Those seeking to describe the St. Cecilia Dominican sisters usually portray our sisters as radiating a distinctive joy, which characterizes the entire community. Still, those who have never experienced convent life may wonder: What is Christmas like in the convent?  Can it be happy for the sisters to be separated from their families at that time of the year most associated with family gatherings?

In fact, celebrating Christmas in the convent can be compared to celebrating at the home of a very large extended family into which you have married. There are new grandmothers, aunts and sisters-in-law of all ages with whom to become acquainted. There is the same joy as in any family as sisters arrive home from distant missions, the same bustle to help them into the warm house with their luggage as an icy blast of winter air comes in the back door. The same excitement pervades the house as sisters sweep, mop and polish every surface, wax the floors, and decorate the doors, stairwells, parlors and recreation hall with wreaths, greenery and Christmas trees. Of course, there are a few more Christmas trees than the usual family sets up. Besides the sixteen-foot balsam fir in the recreation hall, there are usually decorated trees in the novitiate, the infirmary, the community room, the refectory, the guest dining room, and the Mother General’s office.

There is gift giving in the convent, although the community’s vow of poverty precludes expensive individual gifts to one another. Most gifts are actually prepared for our benefactors (the doctors and other professionals who have donated their services to the sisters throughout the year). The novitiate sisters bring formidable numbers of bakers to the kitchen to produce dozens of fancy cookies, candies and holiday breads to wrap and deliver. Some years, the Mother General takes the postulants around like Santa’s elves to make gift deliveries to our generous benefactors.

Sometimes sisters bring their own regional Christmas customs with them.  Along with sisters from New Mexico and Arizona came the custom of making luminarias to line every driveway, even the quarter-mile Rosary Walk in front of the house.

One favorite Christmas Eve custom at St. Cecilia convent is the caroling. Shortly after 11:00 p.m. the sisters take twenty or thirty minutes roving, not through neighborhood streets, but through the sleeping corridors and the infirmary, singing favorite carols “a capella” to waken those who chose to nap for a couple of hours before Midnight Mass. When the carolers arrive in the chapel at 11:30, they are greeted with more music, a program of choral and orchestral Christmas carols that bring the assembled congregation up to the midnight hour for Mass. The last-minute practices by the choir and the “all-sister orchestra” have become, in recent years, an attraction in themselves. An informal audience usually gathers in the recreation hall to listen to the eleventh-hour warm-ups by the “schola cantorum” and by the sisters who play trumpets, flutes, clarinets, and other assorted instruments (the favorite orchestral number being “Do You Hear What I Hear?”).

At the beginning of Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, the Mother General walks down to the crib with the youngest postulant, who bears the Baby Jesus on a pillow. When they reach the manger, Mother takes the baby from the pillow and lays Him gently in the manger. This custom is not peculiar to Dominicans. Gertrud von le Fort’s novel The Song at the Scaffold depicts a Christmas night scene when the Carmelite mother superior and the youngest novice carry the Infant King of Glory to every sister’s cell.

After Midnight Mass, our professed sisters and novitiate sisters gather in their respective community rooms for refreshments before profound silence at 2:00 a.m. Later that morning (in recent years, at the incredibly late sleep-in hour of 8:00 a.m.!) the rising bell sounds, and with it, what the sisters call “rising music” for the half-hour that it takes to be dressed and come to the chapel for morning prayers and a second Christmas Mass. Christmas music echoes through the stairwells and sleeping corridors as organ, trumpets, and other instruments “pull out all the stops.” Like most families, the sisters linger over a long Christmas brunch after Mass, and spend a happy, quiet Christmas Day cooking, napping, chatting with sisters from out-of-state missions, and especially spending time adoring our Spouse in the chapel, where a serene nativity scene surrounded by white poinsettias provides a foreground for His Real Presence in the tabernacle.

For vocation related Advent meditations courtesy of Vocation.com, go to the following address:

http://www.vocation.com/content-nva.htm