TOP STORY: CHRISTMAS WITHOUT THE TRIMMINGS: A simple Christmas, where the light comes from within

c. 1996 Religion News Service NORTH MANCHESTER, Ind. _ There are no Christmas lights, but a fire burns in the wood stove. There is no Christmas tree. Instead, there is an Advent wreath _ white pine branches and purple candles that have burned their way through December. Santa isn’t coming. Mary and Joseph wait alone […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

NORTH MANCHESTER, Ind. _ There are no Christmas lights, but a fire burns in the wood stove.

There is no Christmas tree. Instead, there is an Advent wreath _ white pine branches and purple candles that have burned their way through December.


Santa isn’t coming. Mary and Joseph wait alone before a tiny, empty manger sitting on an apple crate with a bread-board top. Every time a member of the family performs an act of kindness, a piece of straw is laid in the manger to welcome the newborn king.

This is what Christmas looks like in the Kindy home. It is plain. It is sacred. Jesus is the centerpiece for Arlene and Cliff Kindy, both 47, and their daughters Erin, 17, and Miriam, 16.

They have cleared away the distractions of Christmas hype _ the blizzard of Christmas cards, expensive presents and lavish meals. They are trying to live the essence of Christmas _ the belief that God came to Earth as a poor child to bring peace and teach the world how to love.

As members of the Church of the Brethren, a Christian denomination that holds no creed other than the New Testament and promotes the principles of simplicity, non-violence, temperance and service to humanity, the Kindys try to make Christmas real every day.

They build houses with Habitat for Humanity in and around their northeastern Indiana community. They have rebuilt burned churches in the South and houses destroyed by hurricanes in the Caribbean.

They work in a local soup kitchen and prepare meals for neighbors just home from the hospital or mourning the death of a loved one.

They travel to Haiti and Israel’s West Bank to be with the poor as witnesses for an international organization called Christian Peacemaker Teams, a joint project of the Church of the Brethren, the Quakers and the Mennonite Church.


In all of this work, the Kindys look for Jesus, for a sign of his message and presence.”We are just returning what love we can, which is pretty minimal, really, compared with Christ’s love for us,”Arlene Kindy said.”Anytime we can be giving and loving we are doing Christ’s work. We are being Christmas.” The Church of the Brethren, part of the same anabaptist tradition that gave rise to such plain-living believers as the Amish and Mennonites, is a road map for this family. Cliff and Arlene were raised in the faith and are raising their daughters in the same tradition.

Eleven years ago the Kindys moved from town to a seven-acre farm. They made their home from a 30-year-old corn crib, building walls from the field stones and river rock scattered through the area, adding picture windows for solar heat and plumbing for kitchen and bath.

They have no mortgage. They share the farm and their Plymouth station wagon with a neighboring family and their phone with Cliff’s parents, who live in a mobile home next door.

The Kindys earn less than $10,000 a year farming their organic garden of potatoes, squash and cabbage; apples, grapes and raspberries; garlic, oregano and popcorn. This, too, is done in the service of God.”We chose to keep the income below the federal taxable level because so much of those taxes go to war purposes, to research and development into weapons. It’s just better for us not to make that money,”Cliff said.

Cliff works while he talks, rubbing popcorn kernels from their cobs into a basin on his lap. He talks about his favorite Scripture, the Gospel of Luke, which depicts most vividly Jesus’ life with the weak and the oppressed.”In Luke we read that the birth of the Messiah didn’t happen among kings. It was witnessed by the poor who were working in the fields, the dregs of society at the time,”Cliff said.”That is the beginning of the Gospel that turns everything upside down and challenges us to rethink what we do.” Cliff and Arlene say they try to live the spirit of Christmas all the time, in the mundane chores of farm life and the challenge of peace work in foreign lands.

Christmas happened for Arlene in October, when she spent 10 days in Haiti with Christian Peacemaker Teams, living with peasants in the northern part of the country. She learned most Haitians earn essentially slave wages _ 30 cents an hour _ making clothing for U.S. discount stores.


While families here decide what kind of sweatshirt or pajamas to buy at the shopping mall, Arlene said, Haitian families must decide which of their children will attend school on a given day.

But despite the poverty, she said she saw hope in Haiti and felt God’s presence.”For these people to have such a strong sense that something might get better, for them to still be able to talk to me and smile at me, for a little girl to come up to me and say, `Dance, missy,’ while the drummers were playing in the streets,”Arlene said,”in all of that I see Christ’s hand.” Christmas happened for Cliff in June and July, when he worked in the Virgin Islands building houses in the aftermath of a hurricane.

And for Erin and Miriam, Christmas happens all year long _ when they make birthday cards for their friends at the church youth group; when they gather flowers from the garden for a woman stricken with cancer, or for their grandmother,”just because,”Miriam said.

December does bring Christmas gifts to the Kindy home, often necessities like socks and underwear for the girls. Erin and Miriam make presents for their parents. This year it is a homemade calendar for the new year, filled with their own poetry and quotations from favorite writers.

Still, the teen-agers acknowledge they miss the surprises of their earlier childhood _ Christmas stockings filled with oranges and nuts, children’s books wrapped up for the season.

As she remembers such things, Erin Kindy searches for the meaning of a Christmas lived simply. She looks for what’s special about a holiday she tries to make real every day.


It doesn’t come easily.”We have made choices to observe Christmas the way we do and that means Christmas isn’t so different,”she said.”I think I have to keep looking for what it really means.”

MJP END CEBULA

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