The Advent Wreath Story

This week I’m grateful to share with you a photo of a wreath that has a great deal of meaning to me. It’s called the ‘Advent Wreath’ and it was hand-made by my son and I twenty years ago when he was 8 years old. We purchased the wreath, the heart shaped wooden disks and the paint at the local dollar store and proceeded to spend a lovely afternoon building what we considered a creative masterpiece! Also precious for me is what inspired the Advent Wreath.

Kevin had been asked to play a piano solo for the Christmas Eve service at the church and his teacher had suggested a hymn neither of us knew, “Hope is A Star”. It is an Advent hymn that has 4 verses – one for each of the weeks leading up to Christmas.

Hope is a Star that shines in the night; Peace is a ribbon that circles the earth; Joy is a song that welcomes the dawn; Love is a flame that burns in our heart. (The fact that I could type those from memory today speaks to the place this hymn has found in our hearts.)

And even to this day twenty years later, at this time of the year, he and I have weekly ‘Advent’ conversations around these themes of Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. These days the conversations are pretty short and happen over text … but still!

Another reason this wreath and this hymn are important to me is an incident that challenged me as a parent. My then 8-year-old, in learning this piece of music, struggled with the huge size of the United Church hymn book and its inability to stay securely on the piano music rack.

So, what does an inventive young man do?

He cuts the page out of the hymn book, glues it on a piece of cardboard and happily gets back to his practice. But what happens to his mother when she sees what he’s done? !!!!!

Not okay! Not okay! All her family and cultural conditioning kicks in. One does NOT desecrate a hymn book! She remembers the tongue lashing she got when, as a young girl, she did the same thing in tearing out a page of the family’s encyclopaedia that she needed for a school project. That lesson was burned into my brain. And practically every cell of my body wanted to react the same way and make sure that my son understood the severity of his mistake.

Thank goodness for EFT and the one cell of my body that retained some sanity.

Off I went, one more time, to the bathroom to tap. Eventually understanding that I had choice around my conditioning – that just because I had been emotionally taught that lesson didn’t mean that it was true – or that I had to follow it without question.

So, Kevin avoided the tongue lashing, our relationship avoided the inevitable rupture that may never have been repaired. And I have a beautiful memory that keeps on giving year after year after year.

May we all be blessed with the freedom to live consciously rather than conditionally.