Home for the holidays on Longboat Key

Every hour on the hour on Christmas Eve in 2020, St. Armands Key Lutheran Church’s Rev. Ken Blyth ran from one abbreviated service to the next. To allow for social distancing in the middle of the pandemic, church conducted eight services in the sanctuary and fellowship hall. 

“Me, Michael (Bodnyk, music director) and the choral scholars would run down the hallways into the other room with 10 minutes to spare to start worship in the other space,” Blyth said. “To be able to have a worship service in the sanctuary and know that we don’t have to keep looking at our watches to make sure we’re at or under 45 minutes, to be able to do a service the way people want it to be done, to end each worship service … with a candle in hand when the lights get dim and we sing ‘Silent Night’ … and to look out over a sea of faces that are lit only by the candles and see people smile or cry a little, that’s the highlight of the year for me.” 

Last year, worshippers made reservations to visit their churches on Christmas Eve. Singing was tamped down. Churchgoers made their way quickly out the door when service was over, and church leaders couldn’t linger. There were few pats on the back, hugs from friends, reunions with visiting family. In 2020, Christmas felt different. Though things are still different, 2021 is shaping up to be somewhat of a return to Christmas as usual. 

“You don't realize how important those things are until you can't do them,” Blyth said. “I like to think that last year, in all the very different things we did and the different ways we did it, that people still had a meaningful worship service, they still had the Christmas story, they still entered into the gospel, and they still shared the peace of Christ. But all the things we had to leave out or trim or cut short or not do at all, this year, we can do them. Even though they may be small things, and they all amount to big things.”

There are a few things that have changed across the board. Churches recommend that worshippers wear masks, even though there are no mandates, and sanitizer now sits alongside Bibles in pews. There’s some peace of mind thanks to the high vaccination rate on the island, too. Churches are now live streaming their services and everyone is looking to improve their video quality and bring church to everyone in a world that’s always going to be different post-pandemic. Last year at All Angels, Rev. Dave Marshall kept the doors open and saw people come up to worship while outdoors. 

“It was kind of magical to be out there with the lights, and then of course, the weather was perfect,” Marshall said. “Our folks have been very resilient and very generous. We will always have online services, we will always have our outdoor speakers and people can walk up and hear the service. Four or five years down the road when this is just a horrible memory, we will still be doing all of these things, just because that's who we are.”

Longboat Island Chapel’s Rev. Brock Patterson and St. Mary, Star of the Sea Catholic Church’s Rev. Robert Dziedziak will be experiencing their second Christmas on the island. It'll bring marked changes to how things were last year, and neither man really knows what to expect. Dziedziak knows that things are still a bit crippled by COVID-19, but he’s focusing on finding joy and peace with his congregants that he’s gotten to know over the last year through his humor and messages at Mass. 

“It’s difficult to know what to expect, but this is a season of joy,” Dziedziak said. “We’re leaving behind what was not so pleasant, we’re going to let it go and move toward a better future … we’re not there yet, but it’s not as bad as it was.” 

Patterson has seen attendance increase dramatically in the last three or four months, a far cry from the sparsely attended Christmas Eve services in 2020. There are a lot of congregants he didn’t meet yet, and he’s enjoyed watching reunions, meeting new people and seeing more smiles again. He’s seen more joy and — perhaps relatedly — more Christmas decorations around the island. 

“It really turned and people started wanting to do stuff that they normally do, like plan holiday events like they normally do, so we have been having events all the time and of course we’ve got the (Christmas in the Garden) and that’s outside, but it’s just full of people every night,” Patterson said. “Seeing the excitement that people have, it was just a very different environment than when I arrived down here.”

There will be some reunions that feel like brand-new meetings as Canadian and European congregants return and vulnerable members return with the peace of mind of the vaccine. 

“This year, we have a lot of things to be thankful for, and I've noticed that Thanksgiving has passed, but the feeling of Thanksgiving is continuing and I know that it will be continuing through the Christmas season,” Marshall said. “There are parishioners I haven't seen in almost two years, and I'm giving thanks when I see them … There's just this really big sense of being thankful to be together and to be healthy.”