Tag: Advent

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Anderson on Advent Calendars – on CBC’s “Cost of Living”

(plus a cat video)

This last week I had the pleasure of appearing on a segment of the CBC Radio program “Cost of Living“ — about Advent Calendars. OK, I say, “pleasure,” but some of you are as avid about Radio One as me, so you know it was more akin to whatever was happening at those early Beatles’ concerts:

Cost of Living with Paul Haavardsrud airs across the country on Sundays at noon, and is rebroadcast Tuesdays at 11:31 a.m. It’s also on-demand on podcast platforms and CBC Listen. We enjoy the show, so it was quite a thrill when CBC producer Leah Hendry contacted me to ask my thoughts on Advent and on Advent Calendars. Being me, I had a LOT of thoughts. I probably wrote and researched as much as I would for a university lecture! Of course, most of it didn’t make it on to the episode. Cost of Living is a highly-scripted production, so I knew my part would be distilled to a few quick clips. As a life-long fan of CBC Radio, and someone who already felt fortunate to appear on Nova Scotia, Montreal, and Saskatchewan CBC shows a number of times, it was a real honour to “go national!” As my friend Ken Wilson put it, “you’re famous! You’re on the national network!”

It just so happened that I heard the segment live when I was in the car, headed to town. So I pulled over, grabbed my phone, and recorded the five minutes for posterity.

Now, you may not be enamoured of listening to the radio as a background to turn signals and shifting back-seat groceries and windshield washer antifreeze. The sound quality isn’t bad for something captured on an Android device after taking off my gloves. But it is “real time, in-the-car” audio.

So if, like me, you prefer your CBC programs polished, and in full, then have a listen to the entire half-hour Dec 5, 2025 episode of Cost of Living. You can listen to it HERE.

Since I had several pages of notes on the history of Advent Calendars, I pitched an article to The Conversation Canada. That piece, titled “The Surprising Theology Inside Today’s Advent Calendars,” is out today, HERE. (They say it’s a two-minute read, shorter than most folks spend every visit to social media.)

On the CBC clip I said I wanted a whiskey calendar. But we actually have these ones pictured, with chocolate and cat treats, originating from Europe (IKEA) and from BC. What kind of advent calendars are you using this year? Let me know in the comments! On a more spiritual level, I’ve been following Ray Aldred’s daily advent devotions “Alongside Hope,” the Lutherans Connect Advent series, as well as enjoying occasional advent reflections from Sheila O’Handley, a real life hermit from Cape Breton whom I had the pleasure of meeting with my class this fall.

After The Conversation article came out, I also had a lovely, and somewhat more spiritual, conversation with Alison Brunette at CBC Breakaway, in Quebec City. You can find that 9-minute conversation HERE.

So, whether reading, listening, reflecting, or just eating chocolate…happy advent!

Bonus Cat Content: Theodore in the Snow

Apropos of nothing else in this post, but in celebration of the fact that the first major snowstorm of the season hit recently, here’s a fun 12-second video for you of our not-so-feral-anymore cat Theodore, who sleeps in the house at night now. Today Sara took this video of his joy jumping back out into the deep new-fallen snow. She missed the part where he rolled crazily around in it when he first dashed out. It’s like a child’s celebration of winter. Enjoy!

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A Long Time Ago, One Advent

1976-concert-choir-photo

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Winter Walking

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I love a public road: few sights there are

That please me more – such object has had power

O’er my imagination since the dawn

Of childhood, when its disappearing line

Seen daily afar off, on one bare steep

Beyond the limits which my feet had trod,

Was like a guide into eternity,

At least to things unknown and without bound.

                                                                                                            Wordsworth

 

 

The snow is falling. Ice has formed on the sidewalks and walking is becoming, if not impossible, at least treacherous. My 4 km path from home to office has been transformed into an obstacle course. Not so much harder, I guess, than some of the summer’s more difficult wanderings, but requiring much sturdier dress. And even in its warmth, the city was harsher than Norway and Scotland’s hedgerows and mountain trails. There are no wild flowers along the way, no trout rising in any stream through Verdun, no herons kicking into the air to greet my passing. Now there are gusts of needle-sharp air around the frozen concrete corners of walk-ups. There is the way the wind plays a winter song on the wires, calling the pigeons out to find the bread crumbs someone left on the snow. And there is N-, the homeless man on the bench he stubbornly, nonsensically prefers to a warm bed, his nose dripping even as he speaks to me in the most reasonable, cultured, and educated of tones about his degree in English literature. “I can’t leave,” he tells me, “they asked me to be here in this place when they come, which should be any day now.” He shifts his legs and adjusts the plastic bags around him. I look at his boots. Such is mental illness. But then, it was a kind of rootlessness I aspired to not many months ago. I buy him snow pants and worry about him on nights like last night, when it drops to 28 below. I think of my sons and know he is someone’s. Calling the police is an option.

There is garbage in the gutter, the smell of oil and tomato sauce unexpectedly tinging the vacuum of air behind the pizzeria, the hiss of the plastic Frosty the Snowman who lifts out of his inner tube once every thirty seconds as the air pump builds him again and again to greet a street that is empty except for me. Later a car rolls slowly by, a foreign creature, windows shadowed, the sound of its tires compressing the snow loud in my ears, muffled bass beating like a heart buried deep within.

Peregrination seems far away from this winter world. Against the cold and dark of the city, life has settled into whatever warm niches it can find, leaving little above the surface. But there is life nevertheless. Different eyes are needed for walking this way, different rhythms to keep from falling on this pilgrim route. There is a different loneliness and a different cost.  In my doorway I take off my gloves and the back of my hands is red and raw, the skin threatening to break open from dryness. The only hand cream I can find stings.

 A Verdun Christmas 2012

 

 

 

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Yard Art Love – a sort of Advent Story (Maisonneuve Magazine 2005)

Christmas in Verdun

There I was, butt-up, head-down, outside at midnight in my dressing gown. Smack-dab in the middle of lining up my plastic snails, someone at Hydro threw the city’s breaker. The darkness was just so – you know – total, with no big fat moon sitting like a pumpkin just over the neighbor’s clothes-line, that I lost the snails for a moment. It kind of makes you think you could be anywhere. Or anyone. It’s like when we were St-Henri girls pulling down the shade pretending to be camping dans les bois even though we could still hear the humming of the fridge downstairs and the adults talking, voices rising and falling with the rye and coke, the shuffling of cards, the arguments, the calling through the screen door for fresh packs of du Mauriers.
It wasn’t easy making it all the way back to the porch in that kind of blackness. Every footstep’s a decision. I closed my eyes – for concentration – and figured my place in relation to the big cement angel fountain in the centre of the yard. Saint-Gabriel help me see my hand in front of my face, I said, and then I just went. Stepped right around the flock of pink flamingoes, each with their one foot up, waiting. Inched my feet around the frog, knowing the little rascal was there, even without the sound of water shooting out of his mouth. Pictured the glass fairy globes on their poles so clearly I could touch them, passing. Waited till I could hear the lazy clack-clack-clack of the windvane duck, so I wouldn’t bump it off its tethered flight.
I heard geese that night. I swear I did. It was a remarkable Passover. Their calling out in the high darkness to each other made me look up. Oh my God yes. If it’s true what they say, that in this world there are ghosts wanting bodies, then they could have had mine. Perhaps they did.
The night drifted, with the streetlights out. I don’t know, I really don’t – what happened, exactly. Stars trespassed the city, came up my street, crossed my eyes. I fell right over the yard butts (a family of four in descending girth, thick white legs like sausages from their slacks), still looking up. Don’t know how long I sat there. Like eating candy at the drive-in. A good long while, I guess.
What we long for, we live in fear of finding, open and waiting, wanting nothing more than to fall into our laps like fruit off the trees, forever luscious. I’m not saying it was the stars, exactly. But two things happened that night: my troll disappeared, the one sent to me by my mother’s cousin’s sister (somewhere in Norway, I’ve forgotten where). That nasty short fellow with his long nose never did fit with the leprechaun. Better he’s gone now.
And best: I sit on the porch, growing fatter and closer to term with my precious little baby each passing week. A real-estate agent came by today, a nice man in a fancy car, sweating in his spring suit as he hung over the fence trying not to look at either my big belly or the manger scene (I decided to leave it up at Christmas). He said “Ms. Elizabeth, I could sell your house for a lot of money.” I told him about the ultrasound the doctor ordered, about the bulb in the streetlight over my yard that keeps burning out now, the city crews that come back every few weeks to repair it. I showed him how my ankles have swollen with the edema. I asked him about my collection – what would happen to it if I sold? But he didn’t really answer. Eventually he left, my leprechaun making rude faces after him.