirrel who likes to eat Annie's Bunnies on our front porch. We decided to use a potted plant that earned its place inside by surviving the first freeze. It was that or the bundle of dinosaur kale in the crisper. All of it is sitting on a rolling craft table.  It's not Evensong at Canterbury Cathedral, but we enjoyed it. Here is tonight's Evensong at Canterbury Cathedral if you insist on making a comparison:
     Was ours the most primitive of Advents? No. I contacted Alice and Jeffrey in Louisville to wish them a Happy New Year and Joyful Advent. The boys were in the kitchen arguing about the best carrier tortilla for tacos and the merits of Baby Yoda's name reveal while Jeffrey was hiding somewhere in the house discussing fantasy league football. Alice said her candles never arrived and their church was out of them. 

     "What about emergency candles?" I asked.

    "We're saving those for emergencies," she said. "We scrounged around and found four perfectly good candles we'll be using this season. Given that one of the boys hates wine and we have been using Goldfish crackers for at-home Eucharist, I think we'll survive an untraditional Advent setting."

      When she told me about it, she immediately added she would not send a picture. I tried. I really did, but she's not budging. As I type this, her family is gathering around Batman, Spider-Man, the number three, and a Scottie wearing a Santa hat.  

     Happy New Year! ​
0 Comments

    About this blog...

    Someone asked about an essay I write for the front page some time ago. I'd always thought of the home page as something akin to a Buddha Board. Whatever I wrote for it was there as long as I needed it, and then it disappeared. Maybe I do need to save those pieces. At least for now, I'll put them here for anyone bored enough to read them.

    Archives

    March 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Copyright 2007 - 2021
Legal stuff to make you very sleepy (binaural beats not included.)

All original content on this blog is the property of the blog owner and protected by U.S. and international copyright laws and cannot be stored on any retrieval system, reproduced, reposted, displayed, modified or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise without written permission of the copyright owner except as noted below. A brief excerpt of content may be quoted as long as a link is provided back to the source page on this blog and this blog owner is noted as author or source. DISCLAIMER This is a personal website for the owner of Zen Dixie. The content within it is intended for personal use. The views and opinions within this blog represent the owner. It does not represent the opinions and views of other people, institutions, or organizations the owner may be affiliated with individually or as a group unless stated explicitly.

And furthermore...
Zen Dixie is a sole proprietorship owned and operated by Jas Faulkner. Any attempts to conduct business or procure money, credentials and other perks, or publish using this name by anyone other than the owner of this site, domain, and trademark will be dealt with swiftly and to the full extent that legal intervention allows.

Unless otherwise stated, the material published within this website and/or linked to this website is copyright of Zen Dixie and/or Jas Faulkner. No part may be reproduced in whole or in part without the specific written permission of Jas Faulkner (sole proprietor of Zen Dixie) first hand and obtained.