This Golden November

welcoming a bigger crowd for Advent and Christmas

November has been like an adolescent here, subject to fits of mood and temperament, swinging from cold and clear to unbearably warm and humid. Humid! In November! It’s been warm enough that the furnace has yet to be coaxed out of hibernation, and although there’s always a low level anxiety in my head until that basement beast has shown that it’s able to function for another winter, with heating oil currently hovering at $6 a gallon, I’m grateful for the extension on mild temps.

The days have been remarkably sunny and golden, with a stray flower here and there, stubbornly persisting despite routine morning frosts. The leaves have dropped every single leaf, leaving thick mats on every lawn, road, and hiking trail, but it’s been mild enough to keep fall cleanup pleasant.

I know that it’s not even two weeks into the month, and there’s plenty of time for things to settle into familiar patterns, but here’s why a persistent agitation simmers in my thoughts: November is the month set aside to remember our beloved dead in a specific, intense way, and I look to nature to remember with me. There is nothing like a New England cemetery, hemmed in on all sides with bare November trees, steel grey clouds whirling above your head in a broody dance, to really convince you that all Creation mourns the existence of sin and death in the world. There’s nothing quite as lonesome as walking down a quiet road with a wind that cuts just deep enough to remind you of colder days to come, of the cold of the grave, of the cold of death. Spurred by thoughts - and weather!- like these, it’s easy to spin a blanket of prayers over the Holy Souls in Purgatory, as thick as the leaves on the ground.

With proper November weather, I feel close to those I love who’ve gone ahead of me. I feel that I may even provide them some comfort, asking God to apply His graces like a balm for those still undergoing their final sanctification. I feel, like my Celtic and Scandinavian ancestors before me, that the division between the living and the dead is a little thinner for a little while, and the pain of missing the deceased is soothed by temporarily being closer to them.

But with proper November weather, as I’ve slowly come to realize, I feel like I’ve “done enough” all month, and as soon as Advent comes, with all its anticipation and to-do lists, I pack up the intensity of my prayers along with all the photographs and Mass cards on my ofrenda. Oh sure, I still remember my beloved dead as I pass cemeteries and pray before Mass, but that burning fire in my bones connecting me to them cools somewhat.

It’s not hard to figure out why. I want my Christmas, all of it, from Advent to Epiphany, to center with childish intensity on the beauty and the comfort and the joy. I want to prepare my home for the Christchild with an eye only for coziness and goodwill. I want to celebrate the Incarnation with candlelit Masses and children’s choirs and movie marathons in the living room, surrounded by the living. I want to remain childish, resisting a deeper, more complicated Christmas, rather than being childlike, and trusting that all the darkness in the world can’t put out the Light.

When November behaves properly, I don’t feel guilty putting my ancestors in the back of my mind, maybe trotting them out for a Christmas themed memory or two, but them shooing them away when it’s time to find a sturdy tree to decorate. My ancestors are intimate with death, and that just won’t do while debating the merits of spruce over fir.

I think that’s why there’s so many tropes about the awfulness of family around this time of year. Stories about ignorant great uncles and racist cousins and imbecilic parents abound, and many a website has employed the click baity headline of “How to Survive your (Insert Political Topic Here) Relatives This Christmas”. Complex and difficult family relationships exist all year round, but for some reason, we’re particularly annoyed with them at Christmas. I’m beginning to think it’s because our relationships, fractured as they are because of sin, remind us that sin brings death, and death is the thing we cannot bear to acknowledge at Christmas. It’s easier to seethe at Aunt Laura’s politics than to admit we’re all broken and all messed up and all going to die eventually.

I know it doesn’t stop there. As a Christian, I admit that we’re all sinful. I understand that we all suffer wounds and we’ve all inflicted them too. I know that death is an appointment we’ve all got to keep eventually. But as a Christian, I also know that the story doesn’t end there. I know that every casually indifferent word we’ve spoken, every self-centered action, every act of violence and cruelty has been gathered up, nailed to a Cross, and washed away in a flood of Love so deep we cannot ever grasp the depths. In a flood of Love so immense that we don’t want to acknowledge its magnitude, because we’re terrified of our smallness.

That’s the direction I think November is pointing me in this year, with its cheerful unwillingness to behave properly. I think I’m being asked to keep the dead in mind all Advent, and on into Christmastide. I’m being asked to invite them into the preparations and the celebrations, because they’re family and I love them, yes, but more so to help deepen my trust in Christ, to wade a little deeper into that flood of Love. It’s an invitation to not be scared of the irritations of imperfect family bonds, to loosen my grip on the hurts and anxieties those relationships can bring, to admit that death is there, illuminated by the Christmas lights, but remember that death isn’t the guest of honor.

The real guest of honor is revealed more fully and worshipped more sincerely when I don’t try to bar the door to the brokenness, but rather open it wide, the better to let in the flood of graces and Love that want to enter.