A Calmer Christmas Eve

This Christmas Eve will be unusual, for a Christmas Eve spent with my home congregation.  When we've been home on Christmas Eve, we'd head over to our church in the late afternoon to help with set up.  We'd have a 5:30 service, a 7:00 service, and an 11:00 service, and my spouse and I were part of each one.  Because our church is 30-45 minutes away from our house, we'd stay at church, both to help and for the choir rehearsal that came between the middle and the late service.  And in later years, we've stayed after the late service to count the money.  We'd get home in the wee, small hours of Christmas morning and spend Christmas Day exhausted and cranky.

Tonight we will have one service at 5:30.   It will be in the back lot (2 acres) of the church, unless it's raining, in which case we'll be socially distanced in the church--larger than the fellowship hall but we'll have concerns about the lack of air circulation that we don't have outside.  The service will be livestreamed, if the technology gods are on our side.

In the past we've experimented with the outdoors in our earliest service on Christmas Eve.  Once we had a labyrinth, and one of the more meaningful outdoor Christmas Eves was spent walking the candlelit labyrinth with a guitarist playing gentle versions of Christmas carols.  Because the weather can be iffy, in later years, we've started inside and moved in a procession with candles out to the butterfly garden if the weather held.

Tonight we'll have candles for everyone, but we won't be singing.  Actually, I wonder about that.  These hymns are the most familiar hymns the church has.  Most of us have been singing them for decades.  I can sing verse 1 of almost any hymn from memory, but it's only Christmas hymns where I can sing the rest of the verses from memory.

Tonight we'll stay after the service to count the money and make a deposit.  But we'll still get home in time to have a lovely Christmas Eve supper, along with some pink prosecco that I bought special for tonight.

In some ways, it will be like the Christmas Eve we often have when my family vacations together somewhere else.  We go to a Christmas Eve service at a Lutheran church, which is both meaningful and strange.  And then we eat a yummy meal afterward, a meal we put together, not a meal in a restaurant.

I confess I'm looking forward to a calmer Christmas Eve tonight.  I hope we can hang onto some of these lessons as we move forward.