Laurel Elisabeth Stevens

I began Advent with many ideas of how we, as a family, would prepare for Christ’s coming, and some of them we carried through with.  Some of them we didn’t.  It was halfway through week 2 of Advent that I made an Advent wreath and we began lighting candles, but I never did get the traditional purple candles, and I’m finding that white looks rather like Easter.  The stories for the Jesse tree are read about every other day, and thoughts of, “Have I gotten all the right gifts?” too often clutter my mind in unproductive wanderings. There have been surprises though.  In working on the two previous posts I listened to many renditions of anthems, once again immersing myself in the story of the lyrics as well as the beauty of the music.  Elisabeth’s piano playing continues to delight me, and my mom has been playing as well—“What Child is This” and “Lo, How a Rose.”  Henry was in his room singing “O Holy Night” making up words to the parts he didn't know....

A week ago a new nephew entered our family.  His name is Charlie and he came one week early.  Nevertheless, it was a long wait.  After my sister-in-law had been in labor for nearly ten hours, the action pretty much stopped.  My brother texted me: “We’re kind of bored.”  I chuckled, and hoped he didn’t think I was condescending when I texted back, “Sleep now while you can.”  Waiting is hard. About ten years ago John and I were trying to sell a house and buy one in The Woodlands and I was always up and down with the good news-bad news of having a house on the market.  My dear husband tried to lighten my mood by quoting a line from The Simpsons one night: “Now we play the waiting game!” and answering himself with Homer’s line, “Awww, I wanna play Hungry, Hungry Hippos.”  So on a whim one night in a hotel we bought the game and probably caused no little annoyance to our neighbors as we drank glasses of wine and played that crazy noisy game....

Elisabeth has been working on a piano arrangement of O Come, O Come, Emmanuel , a hymn dating back to the 12th or 13th century as a Latin plain chant.  Many renditions hearken back to monks chanting in hallowed halls, “Veni, Veni Emmanuel,” but the Baroque version Elisabeth plays is no less mysterious and wondrous to me.   In my childhood though, I became so familiar with the first verse that I found it quite boring and a bit confusing.  I liked the chorus though, because I got to sing it loud and high.   In high school, our choir director asked us every year to memorize five verses of that hymn for a processional, and every year we failed.  Indeed I felt quite guilty that I could not hold up my end of the assignment.  I don’t recall trying very hard to learn them, but I do recall the dread in my stomach when it became apparent to Mr. Moses that we had failed him again.   Twenty-plus years later I love the story these verses tell--of Israel ens...