Shhhhhh with the holiday hubbub for a minute.

Let's do ourselves a favor here on Christmas Eve and take a last deep breath and find one last quiet moment and see if the six baby Jesuses tucked away in Ann Crehore's drawer have anything to tell us.

She keeps them there until Christmas morning. It's her symbolic way of slowing the season down to a more thoughtful and traditional pace.

As she prepares for Christmas in her Elizabeth home, Crehore often wonders if the figurines strike up a conversation while they wait. Guys will do that, you know. Maybe they wonder when it all became such a blur. How we came up with a calendar that all but eliminates Advent, that mandates the holiday season start the day after Halloween, that compels us to pick out a tree the day after Thanksgiving and then demands it all comes down the very next day after Christmas.

Not that there's anything wrong with any of that. The modern Christmas fits nicely on our iPhone calendars. We can even set up multiple alerts so it doesn't slip by. But have we lost touch with the preparatory rituals of the holiday season? Have we misplaced an opportunity for prayer, meditation and spiritual critique?

I grew up in a big Advent home. As such, Christmas never arrived with the speed of a flying sleigh. It muddled in from the Middle East strapped to the back of a lame camel. Advent was endless. On the flip side, once it got here it wouldn't leave. Our tree stayed up through Epiphany on Jan. 6 and beyond.

As I got older, and life amped up, I came to miss the quietly dramatic buildup toward the holidays. It made the season different than any other time of the year.

I called William Gregg to talk about it. He's the Episcopal bishop in Charlotte, and like Crehore, decorates late. He's also a big believer in "careful preparation" for the big day.

After all, Gregg says, we're being invited "to go live in a new place, a deeper place where we can get the strength to engage as creatively as we can in the living we need to do."

The Earth applauds this notion. This week, it turned away from the sun and we experienced the shortest day of the year. Now, in the last hours before Christmas, the days already are getting longer.

The calendars of nature and God have converged. On Sunday, as Ann Crehore places six tiny babies in the mangers around her home, light returns to the world.