Connected While Apart
A Joyful Scent

a holiday garland

Dear Mayfield,
Just after dark the night before Thanksgiving, I was making my way down the block and I was overcome by one of my most favorite smells.  Even through a mask securely held to my face, I could smell the sharp seasonal fragrance of balsam.  I turned and saw the garland on the fence I was passing by.  It must have just been hung earlier in the day.  The smell was so fresh and strong.  For a few moments I buried my masked nose in the garland and I became balsam.  Balsam is the most fragrant of the evergreens cut to be Christmas trees.  For me, it is the consummate smell of the season.  The joy and peace I felt with my nose in the garland are almost indescribable.  To borrow an often quoted phrase from Julian of Norwich, I was filled with her words “All shall be well.  And all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”

Amanda and Molly grew up in a household filled with numerous Christmas books.  One of my favorite moments as a child came on Thanksgiving night, when all the Christmas books were retrieved from the attic.  They lived at the foot of my bed, and a few tucked their way down between the bedspread and the footboard in the days leading up to Christmas.  Some mornings without getting out of bed, I reached down, grabbed a book, and lost myself in a story.  I wanted my children to enjoy that abundance of Christmas stories too, besides which I used many of them in worship and various programs at church.  I chose books with them and for them filled with wondrous words and pictures.  However, one of their most favored books wasn’t bought by me.  Eleanor and Bub, a delightful retired couple — she had been a primary school teacher and he was a lumber guy — gifted them with a copy of a scratch and sniff book,The Sweet Smell of Christmas.  Both the words and the pictures were fairly ordinary, but the scratch and sniff patches were like magic.  My girls almost wore every ounce of smell out of them.  Needless to say, when the book was reissued twenty years later, I bought them both copies of their own with patches waiting to be scratched and sniffed.

Covid-19 is crashing the weeks of Advent and Christmas with a growing list of limitations.  Within that reality that we wouldn’t have chosen and don’t like much, I encourage us all to engage our sensory awareness this year. What is it that we most love to see, touch, hear, taste, and smell in December?  Many of those beloved sensory experiences can still be enjoyed fully at an appropriate physical distance and without endangering our health or the health of others.  For example, we can feel our hands in the dough of cookies or bread. Or linger beside a candle. Invite the strains of Christmas music to swirl around our hearts.  Take in the lights and decorations.  Listen as we or someone else in our household reads or as voices read on the radio or television the words of the season.  And we can smell every sweet smell in our kitchens, around a live tree, with a steaming cup of something in our hands, or in the presence of a fire inside or out. These and other gifts from our senses are an abundance in which we find ourselves rooted, reminded of the season’s promise, and lovingly cared for.

This will indeed be a different sort of December but not one without the richness the days can provide.  May we all experience the blessings our senses are waiting to offer.
Peace, Martha