Christmas Eve Ashes

Noche Buena Ashes

Every year, on Christmas Eve, I burn the grass in my backyard.

One of our family’s traditions is to have a Christmas Eve feast. The feast is a traditional Cuban celebration marking the eve of Christ’s birth and the feast includes roasting a whole pig. So, every December 24th, we build a pit, and build a fire, and we roast a meal.

In the cold and in the dark of a holy night.

We invite all our family, and friends, and neighbors, and any stranger that might smell the aroma of a well-seasoned 60-pound pig roasting behind our Capitol Hill row house. We remember God’s entrance into our world in the person of Jesus by throwing a party - in the dead of winter.

It’s March 2nd. And we’re two months away from Christmas Eve. It feels strange to say it, but Christmas was only 9 weeks ago. Though, to be honest, it feels like it was lifetimes ago. And in my backyard, there’s still a bald patch where we built the fires. The grass was burned, and the earth is still scorched. The coals, and the wood we used – they are long since burned and are now ash; ash that is still lying on the ground two months later. I probably should have shoveled it up, but I’ve left it – in part because I like the ash and the char and the way it reminds me that a celebration was had here. I walk past the barren burnt earth each night while taking out the trash, and look over and grin.

In a few weeks I’ll take my rake, and hoe, and shovel and I’ll turn the earth and push the ashes deeper into the soil and in the spring the new grass will grow, and if I’m lucky dandelions; the flowering kind and the kind you pluck and blow. I hope the neighborhood kids will come by and blow the seeds even farther around my yard…and my neighbors’ yards.

And all that grass, and all that growth, and all those flowers, and the fuzzy dandelions - it will all emerge from the ashes of a fire used to celebrate Jesus’ arrival.

Because even what is lost in the fire, can be found in the ashes.