I sat in Marilyn McEntyre’s Advent poetry class last Tuesday evening. My brown eyes burned, fighting to stay awake. Up way past my normal bedtime as I am an early bird to the nth degree, I wrestled with the tiredness I felt at that moment. Yet my heart bound joyfully over the pleasant pasture of her poetry presentation. Words and worded ideas stimulate creativity. There, around the Zoom table, an unexpected camaraderie of poets shimmered.

Yes, I’m a book coach, writing coach, and editor, but, like my word-giddy clients, I too am a writer. Whatever the endeavor of your creativity, be it raising dogs, weaving on a loom, growing a garden, or baking a heart-healthy meal, the realm of your gifting grows in proportion to the ways it is nurtured.

 

Now, not surprisingly, December birthdays often get overlooked, not intentionally, of course. Simply caught in the vortex of the holiday blur, they are remembered at the very last second or, occasionally, long after the date itself is no longer on the calendar. I’ll be the first to proclaim loudly that my friends and family consistently honor the fact of my birthday on Christmas Day. Yet, it does get mushed up a bit in the mesh of the merriment.

 

A grown-up kindness to myself is a Christmas Birthday gift I choose as a way to celebrate me. I look for ways to expand my places of joy. I sink into thought: what would delight my creative heart, my deep exuberance among the delight of writing words? Over the years, I’ve gifted myself a writer’s retreat, conference, course, or even a writing coach session. I’ve purchased fabric for a quilt, paint to play with on canvas, or partaken of an art afternoon at a studio.

 

This year, though, nothing landed on my wish list…until I ran across a note from Image. Author of Make a List, Marilyn McEntyre’s offering of a poetry writing workshop for four Tuesday evenings (yes, past my bedtime) around Advent caught my eye. Suddenly my Christmas Birthday gift-to-me list noted one thing that made me giddy: a writing class – “Evocations: Writing Responsively through Advent.”

 

Marilyn McEntyre’s work with words stretches me. When Poets Pray and What’s in a Phrase? Pausing Where Scripture Gives You Pause speak to the heart of a writer. This workshop was just the gift my creatively-hungry heart needed.

 

At the same time, Advent’s beginning found me savoring postcards I created, focused on who Jesus is in the Gospel of Luke. Yet I also wanted a physical book to carry Advent with me. It’s been a season of being in and out of too many physicians’ waiting rooms, (waiting as an appropriate place to be during Advent, don’t you think?)

Sylvie VanHoozer’s The Art of Living in Season: A Year of Reflections for Everyday Saints came to my attention as I scanned my shelves. A first-time author, her artistry of words and botanical illustrations deserved another sojourn. Advent, where the book begins, seemed like just the time to reread it. Do you know of her wondrous book?

 

A native of Provence in southern France, Sylvie VanHoozer’s book introduced me to santons, “little saints,” who bring gifts to baby Jesus at the manger. Traditional Provençal crèches are populated with santons, clay figurines of everyday folks, who offer the baby Jesus goodness from their gifting, calling, occupation, and unique geography— terroir— from within France.

 

As a child, I remember the holy wonder that settled on my heart when reading Christina Rossetti’s poem “A Christmas Carol.” Perhaps you will recall it by its first line: “In the bleak mid-winter.” The last stanza asks the question: “What can I give Him [Jesus], poor as I am?”

It seems to me the santons are answering Christina Rossetti’s question: “What can I give Him [Jesus]?”

 

Aren’t we, as writers, as creatives, as everyday people, like the santons in Sylvie Vanhoozer’s book? We gather our gifts for Jesus from our gifting, calling, occupation (and pre-occupation) with words and from the unique geography of our story, our lives.

 

Of course, my favorite santon from the book is le félibre, the poet-trustee. His gift comes from his words, his calling occurs in passing words, phrases, culture, and stories down through the ages so nothing is lost to those who will stop and listen. I hope you get a chance to read Sylie’s marvelous chapter entitled “The Art of Coming Home.” She articulates the value of word-carriers in our midst and how words carry us home to Jesus.

 

The words we write in our journal as prayers, those thoughts noted as a pondering place for perseverance, the words we speak to those we love or those we disagree with (who may be one in the same), the words sung, spoken, poemed, storied, all of these words matter.

 

You may not even think of yourself as a writer. Yet:

• • The note you tuck in your child’s lunchbox expresses the wonder of words and lives out the love the Word Himself invites us to partake and break and bless and share with the world.
  • The sticky note you leave on a colleague’s computer while they are in a meeting act as a gift to Jesus, for you are sharing compassion and kindness, the spittin’ image of our Jesus.
  • The birthday card you slip into a friend’s hands? A way of loving Jesus by loving others with words crafted.

 

For Advent and the year ahead, I endeavor to be more intentional with my writing, poetry and prose, inspired by Marilyn McEntyre’s workshop and Sylvie VanHoozer’s words. The poems I scribble may never reach any other eyes but God’s eyes alone, yet they show my love of words to the Giver of words Himself. They tell Him of my love of Him, and isn’t that the gift He most wants?

 

It’s my way of noticing His gifts in the world around me. The brown thrasher’s feather on the oil spot in the driveway. The laced frost on the dying brown grass. The red cardinal hopping around the blooming camellia bush. The yellow butterfly darting through frozen air in December. My prose and poetry posted on social media isn’t set there to become an “influencer” or to rev up the number of followers. It will befuddle the algorithm, but who cares? Those words — gifts God’s given me—are to be shared now and then with the world, one or two words, phrases, or stanzas at a time.

 

Perhaps this Advent, as you wrap gifts for your best friend from childhood or the neighbor you just met yesterday, you will think of your words as a way of you being like the santons, “little saints.” They offer what’s within their grasp from their locale. Each offers an expression of delight for Jesus, the One who wants all our words and deeds to be entry ways to bring glory to Him and bring others into His Kingdom.

 

Play with your gifts, friends. Try out that new recipe. Paint the ugly wall. Plan a spring garden. Make flowers available for folks on your street to come pick at their leisure. Strum a new tune on your banjo. Turn a new bowl on your pottery wheel or via your lathe. Create a water feature in the back corner where no one but you and God might notice it. Whittle that imagined creation. Dance at dawn with a wide-awake newborn. Trim the plate with a new spice. Create. Create. Create. Write. Write. Write. Your creativity is the gift we all need to see, hear, taste, touch, or smell.

 

Take whatever brings you joy from your gifting and let it be a gift to Jesus at the manger, at the temple, at the well, at the shore, in the courtyard, at the cross, at the emptied tomb. Like saints of old on the Emmaus Road, like sheepherders angel-startled in a star-lit field, may your heart be strangely warm in the Presence of the best Present of all, Jesus.

 

Merry Advent. Joyous Christmas.

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Photos of santons courtesy of Sylvie VanHoozer. Connect with Sylvie on Instagram and with her book, The Art of Living in Season.