Welcome to the Christmas Around the World Scavenger Hunt!
The scavenger hunt is now closed, but I’m leaving this post up for posterity 🙂
The Candles of Christmas
Sunday lunches were my second favorite part of the Advent season growing up. In Sunday school in third grade, we made Advent wreaths with nice, thick, long-lasting candles. So every Sunday at lunchtime, we’d light the candles and eat around the flames.
These candles, more than any tree or song, formed the centerpiece of my Christmas. First one candle, then two, then three, then four, and finally at dinner on Christmas Eve: all five.
You might have noticed my use of the word “second” earlier. Yes, the Advent candles were my second favorite, because my absolute favorite Christmas tradition was the Christmas Eve service. Not the entire service; specifically the final song. Where each person lit their neighbor’s candle until every one was lit, and we sang Silent Night by the candle light.
I would stare into that shifting, tiny, eager flame until it left a green afterimage in my vision. Then the song ended, our arms lowered, our candles snuffed, and we drove home in the dark.
Light is one of my favorite symbols of Christmas. While December 25th is nowhere claimed to be Jesus’s actual birthday, I think it apt that we celebrate the Light coming down to earth during the darkest days of winter.
John begins his gospel with the following:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.” John 1:1-5, 9 ESV
We see here a beautiful mirroring of the Creation story. In the beginning, God spoke light into the world, scattering the darkness. In the birth of Jesus, the true Light came into the world to restore what was lost, that one day we will not need the sun to shine, for the Lamb will be our Lamp (Revelation 21:23).
Candles, and indeed all pretty Christmas lights, remind us that the Light has come, and is coming back.
Now, I don’t share this to suggest I was an especially devout child, caring nothing for presents or candy and focused unswervingly on the Light of the World coming down to earth.
No, I just liked fire. Fire, lights, and pretty things. There is something undeniably wondrous about Christmastime. Filled to bursting with dazzling lights, romantic melodies, enchanting movies, and sugar, we believe a little more in magic and miracles and the things that are not seen. It’s this same sense of wonder that draws me to books. Books draw out the reminder that we were made for more than this. I look around at the world and all that is in it and am left with an aching in my chest, a yearning for more, a longing for Home.
C.S. Lewis articulates this brilliantly in my favorite of his works, The Weight of Glory. He writes:
“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
Christmas reminds us that we are exiles. We wait for the Son of God to return and to invite us into that far off country. We wait for the day what we see now as a failing reflection, we will finally see face to face. We wait for the Light of the World to make all things new. We wait for Immanuel to come down and live with us.
Usually my posts contain book reviews; this one is a bit out of the ordinary for me. But I’ll be back in a week or two with a few fun, Christmasy reads! Sign up for my newsletter at the bottom of this page to be notified when that comes out. If you’re itching for some book recommendations in the meantime, feel free to check out either of my book recommendation quizzes:
Find the best book for the reader on your Christmas list with my ultimate book gift quiz!
Get personalized fantasy book recommendations with my in-depth recommendation quiz!
And don’t forget to check out the other stops on the Scavenger Hunt!
This is Stop One on the scavenger hunt.
Your first clue for the hunt: light
Next stop: South Africa!
The scavenger hunt is now closed, but feel free to check out the other posts, anyway!