Stripping of the Decorations

Some churches have a tradition following the Maundy Thursday service known as Stripping the Altar.  The lectern and pulpit are stripped bare, symbolizing the humiliation and barrenness of the cross.  Our Presbyterian Church here in Highlands began this several years ago (it is more common in Anglican, Catholic, Lutheran, and Methodist churches), and I had never seen it done before then.  There was no Postlude, and those attending the service were asked to leave in silence.  It is a very moving ceremony.

We felt a little like that today when, only two days after Christmas, we began the work of removing all the Christmas decorations (see previous post) - Stripping the House, as it were.  We nestle the ornaments, one by one, gently in their little tissue-paper-padded compartments in the tattered old boxes; we disassemble the little village in the bay windows; we take the lights down from the mantle; we put away the nativity set; we fold up the artificial Christmas tree we bought three years ago and put it in its coffin-like box.  Then Martha crawls under the landing off the sun room and somehow manages to fit it all in there like a three-dimensional puzzle.  Most of this work is done by Martha except where height is needed:

For example, I reached up and took down the oldest ornaments from the chandelier, the ones I inherited from my parents and grandparents.  My Mom told me that some of them came from "overseas," wherever that might have been, probably somewhere in Germany.

But unlike the Stripping of the Altar, we did not work in silence; we worked to the sound of Christmas carols, which we will not listen to again until next year.  And instead of barrenness, our house simply returned to its normal state.  William Morris, the 19th century artist, famously advised, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."  And that is a principle we have tried to apply to our own house (although Martha has been known to chide me for concluding too soon that something has outlived its usefulness).  Neither of us likes clutter.  

But I suppose Morris might make an exception for seasonal decorations, those scarecrows and pumpkins and strings of lights with which we mark the passage of our annual holidays, those times of planting and harvest, and the fullness of summer and the emptiness of winter, which people have observed for centuries.  

The holidays scattered between the holy days.