The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!
Small Town Festivities Light December Nights
My husband and I awakened to Christmas carols on the radio, the old-fashioned ones singing the magic of city sidewalks and silver bells and wishing joy to the world. With such happy thoughts, it’s easy to say Christmas really is the most wonderful time of the year!
There’s a lot to look forward to, even here where the asphalt ends.
Festival of Lights
This Friday, December 14, Montesano, Washington’s Festival of Lights begins and runs through Sunday. It’s one of many throughout the nation. Montesano’s celebration includes the Jingle Bell Jog, bingo, pancake breakfast, a scavenger hunt, art show, craft fair, chowder feed, chili feast, and the not-to-be missed Parade of Lights, which starts at 6 PM. Afterwards, crowds gather for the lighting of the Yule Log and the live nativity at the Montesano Presbyterian Church.
Throughout the weekend, there’s music, music, and more music, with Christmas renditions at the Community Center, The Dukes of Swing at the Moose Lodge, and a Christmas cantata at the United Methodist Church.
The Festival of Lights does, in fact, remind me of a Hallmark Christmas movie. It has all the small-town charm and camaraderie those movies suggest, but without the snow. (Rain, of course is a different matter. Last year it poured buckets. Events continued anyway.)
A Mayne Island Christmas
No matter how much I enjoy the Festival of Lights, though, some of my favorite small-town Christmases were spent on Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada. With a winter population of about 800, everybody really did know – or at least know of – everybody.
The weeks leading up to Christmas featured a children’s choir performing in the island’s beautiful Japanese Memorial Garden. It’s lit for the holidays from the 14th into January this year. The Santa Ship arrives on the 14th, and everyone gathers at the dock, peering through the fog to get the first glimpse of the jolly old elf.
On Christmas eve, islanders congregate around the bonfire in front of the Miners Bay Christmas tree for caroling. The tree towered some 100 feet above the village. (It’s since been topped.) To me, those evenings were magical, with music, friends, and an abundance of good will.
A Time for Grace
The lights, trees, yule logs, and bonfires that occur throughout the Christmas season are fun, but what strikes me most is that people are willing to open themselves up to the potential for magic in their lives. We are hopeful.
With that hope, Christmas is a time of grace… giving and receiving respite, whether it is deserved or not. “The Joy of Christmas” encompasses that grace, helping us reset and encouraging us to somehow do better in the coming year.
“No man is an island,” Elizabethan poet and cleric John Donne pointed out. “Each man is a part of the continent…a part of the main.”
That may be especially true in small communities where everyone seems to know everyone else, and family connections are both broad and deep.
Have a very happy Christmas!
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