12 Days of Comfort and Joy

“Oh, tidings of comfort and joy,” announces the chorus of an ancient English Christmas carol, “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” Musical legends tell us that nightwatchmen intoned this song as they strolled the streets of London. The first printed version of the song appeared in 1760, though it was likely used long before that.

The “tidings of comfort and joy” refer to the good news and celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem. We usually sing this and similar Christmas carols during Advent, the four-Sunday period leading up to December 25^th, or possibly into the so-called 12 Days of Christmas.

The 12 Days of Christmas don’t stretch from some vague date previous to Christmas until New Year’s Day. Rather, in the Christian calendar, these special days mark the span between the birth of Christ and the arrival of the Magi, the three “wise men.” (Which, incidentally, didn’t happen the same year, but that’s another topic.) So the 12 Days begin on December 25^th, Christmas, and run through January 6^th, Epiphany—sometimes known as Three Kings’ Day.

Some families return to business as usual as soon as the last gift is opened on the 25^th. Others choose to observe the different saints’ days that fall between then and January 6^th (such as St. Stephen on the 26^th or the Innocents of Bethlehem on the 28^th). In our family and in Chile, we like to plan a lot of Christmas-related parties and activities for that week. We make the comfort and joy last as long as possible.

“Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” –G. K. Chesterton

How do you honor and cherish the days and weeks of the Christmas season? Is it a period of comfort and joy for you? Although we’re not technically into the 12 Days of Christmas yet, I’m thinking about the simple pleasures that bring me comfort and joy this holiday period:

12 Weeks of Summer in South America

We live just a short drive—or a long hike—to our lovely local beach in Totoralillo, Coquimbo. Although we lost our ocean view from the deck (see This Homesick World), we can still glimpse it from cracks, crannies, and corners of our house. Our maritime climate often stays windy, hazy, and cool even in the summer and especially in the morning.

But a walk on the beach—either the one close by or along the city boardwalk—in the afternoon or evening feels perfect, since we can’t see our Christmas lights until maybe 9:30 p.m. Right now we’re beating the tourists as they won’t swarm into town for a couple more weeks. Ah, the comfort and joy of thundering waves, salt breeze, and maybe a café helado—a sort of glorified coffee float.

Enjoy your climate and scenery, whatever that might be.

11 Flowers in Bloom (Or More!)

Although the calla lilies have withered, my rock garden of aloe vera plants thrust up new vermillion shoots daily. The lavender has formed a great purple bouquet. Even though we live on the edge of a desert, with poor, thin soil, God gives us the comfort and joy of flourishing trees and flowering plants during much of the year. But especially right now.

“Contentment is not an end point I can reach in life, but rather a mindset I can choose to adopt for the journey.” –Lauren Liess, Feels Like Home

We don’t have pines and poinsettias. But I love my lush magenta bougainvillea and the hydrangea bush thick with puffy pink snowballs. Please delight in the wonder of real snowflakes and frost if they fall near you.

10 Tins of Goodies in the Freezer (Or More!)

Often starting in mid-November, I bake our favorite sweet breads, cookies, and snacks so that we have plenty on hand for the season. Peanut butter everything—fudge, frogs, cups, and balls. Sugar cookies, shortbread, chocolate crinkles, snowballs, lemon squares. Red velvet cupcakes. Cherry bread and homemade English muffins.

My husband’s absolute favorite has always been Nanaimo Bars, and he pretty much gets the whole tin to himself. (Over a month, of course.) My pick lately is Graham Cracker Squares, a new recipe I discovered a couple of years ago—oh, comfort and joy! When my daughter arrives, she has promised to help with our family tradition, Taffy Tarts.

All that sugar and butter’s not just for us, thankfully, or even for our holiday guests. We make up plates—a smorgasbord of treats—as gifts for neighbors and friends and deliver them on Christmas Eve. Chileans as a rule don’t bake much, so they truly mean something special to the recipients.

9 Packages in the Mail (or More!)

Gumdrops and candy canes, red and green, arrived first—in Florida before we headed back to Chile in October. By the end of November we shop online for our closest family back in North America. They receive packages that we never see, but I’m so grateful we can do it that way. And it sure beats pounding the mall, a comfort and joy better than soaking my feet.

“Christmas is a time when you get homesick—even when you’re home.” —Carol Nelson

Next up, the boxes have started to arrive from Mercado Libre, Chile’s version of Amazon. It’s a challenge—almost an impossibility—to keep the nosy parkers of the family from catching onto the secrets, but we have fun trying.

I confess I miss the decades of receiving Christmas cards. In our Chiloé days, the post office box flooded daily each December. I strung the cards, some genuine keepsakes, from coat hangers to line the living room walls. Now holiday greetings consist of emails or WhatsApp messages on the 24^th and maybe a cardboard mailbox at church.

8 Hours of Carols

Though I’m not a musician, I love music. My latest editorial project, Legacy of the Linnenbrink Light (Book 3 in the Desert Island Diaries series), features a dedicated teacher who inspires her students to learn through a heritage musical.

This month, I play iconic Christmas music on YouTube as often as our (unreliable) Internet will permit. The carols in a coffee shop, with a crackling fire and drifting snow in the background, at least offer the illusion of walking in a winter wonderland.

“Christmas is a piece of one’s home that one carries in one’s heart.” —Freya Stark 

Then I dig out my box of CDs, starting and ending with Handel’s Messiah. I opined that was awfully high-brow in my ’70’s youth. But these days, my daughter and I enjoy it regularly, once bursting out laughing as we mindlessly repeated, “We like sheep…” The joke was, we like beef and chicken too. Fun aside, this classic oratorio showcases numerous magnificent pieces. Friends of ours arise on Christmas morning to the strains of the Hallelujah Chorus. What a delightful tradition of comfort and joy.

And in our church Christmas choir this year, we’re doing an upbeat adaptation of “For Unto Us a Child is Born.” “Porque nos ha nacido un Niño…” We also perform a rocking “Joy to the World” and an amazing “Oh Holy Night.” How about “Feliz Navidad” or “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” as Anne Murray sings it? Or “Old Toy Trains,” a Nana Mouskouri oldie-but-goodie I used as a lullaby for my babies?

7 Children for Magic and Mystery

My husband and I have five grandchildren who are all getting older every year (surprise, that!) We still love to buy gifts for them that they wouldn’t otherwise get, but the majority voted for a contribution to their collective Adventure Fund this December.

“I’m of the mindset you can never do too much to make a child’s Christmas magical.” —Ted Maltin, “Jingle All the Way”

So why seven? A few months ago, one of our single daughters took in a friend in need with two small children. To say they’ve transformed her life is an understatement. Though none of the rest of us have ever met them, our whole family has mobilized to give them a Christmas to remember. After all, Christmas celebrates the birth of a child—the Child who loved children.

“Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.” —G. K. Chesterton

Which leads me to…

6 Marvelous Memories

The spirits of Christmases past in different places naturally float into mind…

• The tree of my Maine childhood, a pungent spruce overflowing into the living room with gifts. (There were nine of us kids, plus my parents, after all.) Downeast oyster stew and German chocolate cake on Christmas Eve. Then, the next day, “over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go” for turkey, ham, and walnut cake on her Fiesta dishes. The time the car wouldn’t start for the drive out to the farm because the mercury plunged so low.
• The special gifts: curling iron (thanks, cuz), umbrella (what was I thinking?), suitcase (prophecy of Christmases future), and books (my mom knew what I liked). Our last Christmas on Chiloé Island, I had just finished the first draft of Destiny at Dolphin Bay. I always connect that event with the mermaid doll one of my girls received as a gift. The doll sang the most haunting tune all day long, just like on the ghostship Caleuche.

“As a grown-up I’ve learned that all the ‘Christmas magic’ I felt as a kid was really a mom who loved me so very much.” –Kathy Oberst

• My first Christmas in Canada as a newlywed. Though I’d studied there for several years, this was my first experience of Christmas away from “home”—and in another country. Canada and the U. S. don’t differ to extremes, but I learned I wasn’t in Maine anymore. The Christmas food culture in my new home included turnip, tomato shrimp aspic, and stuffing made from potato or hamburger? My in-laws invited so many guests, we had to eat around a ping-pong table. They baked English treats such as taffy tarts and shortbread, sandwiched “turkey buns” on Christmas evening, and sipped cranberry juice cocktail from crystal goblets.

And on to Chile…

• My first Chilean Christmas—what a contrast in every imaginable way. For them, Christmas is celebrated the night before, but we hosted two other missionary families for breakfast coffee cake and omelets. Then we headed to church for a spit-roasted lamb barbecue.
• Hot, sticky Santiago Christmases. During the early years there, the girls and I made an annual shopping odyssey via subway to the downtown mall. Remember when we discovered marzipan candy? Later I’d retrace my steps to the clogged Meiggs neighborhood—full of hoods, for sure, but also of great deals. Now I can’t stand on my feet all day, but it used to feel merry. While the kids went off to camp, my husband and I roamed the Christmas street fairs till midnight. It cooled off by that hour, and we’d come home to the three-bean salad and ham-and-cheese ball left over from the potluck.
• Beaches, riverside and oceanside. Or a little backyard pool, if nothing else. And I’d either read a new book or, during the Linares decade, I’d start writing one. Our first empty-nest Christmas Eve, we relaxed on El Tabo beach, south of Viña del Mar and Valparaiso, and never missed the kids over Parmesan oysters and paila marina. It’s another world of comfort and joy.

5 Golden Pie Crusts

Did I say I like to bake at Christmas?😊 The freezer, like a brimming treasure chest, nearly bursts at the joints, but still I’m stuffing in made-ahead pizzas and pies ready for a quick filling or leftover turkey and gravy. Nothing like being prepared.

“Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality.” —Washington Irving 

There are also tubs of seasonal fruit, jars of homemade antipasto, and a gargantuan container of tilapia in brine. I miss the comfort and joy of Nova Scotia pickled herring, AKA “Solomon Gundy, and not the Jamaican paté kind. You’d think in our fishing capital, Coquimbo, we’d find it, but no go.

So, anyway, we are now equipped for a party at a moment’s notice. What else during the 12 days of Christmas?

4 Plates of Cookies

As I mentioned earlier, we end up giving a lot of our treat treasures away as Christmas gifts. Not just cookies either. Over the years we’ve delivered grocery boxes and candy bags and dishes of my signature tuna avocado dip. People squabble over it, which flatters me no end.😊 Food that’s all comfort and joy.

And the humble brownie takes the cake these days. It’s the most requested in Coquimbo, especially with peanut butter frosting. In fact, one of our friends just asked me if I’d make a pan for a camp fundraiser.

Although the sweet monkey bread I sent to a meeting the other night could become the next prize winner.

3 Better Versions Transformations

I don’t know about you, but even my best self falls short more often than not. Rather than a better version of myself, this year my goal is a transformed heart, attitude, and outlook.

What comfort and joy to watch some of my friends change before my eyes this year. One woman, an accountant forced into early retirement, has approached me about learning to counsel older women like herself. Another, a new believer when we arrived here seven years ago, has grown into a great Bible teacher, as well as a talented baker. And my “adopted” daughter, once plagued by depression and insecurity, now takes the initiative to comfort others she notices are in distress.

What a joy to be transformed from “glory to glory.” Not into a better us. But into a better likeness of Jesus.

2 Tough Old Turtledoves

Turtledoves, “tórtolas,” are what they call lovebirds in Chile. Admittedly, it’s been a hard year for these old turtledoves. We’re so thankful for family—our parents, sisters and brothers, children and grandchildren, even aunts, uncles, and cousins—who have given us so much over the years. All, at their different levels of connection and intimacy, add value and meaning, comfort and joy, to our lives.

But one’s “mate” falls into another category of appreciation altogether. If God has given you someone to do life with, even a diet of seeds and worms can taste palatable.

“If your heart’s been longing
And you’ve been afraid to try;
Sorrow’s kept you company
And the dance has passed you by;
I’ll lift you up and blaze with you
Across the moonlit sky
On the night before Christmas, ‘Cause you don’t have to be an angel
To sing in harmony,
And you don’t have to be a child to love the mystery,
And you don’t have to be a wise man
On bended knee.
The heart of this Christmas is in you and me…” –Carly Simon, “The Night Before Christmas”

…And a Sparrow in a Palm Tree

After chasing away many squatter birds who attempted to build nests in our rafters, we didn’t rate highly with the avian population in our gravel pit. So when a sparrow couple fixed up a cozy home in our (not very tall) backyard palm—well, we did our best not to upset them.

One by one, three eggs were laid. We seldom glimpsed the parents, but we knew they were watching every second we came around. A few weeks later, the fluffy baby birds appeared. And they grew, until they outgrew their nest. One day, just before Christmas, they were gone.

Who knows why this pair of sparrows chose a precarious palm branch to set up a nursery? But they taught me a lesson. In a place where rusty roofs, dust, grime, and graffiti prevail, God cares for me “more than many sparrows” (Mt. 10:31). The advent of new life in our own backyard promises His comfort and joy for the new year to come.

Every day is a Christmas gift.

How can my life and my writing declare that today?

What gives you comfort and joy?