Creatures of Habit

Winter drives us by instinct, but Advent keeps us on edge

“Do we have any traditions?”

I look up at my son with a bemused eye. He is bent over a school paper while his siblings are simultaneously trimming the tree, listening to Christmas music, hanging Advent calendars, and planning our annual drive to see holiday lights. Is he kidding?

He is serious.

Irony is lost on children; sarcasm is the domain of adults. So I turn the question back on him. What does he think? What has he learned about traditions in school? What does our family do each time this year?

He mulls over my words. He is unconvinced. 

What more does he want? I wonder as I set the candles in their wreath on the table.

Or has he named a deeper human truth—that we cannot see what we are doing while we are doing it?

//

I don’t remember what I was doing during most of my childhood or adolescence, but I can tell you it was not worrying about weather.

I finally realized this after exasperated years of trying to get children to wear winter gear or convincing middle-schoolers to don even a blessed coat to walk to the bus stop: I, too, barely paid attention to my surroundings when I was young.

Weather simply was. So were seasons. I grew up with a big backyard and thick woods that dove down a steep hill toward a winding river. But as I ran and played and poked rotting trees with curious sticks, I rarely noticed the natural world around me. I simply inhabited it, a creature within creation.

Now I over-analyze my weather app: is this sweater warm enough for today? What if it’s raining an hour away where I’m driving—should I bring an umbrella? Are these boots snow-proof? Do I have enough winter gear stashed in my car for an emergency? 

Perhaps parenting changed my perspective: the need to care for other creatures, maternal terror at their vulnerability. Or maybe it was simply adulthood’s gradual release on small insecurities (I look stupid in hats!) for wiser acceptance of myself, my body, and my limitations. 

I know for certain that motherhood woke me up to seasons. In the interminable first year of my first child’s life, I was grateful for any tangible sign that time was passing. Here was fall, after so many sleepless nights! Here came spring, astonishing and new! I walked my son in circles around the neighborhood, desperate for any daily reassurance that we would not be stuck in this endless stretch forever.  

Now I notice the animals shift their habits with the seasons, too. The deer come creeping after dark, silently visiting the snowy garden or pawing the compost heap in search of food. Squirrels bound from branch to branch as I write from the other side of the window. Geese cluster in the small unfrozen center of the lake, pausing on their flight south.

Animals are driven by instinct in winter, and we are no different.

//

Tradition can be a double-edged sword in The Holiday Season™. 

As creatures of habit, we are hungry for rituals to help us mark the passage of time and hang our hats upon a new present. Here we are back in Christmastide, but here we are in a version that has never been. We long to locate ourselves, and the holidays beam a homing signal that’s hard to ignore. 

Tangible traditions surge the strongest: the smell of favorite foods baking in the oven or simmering on the stove, the familiar sight of family ornaments or Nativity figures. Ritual’s orienting power is a welcome relief, especially in the still-unmoored era of post-pandemic life and the virtual disembodiment where many of us roam online each day.

But traditions can trap us, too. The pressure of The Way We’ve Always Done Things becomes stifling or smothering in certain seasons, like grief’s disorientation or sea changes within our families. Holiday habits of yore may not fit the people we are today.

What might happen if we took Advent seriously, if we stepped back and tried to see more clearly, if we cross-examined our own best intentions in this Most Wonderful Time of The Year?

Why are we doing what we’re doing?

// 

John the Baptist is Advent’s weirdest and wildest figure, roaming round the desert, looming large in the lectionary. 

Though chronological time would make him an infant at the first Christmas, only six months older than Jesus, Advent’s Scripture gives us John full-grown and wide-eyed, preaching up a storm, crying out for repentance, preparing the way, bringing baptism to the masses. 

John is part hermit, part prophet, totally dependent on God for food and clothing and the jarring words that tumble from his mouth, unmistakable and unforgettable:

You brood of vipers. The coming wrath. His threshing floor. His winnowing fan. The chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

His sermons make us squirm. We might prefer if he would please move out of the way; we want to get to our Nativity scene, thank you very much; there’s no figure in the set for a camel-hair wearing, locust-eating weirdo from the wilderness. 

Precisely the point.

John is not a creature of habit. He warns us not to be either.

//

The traditional clothing donned by a religious order is called a habit. Originally chosen to help monks or nuns blend into the crowd with simple fabrics and plain colors, religious habits now set the avowed apart. 

Strangers straighten up (or sneer) when they see the classic markers—the priest’s collar, the sister’s veil, the monk’s robe—because a habit sends a signal: something unusual is here. Someone living differently is among you.

This is the wake-up call we need in Advent: to turn our habits from drab into electric. To let this short, salty season keep us on edge.

For churches that celebrate a liturgical calendar, December is sliced in two. Half prophetic and probing, with plenty of prophets foretelling the Messiah and tough truths from John and Jesus in the Gospels. Half familiar and comforting, with angels in dreams and children’s Bible story scenes. 

We need to hear about both halves: the coming of Jesus at Christmas and the coming of Christ at the end of time. But we start every year in the strange place, edging the wilderness with the prophet on the riverbank and the teacher gathering crowds, both of them proclaiming the coming Kingdom of God that will turn everything upside down. Advent is always on the margins, back when Mary and Elizabeth’s sons preached on society’s fringes and today when we try to resist the full-court press of consumerist Christmas.

Do we have any traditions? A question worth asking, buried under the weight of our own expectations.

Winter drives us by instinct, but Advent keeps us on edge. We burrow down like bunnies, hunkering by habit into warmer clothes and thicker blankets. Yet Advent warns us not to get comfortable.

Stay awake. Stand apart from the rest of the world. 

Stay here and see what happens next.