This is our funky subtropical Advent "wreath." It may be pretty non-traditional, but I love lighting it. It puts me in touch with all the warm fuzzy elements of Christmas preparations in my childhood.
Each year, families were selected each week to light the candles of the Advent Wreath at church. There was a small liturgy at the beginning of the main Sunday service. I'm sure it was created by the pastor each year to teach whatever theme he wanted to develop. One year, as I remember it--and my memory may have invented more of this than it actually remembers--the four candles were for Waiting, Patience, Hope, and Joy. The first week, there was a frank acknowledgment of how hard it is for a child to wait. The second week, we were invited to keep waiting, patiently. The third week we spoke of the hope that carries us through the hard times. And the fourth week we learned about how love makes it all worthwhile, because God's Love brings us the great gift of the Savior, coming into our world as a beautiful and innocent baby in the manger.
In the rarefied liturgical atmosphere of the Episcopal Church I used to be embarrassed about these homespun rites. They didn't seem to have sufficient gravitas. But Wikipedia says that Advent wreaths were invented in the 19th century in Germany as a teaching tool for boys and girls. So it makes complete sense that Pastor Wiens would use it as a teaching tool for us. It was very effective. It helped us look forward to the coming of the celebration of Christ's birth. The cumulative effect of lighting one more candle each week as we looked forward to greeting the Light of the World was to give our excitement a much better "container" than the commercial "Santa Claus is coming to town" that we heard in school and stores and on television.
Scandinavians love Advent. It's dark in Sweden this time of the year. When I visited my daughter Anna, who was studying in Sweden in December 2005, the sun never rose more than about 30 degrees above the horizon, leaving the countryside in near-twilight during the day, and utterly dark by 4 pm. Nearly every house and apartment had candles in the windows; and outdoors people made little shelters for candles out of snow in their yards. It is easy to see why early Christian missionaries to the Nordic peoples associated the celebration of the birth of Jesus, the Light of the World, with the winter solstice. When it seems that things can't get much darker, the days begin to grow longer again. "The light shines in the darkness," we read in the prologue to the Gospel of John, "and the darkness did not overcome it."
December 13, is the feast of Saint Lucy, who is the patron of teachers because her name is associated with light and the enlightenment of the mind. Swedish girls in their white nightgowns wear a crown of candles and carry coffee and Lucia buns to family members early in the morning. They sing the beautiful if somewhat corny Sicilian "Santa Lucia" ballad. The Lucia buns have raisins in the middle, evocative of the eyes that St. Lucy carries on a platter in traditional iconography. (One story says that, the young Christian virgin Lucy, in refusing to marry a pagan husband--who admired her beautiful eyes-- in the time of the Diocletian persecution, plucked out her eyes herself and handed them to him, saying, "Here are my eyes. Now let me go and serve God.") Some Swedish congregations in the Lutheran and Covenant Churches have Lucia festivals. Ours did not, but I always wanted to process up the aisle in a white gown with a wreath of candles on my head, even though the thought of doing so always put a frisson of fear up my spine as I imagined my hair catching fire! Here is Carl Larsson's famous illustration of this tradition.
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