Angels and Mortals

This is a story about Christmas traditions and how in a childhood filled with uncertainty I found a simple advent game changed my whole perspective on what it means to be loved and give love.

My father left when I was five and my sister was three. Our house was halfway to being something amazing, exposed rafters and knocked through walls, not a curtain in sight. But it was not a comforting safe place to be. From my mother’s bedroom, I could lift a floorboard in the corner of the room and drop things on people coming through the front door. Out back was a narrow wilderness of long grass and old apple trees, under which young anarchists would lie in the summer, dressed in black, smoking and gesticulating. There was rarely a full meal in the fridge. My mother was a charming bundle of neuroses and wild ideas about how we should live, but she was not the natural leader of our little pack. We drew murals on the walls and went to Greenham common a lot and had no fixed bedtime, but didn’t get hugged much. 

A few years later we moved to a commune in Dorset and I had grown into a spiky thing. Full of clever words and challenges, all grown up in my pre-teen body. People all around me were expressing their emotions and trying to live together as a family that wasn’t a family. It’s a difficult thing to do, but they were giving it a go. We ate meals together around a long table at the same time every day, milked the cows every morning, signed up for tasks and hung out playing music or dancing like nobody was watching, in clothes that bore no resemblance to fashion. For a child like me with nobody to set my edges, it was just the structure I needed. In fact, I may be the first person to go to a commune to drop in rather than drop out.

Christmas rolled around, puddings were made and Anne-Marie the Swiss lady insisted that we observe the tradition of Saint-Nicolas on December 6th. All the children put their shoes out in the frosty courtyard and found them later, filled with clementines and nuts and a letter from Saint Nicholas praising them for their triumphs and encouraging them to be good in the coming year. Even though I was sure I was too old for this nonsense, it was a little bit of magic and I loved it despite myself.

This particular year and all the following years that I lived there, we played an advent game that had arrived via someone who visited Findhorn, the grand commune in Scotland where everything and everyone was steeped in spirituality. It’s a version of secret Santa I guess, but without the onus on commercialism. The game was called Angels and Mortals and when everyone had put their names in a hat and picked out someone else’s, we had our assigned mortal – for whom we would secretly be an angel for a week, with the big reveal on Christmas day. The only stipulation for the week was that your mortal should not get even a whiff of your identity. They should feel your beneficence only obliquely, through the actions of others, or treats left silently while they were elsewhere. And so, we went about our angelic business, arranging for everyone to hug our mortal on one day and the next day allowing them to sleep late while a willing volunteer milked the cows in their place. Biscuits were left for one mortal and then secretly regifted to another. Everyone was happy to pitch in and do favours because we couldn’t actively look after our own mortals, so we asked and offered and the whole week was infused with wonder and generosity. As the week went on, some of us began to twig who our angel might be, yet others had not an inkling and were amazed at the stealth and ingenuity of their angel. Each of us were constantly looking for a way to make the life of our mortal just that bit sweeter and the reward was simply seeing their delight. 

Christmas day came and with it a trip to Charmouth beach to throw ourselves naked into the sea, followed by a smorgasbord of roasted roots from the garden, freshly plucked Brussels sprouts and a massive nut roast with onion gravy. As we lay about afterwards in a roast vegetable coma, the time came to reveal who was who in the game. The pairings were pure genius from the universe, a couple of sworn enemies and a troubled husband and wife forced to put aside differences and act with altruism. My mortal and I turned out to be each other’s angels – which I already knew because some treats had come right back to me the next day, lovingly wrapped in pink tissue. Nothing else about Christmas felt as good as that week leading up to it, spent in service to others, thinking only of their comfort and joy. 

So now I try to embrace that feeling when I can during advent. Instead of thinking about who I should gift what and how I’m going to get it bought and wrapped and given, I think about how I can give of myself without hope of reward. There’s no sense of burden or obligation in it and no last-minute shopping in petrol stations. It doesn’t tax the planet and will only bring joy. Try it with your friends or family this Christmas. I guarantee it will fill your heart.

Naomi Devlin

@naomiannedevlin

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