My wife works nights these days, but in a kind-of way. She goes in a little before three and she comes out a little after three, and so I leave the lamp on over on her side of the bed, and even if I don’t wake up when she comes in, I knows she’s home if I brush against awake and the lights are all off.
Freshman year of college was hard and beautiful, and it swayed more towards the latter after Thanksgiving, when I met my wife and my roommate bought a rabbit with the guy next door. We had a contest in the dorm each year to see which hallway could decorate best for Christmas, and there was no official rubric but judges tended to reward the ostentatious. This is probably not connected, but it was warm in our alley that December, and I’ve always associated that temperature with the volume of string lights we blanketed across the plastered-over cinderblocks.
Alumni Hall had no air conditioning, so the doors still had transoms on top of them, those wooden half-drawbridges that lean open and let air flow through. The light would come in from the hall all year, and for the three weeks between the rabbit’s arrival and Christmas I would fall asleep to a warmly lit room, not in the fluorescent yellow of September and November and February but with greens and golds and reds whites and blues, the decoration directly next to our door—the one bouncing off those walls—a massive string-light American flag. The room was colorful, and the room was cozy, and if snow ever fell those weeks it fell softly, so that I felt myself back in my childhood bedroom, back on Lake Avenue, where the icicle lights glowed in through the blinds and rolled back the darkness just enough to read Calvin and Hobbes without sneaking in a flashlight.
I was back in South Bend last Saturday. My niece was baptized, a chubby-cheeked baby girl, and old Father George, rector of that dorm, performed the sacrament. They remodeled Alumni Hall a year or two back, and I haven’t been inside since, but I noticed more glass than there used to be when I peered in through the windows, and I wondered whether they still have the wooden transoms, and whether they still hang the lights in the hallways at Christmastime.
We decorated for Christmas two weeks ago, getting on the board before halftime as Advent prepared to round the corner. We only worked for about forty minutes. We had to finish the next day. But I brought the crèche up from the garage, the one my uncle made from the wood from Grandpa’s old corn crib, the crèche this uncle—not even a blood relative—stocked with the wooden characters, all of them, from a Christian shop, so that kings and cattle and shepherds and an angel all keep guard now on my dresser over two parents in a stable, two sturdy parents awaiting their chubby-cheeked baby boy. My uncle put a light in this crèche, a sturdy yellow bulb, the miniature equivalent of one of those floodlights you might see over a driveway out in the country, the kind that lights up just enough ground and tree to show how much bigger the darkness is. The darkness has been bigger lately, but that yellow light glows through it, over dog toys on the carpet and dirty laundry strewn about the floor. It glows over Mary and Joseph, poised and waiting, and the ox and the ass beside them, and the shepherds in from their fields and the kings hastening from their far-off lands. It glows over the silhouette of the angel, tall and proud and making a joyful noise on the horn, standing on her rough white wooden block. It glows enough that I needn’t leave the lamp on for my wife.
The light glows, and I think of the multicolored glow coming from the hall in Indiana eleven Christmastimes ago. The light glows, and I think that if I sat up upon the bed’s foot, it’d be bright enough to read Calvin and Hobbes. The light glows, and I think of the crèche’s wood way back in its former life, way out on a homestead near Worthington, a life as a corn crib unbothered by the warning winter wind which blew under the moonlight and over that raindrop of a gravel driveway, a raindrop driveway on a homestead homesteaded by the great-great-great grandfather of a chubby-cheeked baby girl, a baby girl claimed last Saturday for the Lord.
Christ is coming, they’ll say at the churches today. And in a way I haven’t been knowing much lately, I’ll know He is. He snuck in and turned off the crèche’s light in the middle of the night.
Beautiful imagery ❤️