Two old friends will also enhance the merriment. I met Gary and Howard when we were skinny teenagers at Prescott College. Both now live nearby after illustrious careers: Gary as a writer and ethnobotanist, Howard as a Peace Corps director in several Latin American countries. Just (!) fifty years ago, Howard and I spent a month in the village of Banamichi, Sonora, where we lived with families, worked on our Spanish and drank in a culture that would strongly influence us for the rest of our lives.

A Homely Gourd

One little token of that culture catches my eye every Advent. An old friend in Santa Fe gave it to me. Peruvian artist Bertha Medina worked her magic on this small pale brown gourd with four stubby little legs. She carved and burnt geometric designs into the surface. Also burnt into the surface, circling the equator, are the words Cristo viene pronto, “Christ is coming soon.” The grapefruit-sized gourd is cut in half vertically and has a little leather hinge on the back.

When Christmas arrives, I open the earth-tone gourd to discover a wild three-dimensional diorama. It’s like cracking open a homely geode to discover a wondrous core of sparkling crystals. Instead of crystals, the right side, a little concave grotto, contains shiny images of a haloed Holy Family with baby Jesus cuddled by what looks like a cross between a donkey and a zebra. A cow definitely smiles at the observer. What looks like a yellow river of light flows down from the sky into the grotto.

The left side is another matter. It looks sort of like a band shell, with oversized masks hanging on the curved walls and ceiling. Looks like a bull’s head and a pig’s head. Then there’s what may be a mandrill. The other faces look demonic. In the foreground stand a man and woman beside a little pulpit or lectern, or maybe a small keyboard. Their arms are lifted, with two hands touching. She wears a green blouse. He sports a red jacket. They may be dancing, preaching, or singing. Whatever it is, this birth is riling up musicians, beasts, and demons.

But because the demonic faces are just masks, they’re colorful decorations, not scary spirits. Maybe those spirits have fled, leaving their harmless masks behind. Or maybe the hollowness of the masks exposes the emptiness of the dark spirits that visit us in nightmares. Compared to the masks, the little family and their contented beasts seem solid, real, unfazed, maybe entertained, by the melodramatic masks. Although I get the impression that they’re just being polite.

The Singing Cosmos

This sums up something I love about Christmas: a quiet, vulnerable family flooded with light-in-darkness and a world startled, delighted, into song and dance. Children’s masks that once were the fell faces of dark powers and threatening predators fail to intimidate the little family and surrounding creatures.

For me, this is the Christmas Gift: a child, a flood of light, and flesh so infused with Life that the cosmos throws up its hands, sings and dances. And it didn’t just happen once. When love erupts, when justice visits, when kindness appears, the Word becomes Flesh in you.

¡Feliz Navidad and Merry Christmas from Fr. Dave Denny and Tessa Bielecki at the Desert Foundation! This photo was taken in the “olden days” outside our Colorado hermitages.

P.S. Visit tessabielecki.com for Tessa’s moving reflection on “The House of Christmas,” a beloved poem by G. K. Chesterton.