Five Ways of Celebrating Christmas During a Pandemic

I will be celebrating Christmas alone this year. But then I have celebrated Christmas alone for the past thirteen years since I moved to western Kentucky. It is not a new experience for me. Before I moved to Kentucky, I went to my aunt’s home on Christmas Day and exchanged gifts and ate Christmas Dinner with my aunt and my mother. My aunt, my mother’s younger sister, and my mother had been living together for a number of years. Both were widows. My mother moved in with my aunt after she underwent surgery. The two sisters provided each other with companionship until my aunt’s death. After my aunt died, I invited my mother to come to live with me here in Kentucky. She declined. Her younger sister’s home had become her home.

My cousin, my aunt’s son, graciously allowed her to live there until her death in 2013. Since my mother’s death I have not returned to Louisiana where she lived and where I used to live. I still have kin living there but the long drive and an aging car have discouraged me from making the trip. They have gotten on with their lives since my mother’s death and I have gotten on with mine. As my oldest niece put it, her grandmother was what held the family together. With her death we have gone our separate ways.

The reason that I am writing this article is to help readers who will not be traveling this year or attending large family gathering celebrate Christmas. Because they cannot do what they have done in the past, Christmas does not have to loose its specialness. They have not just one day in which they can give themselves over to jollification as C.S. Lewis would put it. They have twelve days in which they can make merry, devoting themselves to feasting, singing and other forms of jollity.

Now the Puritans frowned on all forms of jollity and went as far as banning Christmas in the seventeenth century and ordering in its place a solemn fast—a time of abstinence and penitence. But the English people would have none of it and rebelled against this order. They would celebrate Christmas as they were accustomed to celebrating it—with singing, dancing, food, and drink.

We should not be too hard on the Puritans. They were seeking to refocus the English people’s attention on Christ at Christmas and away from carnal pleasures. But they may have gone about it in the wrong way.

As the Gospels tell us, our Lord attended wedding celebrations and did not turn down invitations to dine. His critics accused him of being a glutton and a winebibber. He told his disciples that they would have plenty of opportunities to fast when he was gone. While the coming of the Christ should always be the primary focus of the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord, his first appearing does call for rejoicing and even merriment as long as it is not done to excess.

Too often we try to cram into one day, what should be extended over an entire season—the Twelve Days of Christmas. Instead of loading up our plates on Christmas Day and stuffing ourselves until we make ourselves sick, we can spread the various culinary delights that we associate with Christmas over those twelve days.

I do not drink alcoholic beverages of any kind, having given up drinking them when I retired nineteen years ago. I figured that I had better uses for my time in my retirement. But I see no wrong in drinking an occasional glass of eggnog or spiced apple cider provided that the individual who is drinking it does not have a history of excess drinking in which case I recommend that they stick to alcohol-free eggnog and spiced apple cider. 

One of my former churches used to serve wine at its social gatherings until it learned that a number of its members had drinking problems. It then switched to serving sparkling apple cider. A church member who did not know about the change chided my mother and I for allowing my youngest niece to drink alcohol at one of these gatherings. What my niece was drinking was sparkling apple cider. She apologized when this fact was drawn to her attention.

Nowadays I drink spiced chai during the holiday season. Both the fragrance and the taste of the spiced chai are associated in my mind with Christmas. When I was at university, a friend of mine invited me to her home on Christmas Eve and introduced me to Constant Comment spiced tea.

Fragrances can not only bring back pleasant memories of past Christmases, they can also put us in the right frame of mind to celebrate this Christmas. Other fragrances that I personally associate with Christmas are burning frankincense, oranges, evergreen boughs, and baking mincemeat pies. While we may not be able to surround ourselves with people this Christmas, we can surround ourselves with the familiar fragrances of Christmas.

In The Country Parson the seventeenth century Anglican poet-priest George Herbert describes how his parish church was prepared for the celebration of Christmas. The church was decorated with evergreen boughs and knots of rosemary—yes, rosemary. 

Rosemary has a long history as a medicinal and culinary herb. It can also be burned as incense. In ancient times it was regarded as sacred. For English-speaking people rosemary has come to symbolize remembrance and twigs of rosemary may be thrown into the grave at a burial. An early reference to rosemary as a herb of remembrance is found in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Before the service Herbert’s church was perfumed with burning incense.

For Herbert’s parishioners the fragrance of evergreen, rosemary, and frankincense would set Christmas apart from other holy days. These fragrances would form a part of their memories of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and would be associated in their minds with the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord throughout their lifetimes.

Another way of marking Christmas as a special time of the year is to light candles every night. All four candles on the Advent wreath or candleholder may be lit. A fifth lighted candle, the Christ Candle, may be placed in the middle of the Advent wreath. The Irish have a custom of leaving a lit candle in their kitchen window on Christmas Eve to welcome the Christ Child.

A third way to make Christmas a special season is to listen to Christmas carols and hymns and to sing them. It is unfortunate that many stores have fallen into the practice of playing Christmas music from Thanksgiving on. In a number of stores Christmas music is played before Thanksgiving. I firmly believe that Christmas carols and hymns should not be sung until Christmas Eve and then they should sung throughout the Twelve Days of Christmas.The only exceptions are Services of Lessons and Carols like King's College, Cambridge's and Christmas cantatas, their American equivalent.

A fourth way to make Christmas a special season is to send Christmas cards and letters to family, friends, and others. The card or letter does not need to arrive before Christmas or during the Twelve Days of Christmas. What matters most us that we send it. It is an important expression of our caring. In these dark times it will be a ray of light to those to whom we send it.

A fifth way to make Christmas really special is to celebrate home communion on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. As the Archbishop of Sydney Glenn Davies in his pastoral letter of April 6, 2020 points to our attention, celebration of communion at home in the absence of an ordained minister while it may not be an Anglican celebration is nonetheless a Christian celebration. Archbishop Davies writes:

Of course, some people may be more isolated and have no access to the internet for live streaming. How can they be nourished in their Christian faith? My answer is to feed on God’s word. Keep reading, meditating and praying over God’s word that he may bring refreshment to your soul. As for observing our Lord’s command, your reading of 1 Corinthians 11 could easily be used with your own bread and wine in these times of extremity, though it would be preferable to share with one close Christian friend or some family members. It would not be an Anglican service, which requires the presence of an ordained minister, but it would be a Christian service, in accordance with Jesus’ invitation to ‘do this in remembrance of me.’ 

We can read the Christmas story from the Gospel of Matthew or Luke and then take bread and wine (or grape juice) and in obedience to Jesus’s command commemorate why God’s Son became human and lived among us. He came not only to teach us to love God and to love others, to love our fellow-Christians as he loved us, and to love even those who hate and despise us but also to reconcile us to God through his suffering and death on the cross and his rising to life again. The following simple eucharistic prayer which I drafted for online and in-person services is suitable for home communions.

The structure of this eucharistic prayer is based upon the structure of the eucharistic  prayers in The Books of Common Prayer of 1552, 1559, 1604, and 1662, and John Wesley’s Sunday Service of Methodists in North America of 1784. It is similar in structure to a number of eucharistic prayers in the Lutheran tradition, the most recent being Form II in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006). In their use of this particular structure for eucharistic prayers the three traditions—Anglican, Methodist, and Lutheran—converge.

In crafting this eucharistic prayer I incorporated textual material from A Prayer Book for Australia (1995) and Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006).

Among the advantages of this eucharistic prayer is its brevity and its simplicity—musts in both in-person and online services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Lord be with you. 

 And also with you.

Lift up your hearts. 

We lift them to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to give our thanks and praise.

It is indeed right, our duty, and our joy, that we should at all times
and in all places give thanks and praise to you,
O Lord, holy Father, through Christ our Lord;
who by his death on the cross
and rising to new life
offered the one true sacrifice for sin
and obtained eternal deliverance for his people.

And so, with the Church on earth and the hosts of heaven,
we praise your name and join their unending hymn.

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.
Hosanna in the highest.

And now, gracious God, we thank you
for these gifts of bread and wine,
and pray that we who receive them,
according to our Savior’s word,
in remembrance of his suffering and death,
may share his body and blood.

On the night before he died, Jesus took bread,
and when he had given you thanks
he broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying,
‘Take and eat. This is my body which is given for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.’

After supper, he took the cup,
and again, giving you thank
he gave it to his disciples, saying,
‘Drink from this, all of you.
This is my blood of the new covenant
which is shed for you and for many
for the forgiveness of this.
Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’

As our Savior has taught us, we are confident to pray,

Our Father who art in heaven….

One thing to remember this Christmas Season is that as believing followers of Jesus Christ we not alone. We have received the gift of the Holy Spirit—God’s presence dwelling in our hearts. By the power of the Holy Spirit we are not only united to other believers but also to our Lord himself. We may be unable to gather with family and friends. However, God himself is with us—the same God who in the person of his Son Jesus became incarnate, embodied in human flesh; the same God who in the person of the Holy Spirit dwells within our innermost being, who is closer to us than the apple of our eye.

If you can find a video or audio recording of Christmas church bells on YouTube or another website, play that recording on Christmas Eve and herald the good news of our Saviour’s birth with the pealing of church bells. It is an old tradition to ring church bells on Christmas Eve. Let us keep that tradition alive and make it a part of our Christmas celebration.