When I returned home Tuesday night, Anne Rachael, Patrick and Eliot met me at the door with a rush, “Are we going to get the Christmas tree now?” This is the long-awaited night. This is the ritual that has persisted since we have had children. It has evolved over the years, yet still the anticipation of going on a quest for the “Holland Family Christmas Tree” is enough to make children giddy with excitement. In Mississippi we use to go and cut our own tree. It was a Christmas Vacation type experience too painful to recall. So painful in fact, that Teri has not gone on these annual adventures for years. In the beginning, she would get the children bundled up, (at this time it was Bethan, Jamie and Will) make hot chocolate and we would cram in my small Nissan pickup looking like the Clampets. The break down was immediate, and nerves would be frayed before we got to Papa’s Tree Farm, twenty miles south of Greenville. Emerging from the truck mad, the sight of 20 acres of trees would somehow give us new hope.

At this point the romance would begin to fade again as one of the children would get lost in the tree farm or one would step in fire ants or they would begin to shed their heavy coats in the warming Delta sun; weather that never seemed to cooperate with our notions that when you looked for Christmas trees it was suppose to be cold. I finally realized that it was easier to go into town and buy a tree than enter hell once again.

Now it is my second brood of children who meet me at the door to take up the annual quest. This year, to our shock there were no trees in Collierville, and after a couple of disappointing stops in the only two places in Collierville where we expected for find them, we got into the truck and the first question was, “Are we going home?” “Of course not, we are looking for the Holland Family Christmas Tree and we won’t go home without one!” Spirits soared and off we went toward Germantown. After a stop at a place which had the most beautiful assembly of trees this side of Scandinavia, but also the highest prices I have ever seen, we made our way to Cordova. On the way there I made this pronouncement: “Hey I have a great idea, why don’t we just stop and get an artificial tree and be done with this! You know—they look so real now.” The reply from Anne Rachael was worth the trip and I was reminded why I insist on certain ritualized events in our home. She said in an indignant voice with head cocked down and looking over her glasses, “Dad, that is like gas grills and vinyl siding, we don’t do that!” Steeled by her exhortation, we continued and hit the mother load—lots of good trees and cheap.

After browsing for a while looking for the right tree, we finally found it and amid much rejoicing and fanfare we took the bagged quarry home where it will adorn our home for the next month. I confess I am conflicted. One side of me wants comfort and efficiency and the other side enjoys the messy rituals we have somehow created. I was thinking about this the other day as I took my two little boys deer hunting for the first time. It has been a few years since I had two little boys tied to my bootstraps and I was not prepared for the possibility of torment trying to sit in a blind and keep a five- and seven-year-old boy from fights, fidgeting, and from having to use the bathroom every five minutes. They were miserable sitting in the blind and I was a nervous wreck. However, the minute we left to walk back in the dark to the truck, they were already asking when we were going again.

In David Baldacci’s book, Wish You Well , two small children find themselves ripped from the modern world of New York City in the 1940s to living with an 80-year-old great-great grandmother in the hills of Virginia. She is the only living relative and when the father is killed and their mother left an invalid she willingly takes them in. Their lives change from one of comfort and efficiency to one of rising at five o’clock and doing chores before they go to school. There is no running water or indoor plumbing. When Lou asked her grandmother the first night eating supper what they did at five in the morning, her grandmother said, “Show, not tell.” This is the way their life evolves. At each new stage when curiosity gets the best of Lou and she is trying to get information from her grandmother she grins and says, “Show, not tell.”

As good as modern life is with all the creature comfort and timesaving devices, I wonder if we have not lost much in the way of mystery and meaning in the little rituals that happened naturally in family life throughout the past. The beauty of Christmas’ rituals or of hunting are many. One is that our children get a sense of being caught up in something bigger than the moment—this is what we do and our family has been doing for years. Rituals are personal, whether it is passing on of special meals, hunting skills, or setting up the Christmas tree, they place us in a living history of people and surround us with people who must love, relate and instruct us if we are to grow and mature. Rituals are, “Show, not tell.”

This is how God burned his existence into Israel, a yearly round of worship and ritual that pointed to larger realities, to futures not yet known. Truth—embodied in stuff, not abstract and prepositional, but passed down from generation to generation: messy, gaudy, overdone, impractical, inefficient—glorious and brimming with meaning.