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This article originally appeared in the December 2006 Boost-A-Month Club Newsletter
'Little Christmas' Celebrated in Big Way
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| The children of Glenmary’s St. Luke mission in Bruce, Miss., open “Little Christmas” gifts sent from St. John the Evangelist Church in Honesdale, Penn. |
The folks at the St. Luke the Evangelist Catholic Church in Bruce, Miss., will begin their celebration of the birth of Christ with Mass on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve. (They won’t know until a bit closer to Christmas exactly when Glenmary Father Tim Murphy will come to Bruce from Pontotoc to celebrate liturgy.)
And they’ll conclude their Christmas celebration with a party on the Feast of the Epiphany, known in many cultures as “Little Christmas.” Sister Mary Jean Morris, the pastoral coordinator in Bruce, describes the January party as a “community-building event,” one that highlights the fact that Christmas is not just a day, but an entire season.
Sister Mary Jean and the parishioners in Bruce have a vision of Christmas that’s very different from typical American culture. Instead of an abrupt end to Christmas on Dec. 26, with trees set out for garbage pick-up and no more Christmas music on the radio, the Bruce mission keeps the celebration going. Their celebration of the season is enhanced through the generous efforts of parishioners at St. John the Evangelist Church in Honesdale, Pa., which adopted this Glenmary mission in 2002. The Pennsylvania church provides the children of the Bruce mission with “Little Christmas” gifts.
On the first Sunday of Advent, St. John parishioners Larry and Ruth Furnald and the St. John Social Concerns Committee decorate a Christmas tree in the Honesdale church, but not with ornaments and tinsel. The decorations are tags marked with the names of boys and girls in Bruce, as well as the names of local children provided by service groups in Honesdale.
The Pennsylvania parishioners choose a name and buy an age-appropriate gift for each child. A couple of weeks before Christmas, the gifts—wrapped and ribboned and tagged for the boys and girls in Bruce—are delivered to the mission in Mississippi. The gifts are then distributed—not before Christmas, however, as would be the case in most places, but on the Feast of Epiphany, which this year falls on Jan. 7.
St. Luke parishioner Tracy Salinas, mother of three, talks of how her children appreciate receiving the Little Christmas gifts and how much they enjoy the celebration at St. Luke. The Salinas family spent Christmas 2005 with family in Mexico, so they were particularly grateful to celebrate “Little Christmas” at home in Bruce.
“In Mexico, they don’t celebrate Christmas the same way we do here, so even though my kids were sorry to have missed Santa Claus, they really enjoyed the Epiphany party at church,” Tracy says. Their benefactors in Honesdale, she says, “seem like really nice people.”
Tracy’s impression was confirmed by Jettie Pettit, who visited Honesdale in June 2002 to sign the covenant agreement with St. John the Evangelist. She stayed with Larry and Ruth, spoke at the Masses and shared stories of her fellow parishioners in Bruce with the Honesdale congregation.
Although she was offered an airline ticket for the trip, she decided to travel by bus—a 27-hour trip! “I saw places in this country I had never seen before, and met people I never would have met,” she says. “I did a little bit of evangelizing along the way. People asked me where I was going and I told them where I was going and why.”
Jettie, a retired high school math teacher and the church organist, converted to Catholicism about 10 years ago and has been an active member of St. Luke ever since.
The children in the mission love the gifts they receive from Honesdale, Jettie says. “Oh, my goodness! They are the nicest things! And every child has a package under the tree. And the tags don’t say just ‘10-year-old boy’ or ‘6-year-old girl.’ They have the names of all the children on them.”
“The people in our mission are the working poor,” Sister Mary Jean says. “The gifts the kids receive from Honesdale are a little nicer than items their parents might be able to afford.”
As an adoptive parish, St. John provides on-going financial support to the mission in Bruce, and makes regular contributions of food and clothing.
“We have our signed covenant agreement hanging on the wall of the church,” says Jettie. “We really feel connected.”
When you ask the folks in Bruce about what this covenant relationship with their Honesdale adopters has meant to them, the first thing you hear about is not the Christmas gifts. It is the visits that have been paid by the Larry and Ruth Furnald and the St. John Youth Group (about 20 teens and five adults).
In June 2004, for example, the Pennsylvania group spent a week in Bruce renovating a building that is now used as a food pantry. “The building hadn’t been used in 20 years and needed a lot of work,” says Sister Mary Jean. “They got it all done in a week.” The food pantry has enabled St. Luke—in collaboration with other local churches—to distribute food to the poor of the community.
“Our kids learned a lot from the trip,” Larry says. “They had never seen the kind of poverty present in Mississippi, and the opportunity to help St. Luke’s has done a lot to draw our parish together.”
As time has passed, both Catholic communities have developed an ever-deepening relationship. Reminders like the signed covenant agreements and the mutual prayers offered during liturgies each week highlights Jettie’s description of the relationship between the parishes: “We’re family!” |
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