On the Seventh Day of Christmas: Savor the Feast of New Year's Eve
My Christmas daybook for these 12 days of celebrating. We'll be spending Christmastide with some favorite short films and video clips. Join me, won't you?
For an introduction read this post: Christmastide.
Note: If you're reading this in email, the formatting usually looks much better at the website. Just click the post title to get there.
CLICK ON THE PHOTO TO GET TO VIDEO HOME PAGE: FEAST BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
Just yesterday I caught myself downloading a fasting app on my phone. You heard me right. On the fifth day of Christmas, I thought I should start fasting. At one level, it makes sense. We’ve been consuming a whole lot of sugar, meat, and delicious ginger beer/vodka drinks and not a whole lot of vegetables. My body was probably trying to tell me something. How perfectly human of me to download an app to remind me not to eat for 12-16 hours rather than just walking to the fridge for some carrots and celery.
If you’ve been around here any number of years, you’ve heard me quote my Mama every Christmastide: “While we feast, we savor.” I’ve also shared one of my top lessons since following the liturgical calendar: In some ways celebration requires more discipline than sober contemplation.
Add to that a mild to severe case of post-family-visit blues and I subconsciously attempted to hit the Christmastide eject button before it was even half over.
Today’s New Year’s Eve. Maybe you’ve got a whole lot of goals that you plan to kickstart tomorrow, the first day of 2019. That’s fine. But for today, let’s keep feasting. Here’s five more clips plus one playlist highlighting the joy of festive celebration. Cheers!
p.s., I’ll be checking into that intermittent fasting app after January 6, the Feast of Epiphany!
Watch:
Feast, Matt Zoller Seitz for the Museum of Moving Image
(Technically, this video was made for Thanksgiving, but I love it for Christmastide as well. If you can’t get it to play from this post, click the link here to go to the original page. If you like food and movies, you’ll be glad you did.)
Happy New Year, Orange Mobile
Grilled Shrimp with Peanuts and Lime, Tiger In A Jar
How to Make the Ultimate Cheese Board, Bon Appétit
Dark Moon, Bon Appétit
10 Vintage New Year’s Eve Movies - 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, (I’dd add When Harry Met Sally for the 90s!)
Listen: my New Year’s Eve playlist on Spotify
“Leader: To gather joyfully is indeed a serious affair, for feasting and all enjoyments gratefully taken are, at their heart, acts of war.
People: In celebrating this feast we declare that evil and death, suffering and loss, sorrow and tears, will not have the final word.
But the joy of fellowship, and the welcome and comfort of friends new and old, and the celebration of these blessings of food and drink and conversation and laughter are the true evidences of things eternal, and are the first fruits of that great glad joy that is to come and that will be unending.
So let our feast this day be joined to those sure victories secured by Christ.
Let it be to us now a delight, and a glad foretaste of his eternal kingdom.
Bless us, O Lord, in this feast.
Bless us, O Lord, as we linger over our cups, And over tables laden with good things, as we relish the delights of varied texture and flavor,
Of aromas and savory spices,
Of dishes prepared as acts of love and blessing,
Of sweet delights made sweeter by the communion of saints.
May this shared meal, and our pleasure in it, bear witness against the artifice and deceptions of the prince of the darkness that would blind this world to hope.
May it strike at the root of the lie that would drain life of meaning, and the world of joy, and suffering of redemption.
May this our feast fall like a great hammer blow against that brittle night,
Shattering the gloom, reawakening our hearts,
stirring our imaginations, focusing our vision
On the kingdom of heaven that is to come
On the kingdom that is promised
On the kingdom that is already, indeed, among us,
For the resurrection of all good things has already joyfully begun.
May this feast be an echo of that great supper of the Lamb,
and a foreshadowing of the great celebration that awaits the children of God.
Where two or more of us are gathered, O Lord, there you have promised to be
And here we are
And so, here are you.
Take joy, O King, in this our feast.
Take joy, O King!
Leader: All will be well!
Participants then take up the cry: All will be well!
Nothing good and right and true will be lost forever. All good things will be restored.
Feast and be reminded!
Take joy, little flock. Take joy!
Let battle be joined!
Let battle be joined!
Now you who are loved by the Father, prepare your hearts and give yourselves wholly to this celebration of joy, to the glad company of saints, to the comforting fellowship of the Spirit, and to the abiding presence of Christ who is seated among us both as our host and as our honored guest, and still yet as our conquering king.
Amen.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, take seat, take feast, take delight!”
Do:
Feast in the New Year
More friends, more feasting, more game-playing, more music. Savor the excess.
[from my 2013 post: "My Mama’s Rule For Feasting."]
“My mother created a rule for feasting years ago. As a family, we'd often be invited into other people's homes for mouth-watering meals, but too many times the dinner conversation revolved around the fattening, unhealthy qualities we consumed. It felt like each dish spooned onto our plate came heaped with sides of shame and guilt. At her own dinner table, my mother would not tolerate this sort of pious, joy-wrecking conversation. This is how she taught us her motto for hospitality: While we feast, we savor.
This is no way to feast, friends. Keeping in mind that legalism kills, but order brings life to our family celebrations, Brian and I keep my mother's rule close to heart. While we feast, we savor. At Christmas, we savor every sort of gift - food, music, family, friends, and the boxes and bags we wrap up and hand to each other. All of it -- the ones we give and the ones we receive -- unearned. All of it, grace.”
(See all Christmas Daybook posts from 2017 here.)