This is Keith and this is Ben, and this is Main Street Lutherans. Well, Merry Christmas, Keith.

Merry Christmas, Ben.

We are recording between Christmas and New Year's. This episode will come out early January. So Merry Christmas to everybody and happy Epiphany, I suppose Happy New Year and all that. Thanks for sticking with us. We have completed our Christmas season. I thought for today's topic we might talk about what Lutheran Christmas is like. I know a lot of our listeners are Lutheran and they know what their, their Christmas experience is. But as we try to, to make the podcast a resource for people who are considering becoming ELCA Lutherans or @ least maybe participating in community with a church, maybe they want to know a little bit about what is normal for Lutheran congregations in our experience. At any rate, I'm sure there's a variety, but we can talk about.

That. I don't know if I would go so far as to say that our experience is normal, but yeah.

Sure, right. And, and honestly, it's probably true for most mainstream church organizations as far as what the Christmas experience is.

Like.

Right. But you know, if you come from a different tradition or none at all, you probably want to know what you're going to experience when you get into those, into those Sundays or were festival days. But hey, how was your.

Christmas? It was, it was good. Yeah. Church wise, it was good. Home wise. My daughter was sick, so that affected our family plans a little bit. They did not make it. Our daughter, who does live at home, was not feeling well and so she did not get to come to church. And so my wife stayed home as well and they were both going to be involved in the, the live Nativity that I'll talk about in a little bit. Apart from that, yeah, services went really well. It's my first Christmas at St Matthew as the lead pastor and as a solo pastor, so it did feel a little bit different. On the other hand, you know, again, I've been there for 15 years, so there's a lot of familiarity and comfort in that too. So, yeah, yeah, it was a, a good night. How about.

You? It was good. You know, talking about the overall season, I had two aspects of Christmas. I did a lot of supply preaching. We've been talking about that on and off here the last several episodes. So December, Advent and then this past Sunday and into January, I'll be supplying a lot of places. And so that added a lot of extra stuff to my year. I've never in the past I've, I've maybe, maybe supply preached maybe one or two Sundays a Month, most of the time, none. And so I didn't have to do back to back sermons very often. And so I spent a lot of time in the texts, which was brand new for me and I should expect to do that more often. I feel for everybody out there that does that a lot. But December is a busy time for me because, well, I still have the white beard and the white hair right now, so. Recovering from being Santa Claus since the first weekend of November, our holiday nights program at work has 18 nights in December. I participated in most of them in various forms, mostly Santa Claus. And so I interacted with lots of people, lots of kids. And so it took until the Monday before Christmas for me to get sick just dealing with that many people. I'd probably make contact with five or six hundred people each night that I worked there. So it was inevitable that I would get something. And I got a stomach bug and so I was out for 24 hours. But it could have been worse. And none of the rest of my family caught it. So that's.

Good.

Yeah. So it was very interesting that way. Learned a lot about Santa Claus stuff this year, I think. So I had one thought in preparing my sermon for the first week of Christmas, first Sunday after Christmas, and that is that we have a phrase for Easter, right. We say Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia. And it came up in my mind why we don't have something like that for Christmas. I think the reason is we don't have many weeks of Christmas. Right. At most we.

Get. Right.

Yeah. So that's probably.

Why. Yeah, yeah. St. Mat's has this thing that I just inherited when I got there that gets worked into some of the Christmas bulletins. And it is also call and response. And they say, glory to God in the highest. The congregation responds and peace to God's people on earth. And it's got sort of a similar seasonal feel to it is what. The one that you described for Easter. And it, you know, it gets. It gets repeated at places like at the greeting near the beginning of the service and at the dismissal at the end. And it's not. I don't know if people would do it from memory the way they do, you know, he has risen. He's risen.

Indeed.

Right. But yeah, it's there in the bulletin. Then it does get. Get reused and it kind of still catches that sort of flavor of the. Of the season in a way.

Yeah. Well, I was thinking maybe we.

Could. What is your.

Proposal? We could rhyme something with Merry Christmas, like God is with Us and. Okay, Happy New Year. Jesus is. Is here, right? Something like.

That.

Okay. Or Christ is.

Here.

Sure. But. All right, it's too late. By the time this episode comes out, we'll be through the season. We'll have to remember this for next.

Year. Yeah, well, it's a good T shirt opportunity.

Though. That's true. That's.

True.

Yeah. Well, let's talk about Lutheran Christmas services. We talked about Advent last year. We talked about how, you know, it has some flexibility in it and sort of the themes. But Christmas Eve, you talked about a sort of a pageant thing going on at Saint.

Mat's. Yeah. So we have three services Christmas Eve, the three o' clock service, designed so that it's over before it gets dark because we've got some folks that, you know, don't want to be driving after dark. It's also really convenient for people that have plans in the evening with family or that are going to be getting on the road to go travel to visit family or to get out of town, whatever. The last few years we've, we've been seeing an influx of families with young children. So we started this year, we added a children's message to that service. But apart from that, that 3 o' clock service is shaped a lot like a regular Sunday communion service, with the exception that, you know, we sing a ton of Christmas carols. We take out most of the liturgical music and sing verses of carols or sing whole carols, as you know, the gathering hymn, the hymn of the day, etc. But then when we get into the evening services, 7:00 clock and 10:30, they're not identical, but they're very similar. They both. The big thing that a lot of people in Lutheran churches I think sort of look for is near the end of the service after communion is a time where, you know, different churches do it in different ways, but the lighting gets dim. Everybody has an individual candle in their hand that gets lit. So now you're in a candle lit worship space. And typically each congregation has like a tradition. Most of the ones I know of, they sing Silent Night during that time. So, you know, singing Silent Night by candlelight near the conclusion of the service. And then there's sort of this, I don't know, there's. It doesn't even have to be more than a couple of moments, but there is this moment near the end where that song has finished and you're in this candlelit room filled with people and it's just this gorgeous moment of quiet and beauty and then it passes In a very natural way. And the lights come on and we sing Joy to the world. And it's just. I don't know, it is pretty magical in its own way. Yeah. So we do that at both our 7 o' clock and our 10:30 service. And there's lots of. We have a brass ensemble. All the choirs are involved in that service. It's kind of long. We do. We include communion, there's a sermon. And then at the seven o' clock service, which we call our family service, that's the one where we do this live Nativity. So instead of the usual readings, we take the Christmas story from Luke chapter two and split it up into four parts. And different churches do this different ways. Some churches, when you talk about a live Nativity, you're expecting to, like, be outside with farm animals. Right. That's fine. Some church, you talk about a pageant and you think about, like, kids acting out the Christmas story, saying the lines, maybe a narrator, sort of like, you know, the Charlie Brown Christmas.

Special. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Ours is neither of those, and it's kind of in between. But we take the Christmas story divided up into four chunks. Usually it's the pastor, not always, but the pastor sort of narrates the story. We read a portion of the baton, and while we're reading, there are indeed people in costume. We try to get a family, like a couple that has just had a child to play the holy family, to play Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus. And this year we did indeed have that. We had a young couple who just had their third child. And so they played Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus. Baby Jesus was awake for the entire show and stayed quiet. We're not really sure how that played out, but that was cool. And then their two older sons were shepherds as part of the show as well. And so, yeah, so we tell the story and the angel comes and sees Mary and tells her she's going to have a child. And then they make the journey to Bethlehem and the child is born. And then the shepherds see the angels and the angels tell them what's going on. And then the shepherds go and visit Mary and Joseph and Jesus. Those are the four basic parts of the story. And then as we tell each one, the various characters come out and do their bits. They don't speak and they don't. They don't like, act anything out. They just sort of move to the various places in the chancel space that are assigned for, you know, this is where the. The shepherds are in the field. And this is where the manger is where Jesus is laid after he's born. But they, they sort of. You sort of follow along the story visually as it's being read. And then in between each section, we also sing a verse or two of a kid friendly Christmas carol, you know, a verse of a way in a manger, that sort of thing. And it's. It's just fun. It's. It's been going on at St Matthew for a really long time and like, longer than I've been there. And it's just the way they do it. And it's something people have come to expect, but it's also. It is really. It is really.

Neat.

Cool. Yeah. So that's the. That's our family service. And then the 1030 service is, you know, it's. It's a little more formal feeling, but it's still really festive. It's the only one where I chanted all of the communion liturgy instead of doing a slightly simpler version at the other two. But there's the brass and the candlelight and sing Silent Night and all of that. And it's Preceded by a 30 minute prelude concert that's included in our radio broadcast. So that makes it a little bit different.

Too. Yeah, but it gives people a reason to come in. You know, at Unity, we do pretty simple, just one service, seven o'. Clock. It's candle lighting at the end. Of course, it's a. I think. I think the smaller congregation. I think it's a lot more like a family gathering. There's a lot of stuff going on at the beginning. People are exchanging presents. One of the funny things for us was that we'd given a gift to a friend at church, but she had some problems and couldn't come to church for months. And she finally got our gift to her, I think, in August. And so Pastor Carm gives me two cards, and they're both from rj. One's a thank you note for the present, and the other one was just a Christmas card. And it was pretty funny. I mean, so that's an example of, you know, it's just sort of a family gathering. And it's a time when people who maybe aren't quite as commonly there show up and people bring their families. So extended family shows up because mom and grandpa are going to church and so we get to. To do that sort of thing. Yeah. So that was. That was Christmas Eve for us. Yeah, Christmas.

Day. You guys do a Christmas Day.

Service? We.

Don'T.

Okay. Because everybody's made it.

Right?

Yeah. You know, it's early enough, so. So I don't know, it's not, it's not, it's not bright. It's not daytime at 7, but it's, you know, early enough. Roads aren't necessarily bad. People aren't driving when they're really tired, at least, so it doesn't seem to be an issue. You've been at churches that have had Christmas Day.

Services? Yeah, my, my first call, which was a big church, had a Christmas Day service. I recall not liking it because I was the only pastor on staff that had a kid at home. You know, my older child was just a newborn when I got there. Well, less than a year old. And so, you know, I was there for four or five years and, and, you know, with this small child. And so every, every year on Christmas Day, we would get up and kind of quickly open the presents, which isn't hard, you know, with a kid. They want to quickly open the presents. But then, you know, I, I'd have to leave because the service was at 10 o' clock and I'd be gone. You know, it was. And that service was. It was special in its own way and it was fun, but it wasn't. There wasn't anything about it that made it much different than a regular Sunday service, except that it happened on Christmas Day and then people would go home again and some of the folks were there from out of town and they would just come because we had a service and some folks were there visiting family and friends and some people had been there the night before, but they came out anyway because they just liked it. Yeah. Yeah. We do not do a Christmas day service at St Matthew, for which I'm grateful. You know, Christmas Eve. I don't, I don't know how widespread. I guess, like you said, a lot of main mainline Protestants do a Christmas Eve service. I don't know where the tradition comes from, but, you know, in I think most people's heads, the idea of doing a service on Christmas Eve takes the place of doing a service on Christmas.

Day.

Yeah.

So. Yeah. And I, I suspect that part of it is that, well, you know, the Christmas story is about stars and, you know, showing up at night. And so it fits, it fits our, our story, you know, that fits the Bible story better than a morning service does. Unlike Easter, which is a sunrise thing. Right.

Yeah. I mean, even the Christmas carols we sing. Oh, Holy Night is about really Christmas Eve, I guess.

Right. And honestly, for my family, the one I grew up in, that was when Santa Claus came was While we were at church. So if we didn't go to church on Christmas Eve, Santa wouldn't be able to.

Come. Gotcha. Yeah. So, I mean, he's not holding up till you're asleep. Yeah.

Yeah. Cassandra knew that we were going to Grandma's house in the morning.

So. Yeah, it's all the practical stuff, right.

Yeah. I don't.

Know. So the Christmas season is short, but like the song 12 Days of Christmas, the Christmas season is really 12 days long and full of birds, Right? Yeah, yeah, it is.

Long. Well, 12 days. Not compared to.

Easter. Right, right. I mean, it's a short season. It's the shortest season in the church.

Year.

Yeah. Yeah, it really is. 12 days. So it starts on December 25th. And because if. If Christmas Eve, December 24th, is on a Sunday, that's the fourth Sunday of Advent. Right. Now, a lot of churches will still do both. Like, we. We've done that at St. Matthew where we've, you know, we've had a service. Maybe we don't have all the regular Sunday services, but we've always had a morning service that was the fourth Sunday in Advent. And then we go on with the afternoon and evening Christmas Eve services. But. Yeah. So Christmas. Christmas Day, December 25, is the first day of Christmas. And you count out 12 days, it takes you up to January.

5Th.

Fifth. Right. That's the Christmas season. And then on January 6th is Epiphany, which will talk about in a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Christmas Eve. The scripture readings that are assigned by the lectionary are the same every year. It's one of the places where three years of the lectionary do not. Do not change. Same for Christmas Day. The only variety you get is on. It's not even on Christmas, too, is it? It's only on the first Sunday on Christmas. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, the first Sunday of Christmas changes each year, but the. The second Sunday of Christmas is always John one that is red. So, yeah. And then Epiphany on January 6th is, you know, it's the day that commemorates the arrival of the wise men, Magi, with their gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. And that's why we always think there's three wise men. Although the story doesn't actually say. It's just. It's plural. So we know there's at least two, but could have been 50 of.

Them. And it's tradition that that story has been passed.

For.

Yeah. A long.

Time. But so, you know, some churches hold off on it, including the wise men in Their nativity scene until they get to epiphany. That's.

Right. Sometimes they move through the. They move through the sanctuary, getting closer and closer. Kind of like elf on a shelf.

Right? Something like that.

Yeah. They don't do pranks. I.

Understand. But I've seen some pastors do some creative children's messages by using the. The wise men moving through the. The worship space for those couple.

Of. But we only get the.

Winners. And if you include it. If you include it into Advent, then you can stretch it out further. If you have the Nativity, set up an.

Advent. But yeah, yeah, I guess they could have started early. They didn't have to start on Christmas.

Day. Right.

Right. Yeah. So, yeah, we get Christmas one and two, and then we get epiphany. Is there any celebration? I mean, you know, Pentecost. We dress up in red when. When epiphany is a special. You know, when it's a Sunday, do we. Are there any traditions? What color is epiphany for the actual.

Day? It's white. As the. The same as Christmas. The same as Christmas, Yeah. All of the festivals that. That have to do with basically moments in Jesus's life are white, but. Yeah, so epiphany is. Is white. Same as Christmas, the Christmas season. Yeah, but it's the story of the wise men appearing. And then, you know, it's interesting when you. You get into discussions about, you know, the wise men likely didn't arrive when Jesus was lying in the manger as a newborn. You know, it might have taken several months or even a couple of years for them to come. The story goes in Matthew where the. Where the magi appear that after they tell Herod that they're in town looking for the newborn king, and he asks them about how long they've been searching for him, that's when Herod comes up with the plot to kill these children that are all age 2 or younger. So why kill kids as old as 2? If the Magi say, well, we know the baby was born last Tuesday, so the thought that maybe the wise men actually took two years to get there. And so Herod was being extra cautious in killing every child under the age of two. So, yeah, it might be that Jesus was a toddler by the time the magi arrived. Yeah. And then. And then the second Sunday after Christmas, we always read the prologue from John, the first chapter of John, which is where we get this concept that Jesus pre. Exists before time, even before creation. And it's neat to include that in the Christmas story as.

Well. Yeah. So it's kind of an overview. We still sing Christmas carols through Christmas one and two. Right. And then begins the epiphany season, which is the Sundays after epiphany, which we go back to green for normal time.

Right? Yeah. Ordinary.

Time.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's like the Sundays after Pentecost in that it focuses on, you know, Jesus's followers. But all of the gospel stories in the epiphany season have to do with light in some way. They not either. Either light or something. Something is revealed about who Jesus is in a new way in each of the Sundays after epiphany. So throughout that season, we start learning things about Jesus and by extension about who we are as Jesus's people.

Cool. Right? So I hope that prepares anybody who's interested in what. What Lutherans, Elca Lutherans do after or during the Christmas season and then. And then after. Hopefully that helps ease. Ease you into that. So we are doing better? No, but we're going to do better know in Holden Village the this for this episode. And the reason is that Holden Village has a lot of tradition. Keith and I are not experts on Holden Village. We're actually setting up a time to be able to talk with folks at Holden Village. But since we started that, they've had some. Some sort of emergency things come up. And so I wanted to have a chance for us to talk about Holden Village, give folks an option to go investigate some of the stuff on their own and maybe find ways to support. Support this organization, the people that are connected to it. Well, let's talk about why. So Holden Village is in eastern Washington State. It's in the mountains up until. So starting 1896, it started to be a copper mine. And Mr. Holden started this copper mine and it had a village that was connected to the mines. The mine came closed in 1957 because the. The price of copper dropped to the point where it wasn't feasible to mine it anymore there. And so in 1960, after trying to sell the property to other people, it was deeded over to Lutheran Bible Institute of Seattle, which then became Trinity Lutheran College in Seattle, which closed in 2016. But starting in 1962, programs started as a retreat center, a Lutheran retreat center. And they have done programs since then. If you have done Marty Haugen's Holden Village Vesper service that was written there on Marty Haugen's sabbatical to holden village in 1986 over the winter. And so that has been a deep connection to Holden Village. And so it's Holden Evening.

Prayer.

Right. That's the vesper service. Our churches in, in our conference use that for Lent. So we do it on Wednesdays during Lent as a thing for shared among three congregations. Which is, which is really.

Nice. So the reason we're talking about setting of eating.

Prayer. It is. It is. Yeah. I think we used it at capital a bit too.

So.

Yeah. So in 2025. Well and over, over the history since 1962, there have been forest fires when, when fires hit in eastern Washington. Often they come close to Holden Village. It's a very desolate part of. Of Washington State. There are not many people out there. A lot of hiking. I think the Pacific Rim Trail goes. Or one of the Pacific trails goes through there. So there, there was a forest fire that came close to the property this past summer. And then in, in December there were mudslides. There's a really heavy rainfall that came in sustained for, for a long time. It created mudslides. They decided to evacuate. Now Holden Village has year round staff and they have folks that, that come in for a week or, or months to stay. And so they evacuated all of the, all the staff that weren't necessary to winterize and shut down the village were evacuated on December 13th of 2025. And by December 20th a week later they decided to evacuate the remaining staff who were trying to repair the systems there and get them ready for winter. In essence, what happened was the mudslide created some trees falling. Some of the trees crushed a feed pipe that would put water to the power generation, the hydroelectric power station. And they were trying to fix it. They found out that they couldn't do it in time and so they shut all that down and were evacuated and these folks were evacuated by helicopter. That's how desperate this was. The roads to get to Holden Village are difficult in the best weather and with the mudslides it has made that impossible to traverse. So. So they used helicopters to get out of there.

Yeah. Wow. They haven't just had a rough time of it the last. Well this past year.

Especially. Yeah. And this is a. I mean I haven't had any chance to go out there. I would love to. It takes a pretty big commitment to do that. I know that our campus ministry at Wayne State University, Henry Ford College and University of Michigan Dearborn has altogether ministries run by Pastor Ben Adams and he led a group that went out there in May this past year. And so it's a great retreat place. Very difficult to get to. It requires taking a boat to get to a bus that takes you up the, the route. Well, at least it did. And so, so it's a, it's a place that, that's sort of. It's, it's legendary within the elca. You don't have to have been close to it to know about it. So our thoughts and prayers are certainly with the folks not only that are at Holden Village, but also the people who hold Village close to their hearts.

So. Yeah. And the people whose, whose lives and livelihoods depend on it too, especially. Yeah.

Yeah. So. So that's it. I'll include some links to where you can learn more about Holden Village and maybe some ways to support them, maybe some of the resources they've got. And we do hope that we'll be able to talk with them. I don't want to push on them too much while they're dealing with this crisis, but we do want to have them on to talk about it. So talk about the, the.

Place. So.

Absolutely. Yeah. So that's it for this episode. Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Fote, and the show is produced by Phote Media Productions. Find all our contact information, links and a transcript in the episode notes. And until next time, go in peace. Serve the.

Lord. Thanks be to.