December 24, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – A smell of moss and fir tree in the living room. Typically Dutch meat patties in home-made puff pastry baking in the oven. Stollen with dried currants and almond paste in the middle, rising lazily in a warm corner of the kitchen. Everything will be just so. Everything will be ready this Thursday when we leave for our long drive to a vetus ordo Midnight Mass. Yes, I’m sure it’s Christmas, whatever’s happening in the outside world. The signs will all be there, in their proper places. And woe to whom would aim to change the rightful smells, colors, and feel of our “Noël”!
I grew up in a nomadic family, going from country to country at the mercy of my father’s moves from one diplomatic post to another. We never really blended in, knowing that we would leave anyway after four or five years; besides, it was my father’s very job to be Dutch. Dutch with a Catholic turn: a good proportion of the Netherlands did not fall into the hands of Protestantism in the 16th and 17th centuries and has kept the culture of the “rich romish life” as the northern Calvinist population used to call it.
Perhaps more than people living in a stable environment, my parents and especially my mother, who left the Netherlands in 1946 just after her marriage, always took care to give an unmistakable homely and unchanging character to our Christmases around the world. This meant hard work, a lot of preparation, respect for traditions of all kinds, and resourcefulness.
Just try to make puff pastry, which only really works in a draughty kitchen on a mid-winter’s day, in Jamaica’s tropical heat! My mother got around that one in the 1970’s by closing the louvres and running the air conditioning on “plus” for 24 hours in one of the bedrooms (the only place where we had it), cooling her utensils in the deep-freezer, and putting dozens of ice-cubes on her improvised work surface before bringing out the flour and butter and water – chilled, of course.
Was it worth the trouble? Oh, yes. It wasn’t only worth it, but necessary, because in a strange way it linked our wandering family to a stronghold where things are safe and secure, anchoring it on the sure ground of faith and the true story of our Redemption that became visible to the world in a manger in Palestine, that my mother would read to us from a beautiful, ancient illustrated book in front of the Nativity scene she would always arrange in a grotto made of gnarled old Portuguese cork.
And so, as best I can, I do the same, in a new balance that was born of my marriage to a Frenchman, which has allowed me to put down roots in France, but with an outlandish twist I know I must retain.
As the youngest daughter of a youngest daughter, I had the grace of being paradoxically close to those old traditions. My maternal grandfather was born in Maastricht, in the southern Netherlands, third in a row of ten children, in 1884; he had trained as a pastry chef and it was he who made all those wonderful Christmas breads and meat rolls at home. He took (from what I understand) great pleasure in what became a hobby, baking treats for his own large family following recipes that had been in use for many years before his time. My mother must have learned from him… She remembered the rhythm of her father beating egg whites and would play it to me, so many decades later, bringing me a little bit closer to a grandfather who died 20 years before I was born.
And so Christmas at the turn of the twentieth century had the same flavors and aromas as our Christmas will have, God willing, in 2020, and that is very good.
When I roll out my pastry I think of my mother and my grandfather and of their forebears, and of their times that seem to come alive in my kitchen.
When I lay the festive table with white linen and red ribbon exactly like my mother used to do, and her mother before her – and why not my great-grandmother, born in 1853? – I feel the deep satisfaction of being part of a lineage, of passing along traditions, of creating the joy and memories of an ever-returning family feast. As heaven will also be, in an endlessly perfect way.
When we build this year’s Nativity scene, the truth we fight for all year round at LifeSite takes on light and color and tenderness and feel. We are pro-life, and the child Jesus is Life, under our own eyes.
Is this all there is to my Christmas? Of course not. But the tangible, here on earth, is the necessary passage to our higher, spiritual faith, hope and charity. And the goodness of these humble traditions and our joy in them illustrates the much greater value and necessity of religious traditions. In the same way I don’t want anything to mess with the “feel” of Christmas, I know that it is good that our worship to God should obey the ancient rituals of age-old liturgy. Our love of returning family events, with so many recurring details, is a practical illustration of the use and value of the yearly cycle of the liturgical year, and of the scrupulous respect, albeit on a much higher plane, of the rubrics, chants and canons of our age-old Latin Mass. Its beauty is not repetitive: its repetitions are just right. It is life-giving, always new, because it surely transmits the fullness of truth and family love – the love that knits the family of saints to its Father, who is in heaven.
We are believers of the true religion of Incarnation. So many of us are weak enough to need the simple artefacts of our family traditions… When we have had the privilege of a Catholic upbringing, we are strengthened and fortified in our very faith by the memories of our childhood Christmases. If we own that immaterial treasure, it is surely our delightful duty to pass on that joy to our own loved ones, because it makes our very beliefs amiable, and helps us to understand that going to God is like coming home to the divine Jesus of Bethlehem and his blessed Mother.
If in years to come – and may God preserve us from it – we can no longer celebrate Christmas as we ought or would want to, may our memories of the rituals of “Noël,” the humble ones at home and the lofty ones of the divine liturgy, help us to desire the wedding supper of the Lamb where all that is good will be given to us to contemplate, in endless bliss.