The Silken Tent My Letter to the World December 1999

Today was my annual Holiday Open House. I had it for the first time in 1990, a few weeks after standing in line at the checkout at the Giant, picking up Pillsbury's "Classic Holiday Cookbook IX," reading the menu and timetable for a "Greet the Season Open House," and saying, I can do this. And I did, and enjoyed it so much that I did it again and again, except for a few years when complications such as grad school work and my mother's death took too much of my emotional energy.

I always have it on the Third Sunday of Advent, known in the Roman liturgy I grew up with as Gaudete Sunday. Gaudete is Latin for "Rejoice!" It's a pause in the watchful waiting that permeates the rest of the season (liturgically, anyway) to rejoice that the season of light is almost at hand. My daughter was baptized on the Third Sunday of Advent, and the day usually falls the same week as Lucia Day, a charming Scandinavian custom dear to my heart. What better time to open our home to those who mean so much to us to join us in a celebration of friendship, light, and hope.

This year's guest list had the potential for 125 people. I think we had 75 or so, many of them children -- though my daughter is 14 now, we still have among our circle some very young families, and all members of a family are always included.

I stick close to the menu and the timetable prescribed in my cookbook, now crinkled and falling apart. I make ham balls (a meat ball of ground ham and pork simmered in a chili-peach sauce), a vegetarian lasagna (with provolone cheese), a vegetable wreath with a salsa dip, a cheese ball shaped to look like a pine cone, a no-bake cream cheese pear tart, a very rich red velvet cake, and a fun cake frosted to look like Santa Claus with a marshmallow beard. I add a tray of the cardamom sweet rolls traditional for Lucia Day, and a tray of fruit and tortilla wrap sandwiches from the supermarket deli.

Funny things have happened. When my daughter was in Brownies I invited her fellow troop members and her leader. The leader called me and asked "just how Catholic" this thing was going to be. I'd explained "that Gaudete word" in the invitation, but she was concerned that it might be a prayer service. I said it was a party. She said she didn't want to go to anything that was "all Catholic, you know." She didn't come. I was not unhappy.

Another time my mother told me that she'd been sitting alone in the corner of the living room (more or less enveloped out of sight in a wing chair) and had observed two little boys who just stuffed their pockets with Hershey's Kisses from the heaped up bowl on the side board. "You'd think they'd never seen Hershey's Kisses before!" she said. I asked her to describe them. It turned out they were the children of the dentist around the corner -- no doubt they had never seen an open bowl of Hershey's Kisses.

Things have happened at this party that have become part of our own family tradition. One year a four-year-old came clutching a bag of french fries and a plastic figurine of the TV character "Alf." Her mother, somewhat embarrassed, explained that the child had insisted on her usual trip to McDonald's after church, and would not be dissuaded. After everyone was gone and I went about cleaning up, I stopped at our crèche to turn off the stable light. There was Alf, posed behind the empty manger, he too awaiting the birth of the Christ Child.

Alf eventually disappeared, accidentally thrown away as junk, I think, instead of wrapped and put away as a member of the nativity scene. The next year, however, I discovered a small wind up train car wedged in between a cow and a sheep. Once again, one of the least among us had given the most that he had. What better lesson to learn at this season.

Every year it gets easier, and every year I enjoy it more. This time I kept notes, including "Remember that it takes FOUR HOURS to assemble and address the invitations, provided you already have the thing written and printed!"

This year was the best -- my family would tell you that I say that every year, but I really really mean it this year. Several people came whom I hadn't seen in quite a long time. Two people who had never met before found they had a mutual passion for AIDS activism and spent a good deal of time together. One family with whom we'd enjoyed many field hockey afternoons came, even though their field hockey player could not accompany them.

And Marilyn, who lost a son last spring (one of the boys mentioned in the Hershey Kiss story above), came by. It was only for a few minutes -- I think she doesn't yet go out very much, and I think social occasions are hard for her still. She hugged me, pressed into my hands a Whitman's Sampler, my very favorite holiday candy, and said she just had to wish me a happy season. I had hesitated a bit about inviting her this time, since Christmas is not even part of her tradition.

But that's what this season is all about, no matter which path you take to approach it. We all want light and love and hope. My friends give me these things by coming to my party, or by thinking of me if they can't. And those who think they might have the least of these things give them anyway, and do me an honor beyond words.