(Host) Commentator April Doherty has discovered that the Christmas celebrations of her childhood in New York City had a surprising connection to Vermont.
(Doherty) Ever since childhood, I have experienced the important parts of Christmas as part of a church congregation.
The
tree and the presents took place at home, of course, but that peaked
when I was five or six; and it definitely went downhill after I found
out, well, you know. The "presents" part of Christmas didn’t grow with
me, but the church part did.
By the time I joined the
kindergarten choir, I had decided that the minister was close to God:
wise, gentle, and very, very old. I thought he was one of the 12
Apostles, but like everyone else’s grandparents who had come from the
old country, they had changed his name at Ellis Island, so now we
couldn’t tell which one.
Every year there was a pageant. It was
always the same – but different because I was. The little kids always
sang the first song – I saw three ships come sailing in on Christmas day
in the morning. One year after we sang, my friend Karen surprised us
all by lifting her choir robe over her head to show the congregation her
new slip.
An even bigger surprise every year was who would play
Mary. She was always a high school girl who was not in the choir, and
she was always beautiful – even if we hadn’t noticed she was beautiful
before. One year my best friend Jeannie was Mary, and she kept the
secret even from me. I was relieved that being in the choir gave me a
graceful way to duck that competition. The year they chose Karen there
were some urgent discussions beforehand, because there are some things
you just can’t risk Mary doing in front of the whole congregation.
But
as we got older, the pageant yielded center stage to the midnight
service on Christmas Eve. First, we sang Christmas carols. Then, while
each of us held our unlit candles in silence, the lights went off. In
the dark, the minister descended to the front pew and lit the candle of
the first person, who then turned and lit his neighbor’s. I always
imagined that as the candle flames multiplied, the window to one soul
met the window to another. We shared something lovely in those moments,
some sureness of who we were and the quiet joy of being together. It
seemed to me that age, emotional baggage, and artifice disappeared from
our faces in the candle light.
Then the minister looked out over
the congregation and reminded us of a quotation that’s attributed by
some to the Reverend Edwin H. Alden – better known as Robert. He was a
real person who was born in Windsor in 1836, who also became a character
in the "Little House on the Prairie" books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
He
too may have been quoting from others, but he’s credited with saying:
"There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of
even one small candle."