Loving our neighbor, stabbing our wreaths

By Esther C. Baird

(Written for whatever newspaper on the Northshore is still running if not Wickedlocal. December 2021.)

Well. Year two trying to juggle the craziest time of the year amongst a pesky little pandemic. We are all exhausted.  Burnt out.  And so easily triggered.  We may be feeling almost anything but good will or peace.  All is not super calm nor terribly bright.  So it seemed important, against all odds, to still hold our Women’s Christmas event at church.   

I knew it had to be different both logistically and, to be honest, emotionally.  We needed to be outside of ourselves.  We needed a way to think about others, to love our neighbors since, I reminded myself when I was feeling undone in the grocery store, we teach that God loved us first when he certainly didn’t think we were super amazing.  It’s kind of the point of Christmas.

So our women’s team put together an evening in two parts, caroling at the neighborhood up the street, and then wreath decorating for Family Promise – – an organization that helps people out of homelessness.  They asked if we could provide Christmas wreaths for families who were celebrating living in places of their own.  

“I’m sure we can do that.” I replied confidently.

“Clearly,” I explained later to the team, “by ‘we’ I do not mean ‘me,’ I didn’t even know it was a thing. So, who knows how to decorate a wreath?” 

It turns out many women do.   The ladies knew to buy the decorations, let’s call them bebaubles, and the materials you need to attach them, which includes hot glue and floral wire.  (Insider tip, if you want to stir the pot, ask a group of women which method is better!)  

Another lady quite literally flooded my office with pre-made bows.  

“Well, I had a wreath making business at one point.” She explained as she loaded bag after bag of giant, elaborate bows, into my tiny office.  

Of course she did.

When it came time to make them at our event, she also explained the basics.  “First you affix the bow to the top, and then decorate the rest of the wreath in complimentary groups of three. When in doubt think about three as the perfect number.”

“Like the doctrine of the Trinity!”  I chimed in. Hey, I’m not the Director of Women’s Ministries for nothing!

I gamely proceeded.  I wrapped my clumps of berries and a random wooden placard that said ‘joy’ onto the wreath with floral wire in a death wrap to make it stay.  I also had some small drums on gold thread.  Were they joyful?  Did they go with the berries?

“Hmmm.” The wreath maker said as she walked by. 

I stepped back.  “I’m not sure about my groups of three.”

“Well,” she paused, “first let’s see how you attached them.”

“Oh yes,” I said, trying to sound on top of it, “for that I chose floral wire.”

“Uh huh,” she said as she slid my berries out of the wire as if friction did not exist.  “Maybe we should just take this wire off and figure out what’s going on here.”

I could tell her what was going on: Christmas chaos. My group of three were plastic berries next to a blue drum hovering suspiciously close to a plaid sign that said joy.  Nothing made sense. 

My friend grabbed the berries, and began stabbing my wreath. “It’s just,” she leaned into it with a vengeance not normally found in church fellowship halls, “much better if you shove them in with force!” 

Ok then!  This, I understood.

“So,” I said as I picked up a berry sprig, ‘if say, the season was frustrating you a bit,” I jammed it in, “and you were on the verge of feeling not particularly,” stab, stab, “peaceful, you might feel better,” stab, “if you decorated a wreath!!” 

Boom!

I did.  I felt much better.  And I was sure that some family would feel all that transferred, um, joy.

Later that evening one of our women shared about finding ways to contemplate the true meaning of Christmas despite our harried lives.  She talked about a day that week her plans were ruined and full of disruption but in the end, was the day she and her family actually needed to have quality time.

And I thought about our nearly two years of disrupted plans, and ever growing divisions about how to respond to them.  But 2,000 years ago one family’s life was super disrupted, a baby was born to a virgin, and nothing was ever the same.  The message then is the message now, no matter how tense it gets, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves just like that baby would grow up and teach the world.

And that’s something (perhaps with a little therapeutic wreath decorating involved) we can still do.