Companionship in the Wilderness at Advent

For many years as the eldest sister of eight, I never doubted I would someday have a houseful of children of my own. Now–well, now I’m in my forties, and that’s not the case. Lanier Ivester, a writer whom I’ve long admired, has walked a similar path. Already this Advent, her brand-new book Glad and Golden Hours has proved to be such a kind companion in the griefs that Advent and Christmas often underline. She writes: 

“We’re all waiting on something. Waiting for God to fix a problem. Waiting for him to give us the desire of our hearts. Waiting to see him face to face. It’s tempting to let the season underscore what we still don’t have, even though another year has rolled around. But how much richer it is, I am learning, to embrace the stark solemnity of the great universal waiting for the Messiah and to find a parable of it in my own desires.”

(Lanier Ivester in Glad and Golden Hours, pg. 19)

Stark and solemn those reminders can be. Two winters ago, I helped my middle sister pack after her annual visit from a thousand miles away, not knowing it would be our last Christmas together. She died suddenly the next spring. Not only do I miss her, but I miss her young son, who now comes at a different time of year. Truth is, our whole-family Christmases are now a gift that belongs to the past.

Companionship is the theme I’ve returned to over and over since my sister died. The neighbor-friend who ran up the walk after work, simply to be with me when I got the news. The long-distance friend who tenderly checked in with me again and again over many months. The writer Clarissa Moll, whose wise posts and books have kept me company – and who hosted a Zoom call last year, just for those experiencing their first Christmas without a loved one. 

This year, Lanier is that friend from a distance, and to this grief, too, her book is hospitable. She weaves her own story with the loss of her parents and her husband’s parents along with a devastating housefire — yet it is far from a sorrowful tale. She says:

“If you are tired, or disillusioned, or curious about shaping a holiday season that makes present the astonishing fact of God-with-us, then I would like you to consider this book my gift to you. It’s not a manual or a how-to, or a glorified to-do list, but a companion, in the neighborliest sense of the word. 

“Whether you choose to read this book, this story, simply to enter its twists and turns, its hopes and sorrows, its people and its places, or whether you elect to participate in it yourself via its many recipes, crafts, and holiday suggestions, my prayer is that you will find a friend in these pages…”

(Lanier Ivester in Glad and Golden Hours, pg. xvi)

Glad and Golden Hours is a recipe book, an unabashed celebration of beauty, a feast of watercolor illustrations, and a treasury of wise traditions that don’t break you in the making. It’s a memoir of rollicking family and friends-like-family Christmas parties, freedom from perfectionism, and Lanier’s great joy in being Philip’s wife and the mistress of the Ruff House, welcomer of its guests, careful tender of old family traditions and instigator of new ones.

The year of the house fire, Philip and Lanier were exiled from their home at Christmastime, and there could be no parties while they lived in the tiny RV in the yard. But they did have impromptu guests: young friends who longed for the simplest of Lanier’s Christmas treats, perhaps the most accidental of her food traditions. (Read the book to find out what it was!) She writes: 

“These children had seen in their innocence when I had missed in all my so-called experience. They didn’t care about the trappings and the trimmings so much as the memories and relationships they represented. It wasn’t the flaming pudding or the beautifully set tables, or even the homemade cinnamon rolls that were requisite, but the people. For they had brought me home to the original simplicity of the thing. Tradition, like liturgy, grants form and substance to unseen reality, and it carries us when circumstances or emotions belie what is actually true.”

(Lanier Ivester in Glad and Golden Hours, pg. 252)

Glad and Golden Hours is a tale of the beautiful dignity of walking with Jesus and finding that our unfulfilled longings, blocked talents, and deep griefs can break out like subterranean rivers into unexpected fruitfulness. 

Lanier has wandered the desert. 

She has seen it blossom like a rose.

Unexpected Fruitfulness

“Are we going to make sufganiyot again this year?”

Ever since I lived in Jerusalem, one of my Advent activities has been lighting Hanukkah candles. Once a solution to being far away from family, familiar traditions, and Christmas decorations, candlelight became a beloved way to foster wonder. And what better way to prepare for celebrating one miracle – the birth of Jesus – than by remembering an earlier miracle (the Jewish people rescued by a handful of Maccabees) that made it possible? 

Inevitably, then, my Advents have also included daydreaming about the round, sometimes elaborate Hanukkah doughnuts I used to enjoy in Jerusalem. Sufganiyot: some filled with strawberry jelly, some with creams of various flavors, but best of all (in my opinion) with oozy caramel.

Though I love to bake, my skills with sweets usually stop at pies and crisps and lemon squares. But as a managing cook and honorary “kitchen mama,” I share a big kitchen – and cooking for their classmates – with three 18 and 19-year-old student cooks. So with more hungry mouths than mine in mind, I finally got brave last year and tackled several unfamiliar skills. First, a decadent caramel filling. After one batch of sugar and water simply re-crystalized over the heat, I learned the value of a quality pan and watched it melt into amber, then stirred in butter and salt and cream. Next, the doughnuts. Consulting Smitten Kitchen’s recipe, I made a tender, sticky dough, stamped out a couple dozen and put them in the fridge overnight. In the morning, I had a date with a cast iron pan, some melted Crisco, and that dough, lining up a couple dozen golden spheres. Finally, after wrestling to add the tip to a piping bag, I injected the fresh doughnuts with a dose of caramel, doused the outsides with powdered sugar and served the wonderfully messy results to my students – for breakfast.

That was last year. This year, my girls remembered – and requested – those sufganiyot. One even joined the adventure, face alight at the very invitation. In the grey winter-morning light, she fried the doughnuts while I wrestled again with the piping bag, the caramel, and some strawberry jam, while I loosed new flurries of powdered sugar on our imperfectly delicious results. 

While my role with these first-time-away-from-home young women really has some mama-like aspects, there’s one I overlooked. But this year, it seems, I unlocked an unexpected achievement: transmitting a food craving and festive tradition to the next generation. 

My heart still longs to be a mama. But my life, and often my house, are full of the babies, children, and teens of my siblings and friends. And a kitchen mama, it turns out, is not a consolation-prize mama, but a real and meaningful role. I’m a rich woman, in fact, surrounded with wise and understanding companions in both suffering and joy, with folks to love, mouths to feed — and sometimes even imaginations to fill with caramel doughnuts at Christmas-time.

Rose Photography by Jennifer Marie
Sufganiyot Photography by Elisabeth Adams