December and its Delights

It’s snowing in Budapest so we’re cozied up with our books and our work watching the snow fall like little kids. It’s mesmerizing—the best St. Nicholas day present I could have imagined. A tradition that I’ve loved in years past to mark the feast and to prepare for the feasting to come is drying oranges and hanging them in garlands on every available surface—by windows and cabinets and doors—until the whole house is full of the outdoors. Christmas is funny that way. Christ turned the world on its head at Christmas. He righted it, gave us gifts, and mesmerized us with absurdities like snow and ice and twinkling lights and trees in living rooms, so that it would be easier for us to understand that unless we become like little children, we cannot enter the Kingdom.

I haven’t dried any oranges this year but I did bring a sackful home last week (plus chocolate biscuits and a pomegranate), through the very crowded grocery store, down a foggy cobbled street, and through the crowded St. Stephen’s Christmas market. Sometimes pushing my way through the crowds that are always crammed around the brightly colored booths is an annoyance: I’d like to say I’m always bright eyed and awed but frequently I’m not. I’m impatient and tired and longing to get home with my groceries. Eggs and cheese and spinach at the end of the workday are rather prosaic, after all. But some days—cold and rainy days especially, when the air glows and I have the street mostly to myself—those days are a special kind of delight.

Speaking of delights, we’ve had the joy of company and the joys of work and projects and books to read and ideas to discuss over the last couple weeks, so December snuck up on us absolutely out of nowhere. That’s what happens every year, I suppose, and that’s why Advent comes at just the right moment. It’s counterintuitive and so necessary to celebrate a season of slowing down as the year draws to its close. The year is ending, and the days are darkening, and for some reason everything starts to race all at once: schedules, calendars, to-do lists, anxieties. And the solution: slow down. Really, that’s just another gift—hard to appreciate at first, but a delight in its own right, like a breath of brisk bracing air. The kind of thing that hurts for a moment and then helps.

Beauty is like that too, and we’ve seen so much beauty recently—last Saturday, for instance.

Keszthely is a town on the far end of Lake Balaton—and until last week it was just a spot on the map, with the promise of sites to see, a palace to tour, and a beautiful train ride en route. That was enough of a promise for us, so we hopped on the 10:35 with high hopes. Escaping the bag lady aesthetic is no easy feat for me for some odd reason. I think it’s a question of physics. I labor under the persistent delusion that I can bring whatever I want on whatever trip I choose to take and as long as it fits more or less in my bag, all will be well. Neck muscles and good posture and an old age of traction for just one shoulder be damned. This time, I had squirreled away five apples, three sausages, a loaf of bread, several hardboiled eggs, and other assorted snacks, plus towels and two bathing suits for a potential hot springs detour, with several books just for good measure (always several hundred pages over prepared on that score) all into my bag.

Daniel took pity on me and moved my loot into his backpack: and that’s how we found ourselves—my dear aunt and cousin and husband and me—ensconced in a train car, a picnic spread across our laps, speeding through wide open Hungary and watching trees and fields flash by. We took the train to the end of the line, walked across the tracks, and made our way through the station, snacking on the last remnants of lunch while we waited for our bus to the palace. It was worth the wait.

Festetics Palace was gorgeous—room after room of dark wood paneling, gold leaf, and etched hinges. Intricate flower patterns run across the ceilings. The grand piano shines—matches the patterned paraquet floor, contrasts with the green wallpaper, begs to be played in vain. Rows of windows look out across a gravel courtyard and the crunch of carriage wheels lingers in the air. At twilight, it’s easy to picture what it must have looked like at the turn of the last century: proud horses tossing their heads, silk dresses rustling, torches flaring in the gathering dusk.

The piece de resistance was the library. It houses over 80,000 books in at least five languages. Libraries are always hushed—as if the characters in the books and the authors who poured their souls into the volumes they wrote are sleeping along the shelves, waiting to be read but not to be woken lightly. There are carved spiral staircases on both ends and a marble bust of a veiled young woman in the corner: another sleeping figure, another gentle reverence, not unlike the hall of statutes Elizabeth wandered through in Pemberly.

Eventually we left.

Houses-turned-museums are nostalgic places, ancient sleeping beauties dreaming of their halcyon youth and remembering the days when people came to live, not just to visit, ticket in hand and tour guide in tow. I’m happy to visit and happy to leave the castles and palaces and all the lovely buildings that we visit these days to their dreams because I’m busy dreaming too: of window-panes and doorknobs, wainscotting and wallpaper. Freehanding a floral ceiling pattern with some kind of drywall concoction can’t be all that difficult, right? I’m sure I’ll find out one day.

What a lovely, lucky thing, to be the heart of a home and to have an eye out for all the little treasures that make a home physically so beautiful. I’ve been collecting Christmas ornaments on all our travels, hoarding them in a corner on our bedroom windowsill and unwrapping them every now and then to grin at my collection like a little Christmas miser. Childish, perhaps, or childlike. This chapter of cobbled streets and church bells and train tickets won’t last forever. It’s fleeting, and time is slipping past, and there’s nothing for it but to buy the ornament, embrace the beautiful chapter and let the page turn when it’s time. Life is all that way—fleeting, beautiful, hard to get a grip on, better when it’s held gently.

Sin calcifies the attitudes and moods of the heart, and I want to be free. As von Hildebrand has put it, ever so beautifully, “Genuine beauty liberates us in many ways from the force of gravity, drawing us out of the dull captivity of daily life.” Advent is the time for casting off captivity. Advent is the time for beauty, for lightness, for quickness to laughter, quickness to forgive, readiness to skip the scorekeeping, and just let the ledger go.

I’d like my home to be like a perpetual Advent—a place that’s disposed to children and to childlike wonder, a place that’s always ready and wanting for Christmas: a kind of inverse of the terrible winter-but-never-Christmas we read about as children. We’re all children when it comes down to it—children waiting to go home to our Father’s House. The time of waiting may be long or it may be short, but there’s the promise of a holiday by the seashore in the offing, and I want us to be ready.