Skip to main content

Silent Night, Holy Night

As I've rocked Mateo to sleep in my arms for the past few weeks, I've found myself singing to him Christmas carols. Those traditional songs we'd sing at midnight mass: Away in a Manger, Hark the Harold Angel Sings, The First Noel. Did you ever think about how the songs we sing to celebrate the birth of baby Jesus sound so much like lullabies?

Christmas Eve is going to look quite different this year, without the large gathering of family we're accustomed to, without children's holiday pageants, without breakfast potlucks, without midnight mass. I feel almost as if I'm reciting a new edition of How Corona Stole Christmas...

    “And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before." 



The underlying message behind the famous Dr. Seuss story, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" is that excessive consumerism literally consumes the holiday season, and while I do believe that capitalism has commandeered Christmas, that's not quite my point here. Rocking sleepy Mateo in my arms and trying to lull him with lullaby-like carols, I think about that true meaning of Christmas. I'm reminded of another quotation I saw on Facebook recently. It said, "The first Christmas was pretty simple. It's okay if yours is, too."


So as I hold my baby boy and sing him to sleep, I can't help but reflect upon the First Christmas, where a young mother had just given birth alone, in a foreign land, in a drafty barn. She was living in dangerous, uncertain times, too. She must have been overwhelmed with fear, elation, exhaustion. She knew then that the baby she held was special and destined for great things. He would grow to be King of Kings. But in that moment she had no idea the trajectory his life would take, and just like any mother, he would always be her baby.


While Mateo isn't a newborn infant anymore, he still nurses and cuddles to sleep. Sometimes I can't believe how big he is getting, and then in the next moment he still seems so little. But it brings me the most comfort to lull him into dreamland, while singing the story of another baby boy, whose birth we celebrate this month, and who entered the world in the most humble way.

From humble beginnings, come great things. 

**Wise men still seek Him.**



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is 5 Little Monkeys Racist?

I’ve seen a lot of Tik Toks debunking children’s nursery rhymes lately. I have two toddlers, so now whenever I hear one of those rhymes, I think about their unsavory origins. But my son loves, loves Five Little Monkeys. He’s just learning to talk, and can almost say it by himself. I’ve thought about telling him to stop singing it since I learned in the original lyrics it’s not monkeys jumping on the bed, but he just gets so much joy from singing it as he jumps up and falls down, I thought... no harm, no foul, right? As long as he thinks the song is about monkeys, it’s ok.  Until my niece came over one day, and the three toddlers were playing on an old mattress we have on the living room floor for them to jump around on. My son asked me to sing 5 Little Monkeys. At first it was cute, because they literally were jumping on the bed, but then I took a good look at the three of them.  My kids are half-Guatemalan but very fair, like I am. Whereas my niece is half-black, and her skin happens

Storytime Bilingüe featuring “Buenas Noches Luna”

This week's Storytime Bilingue features Buenas Noches Luna , the Spanish translation of the beloved children's book Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. We love the vivid language and images, and the black and white contrast pages are particularly compelling for the little ones whose eyesight is still developing. You'll see how much Mateo interacts with the book during this reading! This is a story I have nearly memorized, because I read it to Maya consistently before bed during our bedtime routine. We've read it so much, she practically has it memorized, too. Sometimes she likes me to read it aloud, and sometimes she likes to "read" the book by describing the images. I actually wrote about her as an emerging bilingual reader in my earlier blog post,  Today a Reader, Tomorrow a Leader , but the highlight of that post is that research shows repeated readings of the same book really benefit early literacy and vocabulary acquisition. For that reason I

Why You Should Travel with Little Kids

I took my first cross-country road trip when I was six-weeks-old. My parents loaded me up in an old Ford Wagoneer and drove me home from my dad's hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, to my hometown of Ojai, CA. After that, we traveled back and forth between the East Coast and the West Coast every summer of my life. A few times we flew, but most years we loaded up the car with the suitcases, the dogs, and the children and drove 3,000 miles across the country. This early exposure to travel instilled within me a joy of seeing the world, and since that first trip I have visited 34 states and 14 countries. And I hope to share that same joy with my own little ones. Traveling with children can be hard--it disrupts their nap schedules, may involve crossing timelines, and definitely pushes everyone beyond their comfort zones. But seeing different countries and different parts of our country as children gives them a greater appreciation for cultural and regional differences, and it widens their exper