advent

We're doing a kids' service on Sunday, and since it's December 1st the theme has to be Advent, but my partner-in-this-particular-crime and I have decided that this year we are not going to talk about waiting and counting down the days until Christmas. Instead, we're going to ask "what's the biggest gift of all?"

My partner scoured the library and found this sweet story about a girl who brings a box to a new school and tries to use it to make friends. On the first day she puts her teddy in the box, and the kids laugh at her. The next day she puts cupcakes in the box, and the kids go wild, but then wander off and no one even says thank you. Then she puts a puppy in the box, and everybody is excited to play with it, but the caretaker says that the puppy can't stay at school. On the last day, dejected, she crawls into the box herself and just wants to hide. But one kid "finds" her and starts a game of hide and seek. She goes home that night and announces that she has found a friend. "Oh," says Grandpa, "you must have really had something special in that box!"

So that's it. The special thing in the box was her. The biggest gift of all is love, and we ourselves are the lovers and the beloved, participants in the cosmic miracle we're going to celebrate again at Christmas, already here.

Will we manage to communicate this? I hope so? We are often accused of aiming our messages way over the kids' heads. My defense is that these are preschool kids and they're not going to be taking away much anyway, so we might as well say something meaningful to their parents. Also "at kids' level" often feels very much like code for "in Swiss German," which is beyond me in any case, so I do what I can.

Marginally-related aside: well, this is an interesting little corner of Wikipedia.