Advent Candles

Experiments in Celebration and Simplicity in Quaker Meetings, Summary

November 19 and 21, 2024

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 DURING THE CHRISTMAS SEASON AND OTHER HOLIDAYS, FRIENDS MEETINGS MAY CELEBRATE 

as a way to experience wonder and light, rejoice in intergenerational community, and engage in cultural traditions.  At the same time, we are called by the testimony of simplicity that is essential to Quaker faith and practice. We are challenged to celebrate what is most essential in the holidays and let distractions fall aside. We celebrate, in part, for the sake of children in our meeting and recognize that when the adult Friends who curate these celebrations are centered, the spiritual meaning comes through for children. 

In this conversation, Friends shared traditions, experiments, questions and ideas on how Quaker meetings celebrate in a manner that takes us deeper into the Spirit, bringing joy and weaving us together as a community. 

 Queries:

  • How does your meeting celebrate holidays and special days?
  • How can we make celebrations meaningful and manageable with limited time and energy?
  • What makes celebrations effective in connecting the community while conveying the spiritual essence of the holiday?
  • What about the old Quaker tradition that every day is holy?
  • If you don’t have a regular First Day School program, how can your meeting host celebrations that welcome children and families?
  • How can publicity for celebrations engage people from the larger community?

    FACILITATORS

    • Elizabeth Freyman, Albuquerque Friends Meeting, IMYM
    • Chris Jorgenson, Friends Meeting at Cambridge, NEYM

    SUMMARY

    Labyrinth

    My Meeting makes a labyrinth by laying greens on the floor. Children read or speak. Sometimes adults walk through the labyrinth with younger children. Candles, made by the older children, are placed in the labyrinth. The celebration is similar to the Waldorf school practice. 

    In my Meeting we do a luminaria labyrinth with a traditional Mexican decoration, paper bags weighted with sand containing a tea light.   We set up a labyrinth made of luminaria on our property. Around 6pm we walk the labyrinth together and then go inside for soup and board games until 9pm aka “Quaker New Year”.

    Our Meeting supports a preschool with a Montessori/Waldorf emphasis, though there is no official connection. For the winter solstice the Meeting hosts a labyrinth celebration and caters food so families can come. Neighbors are invited. Attendance is 45 adults and 33 kids.

    Alternative Gift Mart

    In our meeting, teens do an alternative gift mart. They host a forum to talk about various nonprofit organizations or NGOs they would like to gather funds for, then Friends are invited to contribute.  Instructions: Friendly Holiday Gift Fair, Beth Collea and Friends Peace Teams.

    Holiday Card Making

    Near the beginning of December, we have a big party and set up tables with craft supplies. We decorate about 200 cards that are sent out to everyone on our mailing list for the holidays.

    Stone Soup

    In my meeting we prepare stone soup in the week before Thanksgiving. Everyone places something in the pot.  Sometimes we bring bread and make dessert.

    My meeting does stone soup too. Our youth hosted the SAYF young Friends gathering. They did stone soup since the youth retreat was the week before the usual weekend.  In a variation, we have a substantial early worship and which is quite separate from the later meeting.  We decided to do something between the meetings to bring Friends together, so we are doing stone cereal.  All morning Friends bring their favorite cereal.  Separate cereals are offered along with a mixed bowl.  The teens will set up outside the meeting room with board games to play with adult Friends after Meeting for Worship.

    Christmas Story, Candles and Carols

    On Christmas, we have one meeting focused on children with the Godly Play Christmas story and songs. We have a silent evening meeting on Christmas Eve with candles, concluded by Christmas carols.

    Our Meeting reads the Christmas story from Luke with carols woven into the story.

    On Christmas eve our meeting gathers for silent worship. Handmade simple wooden candle sticks and greens decorate the windowsills.

    Our meeting holds family-oriented Christmas eve worship family in the early evening.  It’s a short, semi-programmed worship with candles and carols.

    On Christmas morning, or Christmas Eve morning if Christmas Eve is a Sunday we have an intergenerational Meeting for Worship where we gather with some Waiting Worship. Then out of the silence people will request a carol that we all sing together. There is often vocal ministry as well offered in the form of poems or stories of wonder and mystery.

    Because our meeting is hybrid and those who are remote want to be included, everything has to be hybrid including the Christmas pageant.  We were not technologically prepared to film children doing a Christmas pageant.  We’re thinking through how to integrate this into our plans.  Getting children to speak into microphones introduces a level of complexity in order to produce accessibility.

    During the pandemic, a Friend would tell the Faith & Play Christmas story. Someone would manage the story online.  The people in the Meeting house sing, and those on Zoom can mute themselves and sing along.  The kids are pretty good with using the microphone.

    During the pandemic events were outside and we had to stay 6 feet apart. We set up the stations of the Christmas story with a picture and the corresponding text.

    Beth Collea does a wonderful series of stories where the flight to Egypt leads to the story of immigration.

    Melinda Wenner Bradley tells a version of the Godly Play Nativity that emphasizes the story of being displaced from one’s homeland.

    In our meeting a committee helps to support worship on Christmas day and New Years Day. Activities may include a pageant with all ages, candle lighting, and cookie making or a dessert potluck.

    Our Meeting’s Christmas celebration is classic:  The Christmas Pageant at the rise of meeting on a Sunday before Christmas.

    We have a traditional pageant the Sunday before Christmas.  People dress up as figures in the Christmas story. We read poems, play instruments and sing carols. We also have a hybrid meeting and need to arrange ourselves to be visible and audible on Zoom. 

    In a previous congregation, I have had much luck with this pageant. It’s very little work, you need a narrator and costumes for everyone. It’s lots of fun, and no practice. https://theresaecho.com/2010/12/03/no-stress-no-fuss-christmas-pageant-worship-part-i/

    Printable puppet patterns for the Christmas story https://springtimedoodles.com/blog/posts/nativity-paper-puppets-free-printables/

    Musical Celebration

    Our meeting brought in a harpist the Sunday before Christmas. The harpist plays at the beginning, then we settle for silent worship, then the harpist plays again at the close of worship. 

    Our meeting has a music event with breakfast a week or two before Christmas.

    We are aware of advent from December first. We usually have hymn singing before worship and during Advent we sing carols.

    Our meeting invites the community in with carol singing, instrumental music and poetry from the Sunday before Christmas through twelfth night.

    Christmas and Hanukkah

    Our family has mixed Jewish and Quaker traditions. We will do Hanukkah and Christmas, which are both on December 25th this year. We make decorations with items of cardboard (characters made from toilet rolls). We have light lights for both Hanukkah and Christmas and sing a song.

    First Sundays at our Meeting we have a family worship program at the same time as meeting.  We often feature a book.  This time on December 1, the first day of Advent, we’re using Oskar and the Eight Blessings (also relates to Hannukah)  Our theme will be blessing, so we’re making a big advent calendar on a flip chart page, and each person makes a sticky note with a blessing they have received or given, or a blessing from nature.  We’ll give away chocolate advent calendars and blank calendar sheets where the family can record each day a blessing they noticed.

    Service Projects

    Our meeting has a mitten tree in which people put cash to support a charity chosen by First Day School children.

    Porch bins: During the pandemic, families in our First Day School placed large plastic bins on their porches. The bins were decorated with posters specifying items to be collected for an organization chosen by the First Day School.  Children distributed flyers to their neighbors and posted announcements on their Facebook page.  We collected twelve times the number of items as a traditional mitten tree. It was so successful that we have continued the tradition each year since.

    Friends in our meeting bake and exchange cookies. It’s a joyful time. We donate funds to a charitable organization the children choose.  Friends pay as led for the cookies.

    Since COVID the second First Day of December, we have an amnesty letter writing session we write to prisoners around the world to let them know that they are not forgotten. The Meeting sponsored two Afghan families so to help them understand Christmas, we invited them to various Christmas events such as the Christmas tree lighting downtown.  People would bring cookies and make up mixed plates to take to homeless shelters.  We do a candlelight Christmas eve worship. One light on a table covered with greens. Friends share a poem or story and light a candle. 

    Our Meeting sponsors a family with children. This has become part of the season. Connecting with a social service agency and helping with needs of a family is now important to the Meeting.

    Our meeting responds to what families find most meaningful such as service projects.  The children make baked items to raise money for items from a wish list through the Family Resource Center.

    Small Meetings

    Our meeting has 3 children from 2 families.  We have 3 teens on Zoom who we don’t expect to see in person.  Over Christmas we will have 3 additional children with us as visitors.  We have a meeting for Worship on Christmas morning. This year we will do a Christmas eve semi-programmed worship.  It will begin at 3pm with decorating cookies, then worship will begin at 4:30 with a book.  After worship we will serve pizza.  We are also expecting a new baby and plan to have a rocking chair in the meeting room.

    At our small meeting we get together in someone’s home for poetry and reading.

    In our small meeting, we had nothing for a while. In the past we hosted a potluck and sang carols.  Now we sing hymns before worship, and carols during the holiday season.

    Our small meeting rents space for a program the 3rd Sunday in December.  We have cocoa, coffee, cookies, carols and musicians.

    Who feels ambivalent about bringing holidays into our Quaker tradition?

    As I read the queries about celebrating holidays I was struck at the blending of traditional Protestantism and Quaker practice. The deeper Early Friends belief that each day is Holy is difficult to practice in our majority white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. Not to shame anyone or offer any shoulds but just that true simple friends would be teaching children this basic understanding that each day is Holy. Christmas is essentially a pagan holiday stemming from saturnalia and the Germanic Christmas tree etc. as well as the misrepresented holiday of Thanksgiving that had to do with celebrating the massacre of indigenous people. A more meaningful approach to what are called holidays could be more like Yom Kippur where we examine our previous year and the amends that ought to be made and to teach our children that each day is Holy and to be treated as such.

    How do we bring our tradition into the holiday?  It is about giving, seeing the good in each person.  It is hard to avoid a world that celebrates this.  How do we embrace the Quaker meaning and practice and bring them into celebrations that may be rooted in Quaker culture? 

    I believe as human beings we need rituals to mark our years and our lives.  The deep tradition behind these rituals speaks to our longing for meaning in birth and death and renewal.  I am glad we are open to continuing revelation.  I do not resonate with Early Friends’ insistence on putting away ritual.  Rituals are valuable, particularly to children.   Our children don’t get much information about the Nativity story. I think it is hard for universalist meetings to include these ancient stories.  I feel sad when our meetings don’t give our children an understanding of them.  They resonate so deeply. 

    In our meeting on Christmas, we have First Day School and worship as we would on a Sunday.

    Our meeting celebrates Christmas with a potluck, and we focus on simplicity in hectic world.  We have an annual retreat at Pendle Hill on a Sunday in December.

    The morning of Christmas Eve, we go on a hike with all ages. We take books to read to each other.

    Santa?

    The resources included in your recent email brought me joy and hope–as my Monthly Meeting continues planning for our annual Christmas Pageant.  Melinda’s sharing “Reverse Advent: A Spiritual Discipline of Reaching Out” and “The Light: A Story for December;” several potential bulletin inserts from Wesley Friends Meeting (NEYM); and our neighboring Birmingham Friends Meeting’s description of activities for holiday time all strike me as Godsent!

    I appreciate the invitation to share, through this email, a concern that has been on my heart:  

    Among the costumes and props for my Meeting’s traditional Advent Pageant is a vintage red suit and a tousled head-and-face covering that renders the wearer unrecognizable.  

    The tradition is that this Santa look-alike appears after the Pageant and distributes treats to the children.  When my meeting joyously resumed our pageant after COVID19 restrictions were lifted, our Religious Education Committee discussed–and did not reach unity on–reviving the Santa tradition.  

    My question to QREC: Do other Quaker congregations include a costumed Saint Nicholas in their seasonal celebrations?

    Our meeting hosts a winter festival on a Saturday; planned by a committee of parents and nonparents. The community is invited, and Santa comes.

    In our meeting we are ‘Santa Claus for each other’. The Meeting hosts a holiday party on a Friday night. All ages of Friends bring single presents (less than $10) to open and exchange. We enjoy intergenerational conversation and connection.

    A nearby meeting has a member who feels connected to the spirit of Santa Claus and often wears the suit. His spirit really does embody Santa Claus.

    Simple Celebrations of other holidays
    Easter Egg Hunt and Potluck    : The Meeting does a reverse egg hunt where the kids hide the eggs and adults find them. The eggs have clues about one of the kids. The adults have to identify which child the clue is about.

    Easter Faith & Play Story: When I tell Faith & Play stories I use lots of different names for God.  I told the Faith & Play Easter story, and we had a dance as part of the story.  For Christmas, someone said, I am bringing my atheist brother, What story will you use? Our story was about a young girl who reaches out to a neighbor who is living outside and invites her into the warmth.

    Memorial Day Weekend Intergenerational Camping Trip: We go to a beloved nearby campground, where our Yearly Meeting gathering used to be held. We hike, spend time at a lake, and tell stories and sing songs around the fire (if it is not too dry for campfire permits).

    RESOURCES

    Learn more: Visit the QREC Resource Library and subscribe to our announcements

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