Religious Educator's Memo by Sierra-Marie Gerfao

[Memos from Rev. Barbara Merritt and Rev. Tom Schade]

R E L I G I O U S   E D U C A T O R’ S   M E M O

For a number of reasons, the details of which I won’t bore you with now, all
of my family’s holiday celebration accoutrements are still back in
Washington, packed away in boxes inaccessible to us.

My family celebrates both Hanukkah and Christmas. Though both my parents
chose Unitarian Universalism in their teen years, my mother’s father is
Jewish, my mother’s mother was Lutheran, and my father’s parents are both
Catholic. I am a lifelong Unitarian Universalist who has a nearly, but not
quite direct, lineage from our Jewish and Christian roots. I celebrate with
my wife and children the holidays of my own childhood, as they hold
particular meaning for me.

Our family’s menorah is the same menorah we had when I was a kid. My mother
gave it to me a few years ago after she purchased a new, more contemporary
one. Likewise, my mother also passed on to me her clay nativity scene after
she was given a new one. It can sit on my own mantel now, those same little
figures, telling the same story they did when I was younger.

The Christmas stockings we have in our family were handmade by my wife and
mother. We have a tradition each year of sewing a new set of decorative
buttons on each stocking. The buttons are images of things that speak to our
memories from the year. Christmas ornaments are also a big deal in our
family. Every member of our family – myself, my wife, my son, and my foster
daughter – has their own collection of ornaments. Some of them are handmade,
the rest were all given to us. I have Christmas ornaments that I have had
since I was a baby. The ones from my early years, when my parents had very
little money, are recycled gift tags with my name and the year written on
the back. Each ornament carries with it precious memories, and each one came
to us in the spirit of love.  Our tree decorating tradition is to light a
fire in the fireplace, make some hot chocolate, turn on some Christmas
music, and spend hours going through our boxes of ornaments and hanging them
on the tree as we sing along to our favorite holiday music. We’re fortunate
to have a number of good holiday memories, mixed in with all the imperfect
and even bad memories, of which there are just as many. I can conjure up
these good memories each year as we begin to celebrate the season, and I am
aided in my recollections by this collection of tangible objects of our
holiday rituals.

Yet this year, we didn’t have these things. At first, I worried. How could I
muster any holiday spirit at all when I didn’t have my usual material
triggers? I couldn’t imagine lighting any menorah but the one I have lit
since I was a young child. I couldn’t imagine what we would do with a
Christmas tree, since we had no ornaments. It wasn’t until someone put up a
Christmas tree lot on my route home from work that things started to shift.
“What the heck,” I thought, “my kids ought to at least have the fun of
picking out a tree this year.” So we got some hot chocolate, loaded the kids
into the car, and wandered around the lot until my son finally pointed to a
misshapen tree and said, “this one.” We came home, unbundled our tree, did
our best to make it stay upright, and left it there for several days,
nothing on it at all
until my wife and children went to visit my
parents-in-law. They came home with a couple paper ornaments my kids made,
and my wife had an origami star she made herself as a tree topper. This was
the start of it all. We’ve made over a dozen ornaments now, and received a
couple as gifts. My mother-in-law propped some of the holiday cards we’ve
received in the branches of the tree, and I think the thing looks dandy. I
like the way it is an expression of who we are right now.

Since we haven’t sold our house in Washington and we are traveling back and
forth still very frequently for our foster daughter’s case, money is
stretched thin this year. We’ve kept busy enough making gingerbread, singing
carols, and decorating our tree, that presents haven’t been much more than a
mere afterthought. Instead, its been all about enjoying our family time.
Still, I was quite touched when a parenting community we are a part of sent
us a big box of beautiful toys for the children. They knew money is tight
for us right now, and I was moved to be on the receiving end of such
generosity.

The true spirit of the holidays has touched us this year. What a blessing it
has been not to have our things around us to get in the way of that.

Happy Holidays!
Sierra-Marie

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