It is my joy to invite Alyssa back Hearthside this holiday season. In this piece, Alyssa explores the mystery of the holiday season. As she does, Alyssa encourages us to keep our sense of wonder as we celebrate this year. ~Gwendolyn

The Joy in the Mystery ~ Special Guest Post by Alyssa Stadtlander

From a young age, the holidays are full of re-enactments. We make the same dishes—mashed potatoes, green beans, turkey—and we cherish the taste of the traditional pumpkin pie throughout the months of November and December. We retell the classic stories that accompany the seasons, from reminiscing around the dinner table to plays and pageants with costume and song.

I remember a photo of me and my best friend in kindergarten, paper bonnets tied to our heads as we ate a Thanksgiving meal together in our little desks. I remember playing a woman on the Mayflower in a skit in the second grade, and making what we called “stone soup,” though there weren’t actually any stones in it (at least, not to my knowledge.) I’ve been Mary, an angel, the Angel (more than once) in Christmas pageants, and a host of other adjacent holiday characters—a toy doll under the Christmas tree, a caroler, a sprite, and a bully who learns the true meaning of Christmas—in more plays and performances than I can remember.

“The problem is, all my education taught me not to believe in the impossible.”

— Madeleine L’Engle

These memories remain close to my heart; they seem soft around the edges, full of a special magic that perhaps is part of the reason I hold the holiday season so close to my heart. There is a residual tenderness that our traditions, and our stories, and our rituals infuse into these last, darkening months of the year that keep us afloat. I think I’ve always sensed this, which is why I love the holiday season, even from a young age.

How do we keep the wonder of mystery in our hearts this holiday season?

However, this year, as we near the holidays again, as to-do lists grow longer, and family tensions stiffen with expectation, and as we, no longer children, tune out the stories that shape the holidays after so many years of hearing them over and over, I am asking myself:

What would it take to open ourselves to curiosity?

What would happen if we allowed ourselves to wonder once more?

What joy is hiding in the mystery?

Madeleine L’Engle writes, “the problem is, all my education taught me not to believe in the impossible.” We are taught facts that we categorize into files in our heads, and told stories that attach these files to our hearts; our growing-up often blocks that pathway between the intellect and the intuition as tender questions and feelings are exchanged for resignation and apathy.

This year, after a year full of personal transition and change, I find myself longing for wonder, for mystery, for all the emotions that come with a sacred curiosity—both the darkness and the light.

In the Thanksgiving story, what would it look like to ask questions about the ethics of what actually happened there without a defense, but a simple open-handed-ness towards humility, love and reconciliation? How much more can we be full of gentleness when we are confronted with our own ancestral misdeeds—how can this draw us out of ourselves and into a soft space of both apology and forgiveness?

In the Christmas stories, both ones of a jolly, red-suited man full of an unbelievable generosity, and a quiet one of God, a light born into darkness, there are mysteries and deep, human truths we will never fully comprehend. What would it take to step away, even for just a moment, from the loud and gaudy season to imagine the reality of the quiet, delicate moments of a young girl with her child after an impossible birth?

As we cultivate curiosity around the stories of the season, as we make space for the wonder that keeps our hearts beating, what would it look like to approach ourselves in the same way? Our families? Our traditions?

How can we invite wonder into the holiday season this year?

When we find ourselves overcome with emotion at unexpected moments? When the conversation around the table is not what we were hoping for?

When, yet again, the holidays highlight to our hearts how our lives hasn’t necessarily turned out as we had hoped?

How can we bring a spirit of wonder to those places? How can we light a candle there, treating those questions that don’t have answers with a wild grace, sitting with the feelings that arise without judgment or neglect, simply waiting open-handed for a whisper of comfort that will come in the quiet. I truly believe, if we make space for it, that whisper will come.

Perhaps this season is indeed about something more than pithy sayings and traditions. Perhaps is is, indeed, all about an inexplicable, ancient mystery, about the innate curiosity of our childlike hearts given space to wonder again, about the joy that comes when we release our desperate desire for answers. Facts organize reality into our brain, yes, but the mysteries place the meaning of life in our heart, moving us by the wonder of it all, the awe of the beautiful and true things. What a gift it is that we don’t have all the answers, but are encouraged to sit in our humanity, waiting in the bright darkness where we are met with a beacon, a miracle, met with a joy that comes when we open ourselves wide to the not-knowing.