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by Stephanie Piper

Looking for peace in an overgrown season

It's December, and I'm having my desert fantasies again.

I'm dreaming of a place apart, still and serene, where there are no canned carols and no 800 numbers and not a single overcharged credit card.

It happens every year at this time, as the afternoons darken early and the stores fill up with reminders of the annual retail extravaganza. Evergreen boughs and fake snow crowd the landscape. Within, a small voice speaks of the desert.

In the olden days of my children's childhoods, I silenced these murmurings with an avalanche of holiday chores: the assault on Macy's toy department, the frantic cookie baking, the costumes for the school pageant. A Type-A organizer from way back, I had Christmas tied up, tagged, and taken care of by December 24.

I knew how to create magic then, from the new ornament each child chose each year to the frosty pilgrimage my husband and I made every Christmas Eve. Our New York City apartment was on the top floor, and when the tree was trimmed and the children tucked in, the two of us bundled against the cold and climbed to the roof. We stamped our feet and jingled bells and rumbled ho, ho, ho, conjuring up St. Nick for the three little boys in the bedroom below.

It's a seductive role, Christmas magician, and I played it with aplomb for more years than I can remember. Each December, I feel the same old stirrings, the ancient need to dust off my wand, dredge up those cookie cutters and make this thing happen.

But there is in me now a need more ancient than the old race-to-the-finish reflex. It's mirrored in the pattern of stark branches against the sky, in the peculiar brilliance of the winter stars, in the thin December light. It's a need to be empty, swept clean, waiting.

I denied myself that waiting for so long that I have to learn again how to do it. Buried in tinsel and wrapping paper, I lost the art of true preparation. It's why I long for the desert, the place apart.

As I once created magic for my children, I struggle now to find it for myself—knowing as I write these words that there is nothing magical at all about what I seek. Mystical, maybe, elusive, hidden. The trees seem to know about it, black and leafless in the twilight, brooding over their green secrets. There are hints of it in the evening sky, blood red, painfully beautiful, reminding me strangely of childbirth. I hear it in the music of Advent, as this time is called in the church year. Maranatha, we sing. It means come, do not delay. But the notes are stretched out, sustained. I hear in them the longing of all who look for the desert in the overwatered, overgrown tangle of this season. I hear waiting, and wavering, and gathering strength to begin again, and as I lay down my wand and surrender my magic, I hear something that sounds like peace.