by Pastor Laura Stern
According to America’s Christmas movie industry, New York City is the ideal setting for Christmas. Something about the city’s street decorations, snow covered taxi cabs, crowded shopping malls, and street corner Santas just shout Happy Holidays. For me, however, the essence of Christmas is found on an island far different from that of Manhattan. Ocracoke Island captures the quiet beauty of Christmas, while celebrating the season with music, fellowship, and faith.
There might be few tourists on the island, but Ocracoke does not slow down in December. Annual Christmas events include a community Christmas concert, women’s potluck charity dinner, Ocracoke School Christmas Show, Wassail Party at the Ocracoke Preservation Society, cookie exchange at Ocracoke library, door-to-door Christmas caroling and chili supper, special church services, drive by live nativity scene, and the Christmas Eve Pageant.
Throughout all of these events, there is music. Traditional Christmas carols, modern original pieces, cello solos, A cappella groups, and school-kid choirs fill the air. The two church communities come together and offer an evening of caroling to the island’s elderly and homebound. The Methodist church bells chime 6 o’clock and then offer a concert of Christmas hymns. While the rest of America sounds of holiday hustle and bustle, Ocracoke village rings with music.
While individual island groups host different events, the events are decidedly open to everybody. There are few, if any, private parties as people’s schedules are full with community-wide activities. Community leaders coordinate events so that there are no scheduling conflicts. The United Methodist Women kick-off the season with a women’s dinner at the Community center (not the church), that welcomes fifty or more women, many of whom worship elsewhere or not at all. This event sets the tone for an entire season where neighbors come together regularly in acts of fellowship.
As the pastor of Ocracoke Island United Methodist, I find faith woven throughout the island’s celebrations. It is not the typical church faith I have found elsewhere. Our Christmas Eve service concludes with the arrival of Santa, not necessarily a chorus of excitement over the birth of Christ. However, the entire community comes out to attend the Christmas Eve service, even members of other worshipping communities who move their services so as not to conflict with the one held in the island’s historic church. There is no sermon, but a pageant of the Christmas story acted out by the island children, many of whom only attend church over these weeks so as to be part of this annual tradition.
It is not holy or reverent. There are kids, costumes, crowds, and open flames. Yet as God looks upon an entire community coming together on the eve of Christ’s birth, on the greatest of all stories being told by five-year-olds draped in over-sized fabrics, and the light of Christ traveling down pews of people who otherwise never sit together, I believe God smiles.
