The Unexpected Christmas

From December 1 – 24, we welcome you to partake in a heartfelt voyage — our annual Advent devotional. This year, it brims with poignant reflections from fellow congregants and church staff, recounting unexpected Christmas moments and illuminating how they discovered the true essence of Christmas during those times. 

Every week, we’ll share devotionals for weekdays, along with a unique Advent candlelighting liturgy, a resonant verse and a blessing during the weekends. We’re sure that each entry will guide you on your own unexpected Christmas journey.

We sincerely hope that partaking in this journey elicits as much meaning for you as creating it brought us. For more information, kindly email shaw@washmorefeet.org. This Advent, let’s embrace the spirit of Christmas together, one devotional at a time.

Special Bonus Devotional

Sometimes the unexpected comes in real time, in your face, and you know it when it hits you.

The Christmas season in our house has always begun with the Christmas CDs appearing sometime over Thanksgiving weekend and has culminated with a festive dinner with family and friends on Christmas evening. Over the many years there have been babies and grandparents, kids and teens, tears for those departed, and laughter with those present, candles in the windows, and always love.  

The years have been sprinkled with unexpected events; the kind that hit you in your face and make you take notice. There was the year my oven decided to go toes up as I was about to cook the turkey (luckily my neighbor was out of town and had left me a key “just in case”), or the year the lasagnas did not thaw (nope, you can’t really cook lasagna from frozen – it was a long salad course), or the year Jillian got stuck for hours in a DC-unpredicted-snow-traffic event with my parents on the way back from Dulles –  in a car where the only working entertainment device was a tape deck and the only tape was “speaking with a Scottish accent”.  (They had a fair few laughs on the way to Bethesda.) These times have all made their way into the book of Toomey family lore.

2019 had started pretty much as expected. In July we all made our way to the beach for our annual vacation. On beach day 5 Joe had a heart attack followed a few weeks later by meningitis. It had not been not our finest summer and fall and Jillian, Emery, and Eliza left vacation quite worried about Joe.  In November we celebrated Thanksgiving with Emery and family and later that week as we were discussing our Thanksgiving holidays with friends, they mentioned that their son in law had returned from a business trip in Europe sick with the flu.  He had managed to rally for Thanksgiving dinner but complained that he couldn’t smell or taste any of the food.  No one else seemed to get ill and no one thought much about it…..little did we know.  

In December 2019 after about 35 years of Christmas celebrations in Bethesda and with a little trepidation (I am someone who takes my traditions maybe a little too seriously), we set off to Burntisland Scotland (not burnt and not an island!) to spend the holiday with Eliza and family. It was a lovely week. Santa came, Joe convinced the girls that he had waited up and had actually seen Santa, which they believed, we had a traditional Scottish Christmas ham with all of the trimmings, and enjoyed eating leftovers, playing games, and meeting new friends.  We spent a few days at a very Scottish country resort(ish), complete with a cozy cabin, high tea, and walks in the woods. It had been a very different, peaceful, and joyful Christmas; we headed home on December 30th filled with happiness and looking forward to our next trip.   

On March 13, 2020, about 10 weeks after we returned home, the world shut down due to Covid.  It would be another 20 months before we could travel.  

Our parting hugs in August 2019 had been filled with sadness and worry, we didn’t yet know that Joe would make a full recovery.  Our parting hugs in December were filled with joy and the anticipation of future visits, Christmas hugs that would soon keep us through the long and dark pandemic time.  

Sometimes the unexpected comes from behind and it is only in looking back that you find the unexpected gift.

Mary Ann Toomey