I haven’t played along with the RevGals Friday Five in a long, long time … but this one really caught my eye. So I thought I’d throw in my two cents for the day. Here’s the challenge from RevRodH:

I have debated with myself for weeks about today’s Friday Five.

* Self 1: It should be deep and theological.
* Self 2: But it’s almost Christmas, it should be fun and warm and sweet.
* Self 1: But your last Friday Five was sort of silly. You should show your more serious side.
* Self 2: You worry WAY too much!

So after consulting with my fourteen year old daughter, we’re going playful, pals o’ mine! I love stories, so I hope you’ll tell some about your favorite Christmas memories.

1. What was one of your favorite childhood gifts that you gave:

This was the best all time Christmas moment ever. I don’t remember our respective ages … but I think I was in my early teens (say 13 or 14 … about the age that LightGirl is now). My next brother was about to turn 11 or 12 and my youngest brother was about 10. So this is about my youngest brother. He gave his Christmas list to our mother as we all did. There were several items on it … as all of ours had, but nothing stood out very much. My other brother and I decided to pool our resources and get him one of the items on the list, but we didn’t think too hard about it. It was just one of the items. We bought it and felt kinda good about it, but we were not attempting to get the “best” one or anything. We wrapped it up and felt a little bad, because it was very small and it came from both of us. But it was costly, so we just hoped he would know that.

Now, what you have to know about my youngest brother is that he is very tall. He’s always been tall for his age and when he was young he was very gangly. And at this time in my childhood we didn’t have any money for first hand furniture … we had cast-offs and lived in an old Vermont farmhouse with insulation for wallpaper. It was pretty stark, but we were generally speaking well-fed and happy. We heated with wood so the livingroom was always warm around the woodstove.

I can still remember the moment that my brother opened that gift. It was over 30 years ago. But it is still crystal clear in my mind. I can see him and where he was sitting on that old green sofa … between the woodstove and the window. He was all folded up because it was low to the floor and he carefully pulled the Buck Knife from it’s box, cradled it in his hands upon his knees and said over and over again, “Buck. Knife. WOW!” His eyes were huge and it was all he could do. Stare at that knife, cradle it in his hands and gasp. In my memory this went on for about 15 minutes. More likely it was two or three. But it made a huge impression on me. We still tell the tale between us siblings with huge foolish grins on all of our faces, about the gift with unexpected rewards for all of us.

2. What is one of your favorite Christmas recipes? Bonus points if you share the recipe with us.

Christmas morning Candy Cane Bread … yummy sweet bread made in the shape of a candy cane braided around maraschino cherries and apricots … served warm with confectioner sugar icing on top. I’d post the recipe … but it’s long and complicated. Hmmm … I’ll think about a link to a .pdf document. I have to give credit to my mother-in-law for this tradition. I don’t know where it came from before her, but I love it … so does everyone but LightGirl. She gets to start her own tradition when she has her own family. Ha!

Oh … I couldn’t stand it … I “need” those extra points 😀 LOL.  Here is a link to download the recipe.

3. What is a tradition that your family can’t do without? (And by family, I mean family of origin, family of adulthood, or that bunch of cool people that just feel like family.)

Having a big tree … as I discovered this year when I proposed having a small, living tree and was thoroughly ridiculed for it. It’s become a family joke. LightHusband has taken to calling me Moses because I want a “burning bush” as he calls my proposal for a small living tree to go with our reduced Christmas. So, apparently, my family cannot go without a big tree with all … every last one of the ornaments out, every last year.

4. Pastors and other church folk often have very strange traditions dictated by the “work” of the holidays. What happens at your place?

Well, this is the first year in a long time that I have not been directly involved in anything churchy around Christmas. I kind of don’t know what to do with myself. My parents are coming to visit, but we realized too late that it should have been the other way around, we ought to have made plans to go to them. Eh … such is life.

5. If you could just ditch all the traditions and do something unexpected… what would it be?

Take my children and all the money we spend on Christmas and go to the local women’s shelter in January. When we get there, we’d sit down and find some families to befriend and walk with. I’m tired of Christmas and all of it’s pressure, both sacred and secular. It’s just too much. We ask too much. We do too much. We want too much. We don’t love enough. I’d want to love more. That’s it …

John Smulo is starting another meme (isn’t there a limit on these?). But this one is fun and is sort of like a (non)commercial break in the action. And you self-select your participation.

Here are the rules, but in grand pirate tradition … they’re more like guidelines.

1. Write down your four favorite Christmas movies in descending order.
2. Tag the first ten people who respond in your comment section saying they want to particpate.
3. (Optional) Include a link to John’s post and encourage others to place a link to their completed meme in the comments section of his post so we can keep track of the meme. (I love how John uses the royal “we” in his directions … as if he has staff watching the meme. 😀 It makes me giggle.)

Okay … so … rules (but they’re more like guidelines) established and all that. Here are my four or so favorite Christmas movies in (no particular) order.

1. Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer … the 1964 edition and I’m partial to this for the Island of Mis-fit Toys.

2. How the Grinch Stole Christmas … the 1966 edition – I love Cindy Lu Who and her great big heart.

3. Home Alone (the first one) … in the midst of the slap-stick hilarity there is a lot of really spiritual stuff going on that’s worth watching and thinking about, plus I really love Joe Pesci in this.

4. Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation … just fun and the scenes at dinner knock me over.

For those of you who have been waiting with bated breath … here are photos of the finished livingroom.

We finally got it all done and completed yesterday with the help of LightHusband’s sister and her husband. Painting was completed with the assistance and able consultation of BlazingEwe. The computer on my desk in the corner belongs to my mother-in-law. It will not remain on my desk. It is there for it’s annual check up from LightHusband.

You can find the before photos in this post … along with these words of boldness (written on Sept. 15), that we did not live up to:

It will be finished this week. Our goal is to have the entire downstairs and our bedroom painted by Thanksgiving.

Well … we did finish the livingroom. And we did get the kitchen painted. And the powder room. And the upstairs hallway. The house does look good. The livingroom, in particular, looks completely and utterly different than it did. This is good. I can now sit and relax in my livingroom again without feeling panicky and sad. It is no longer a place of pain and attack, but a place of sanctuary and rest once again. For that I am thankful.

Well then. I’m now keepin’ up with the Joneses and keepin’ on with getting ready for Thanksgiving.

Our first guests arrive today. The house is not ready. It will be. Sort of. Things will be fine and we’ll all have fun. It won’t go according to my original plan, but the necessary things will get done and the unnecessary things will drop away. Hopefully, I will remember to put the turkey in the oven on time.

It turns out that I do not have stress-induced eczema. I have a fungus that is causing the itching. Super! In what has become a standing pre-Thanksgiving tradition for LightHusband and I, we had matching doctors appointments yesterday afternoon. He has an upper respiratory infection and a sinus infection. I have fungus. Ewweth. Apparently we all have fungus on our skin, but if it gets underneath through a break in the skin then it becomes a problem. Bleh. Something I did not want to learn.
It makes having 16 for dinner on Thanksgiving and hosting a party for 35 the next day just another hoop to jump through. Keeping up and keeping on.

In other news, the grandparents will stay an extra day. We’re going to a Washington Capitals game on Saturday evening. This came up as a surprise yesterday afternoon. LightGirl has been chosen to skate with 3 of her team mates to help clear the ice between periods of the game that night. So while the rest of the thousands of fans will be there to see the game, at least five of the fans will be watching the cleaning of the ice! It’s very important you know 😀

Last, I’ve finished The Shack, by William P. Young. It was all the rage several months ago. I read several reviews of it all around the blog-o-sphere (including this one). It looked intriguing. So I threw it in my shopping cart in Amazon. Then one day it arrived. Such a miracle.

I know many (most) folks who read it sat down and did so in one sitting. Certainly, that is possible. And I wish I could have done so. But that wasn’t bloodly likely given my schedule lately. So I grabbed odd moments and before bed-time to read it. It’s a very powerful book packed into a small space. There’s a lot there.

I found it made an excellent companion piece to the book I reviewed here recently, It’s A Dance, by Patrick Oden. Having recently read that book gave me texture to bring to The Shack that I would not have had had I read it earlier.

I’m not entirely certain that every last jot and tittle of the theology is correct.  But then, I don’t know that anyone’s is.  Every one of us are making educated guesses.  Some guesses are more educated than others.  But not one of us knows the whole of what God is up to.  At best we see through a glass darkly; we see in part.  This book’s vision of the whole is winsome, captivating and certainly worth considering.  And certainly well worth the read.

Here’s my young woman … playing hard last Sunday morning against a tough team. I’m pretty proud of her and her whole team.

Today we’re off for another hockey, hockey weekend. LightHusband and I are taking the Girl up the coast to LibertyCity to play two games and watch a professional game. We found that the NHL hometeam developmental club (or American Hockey League) team is playing tonight. So we’re going to see that game as a team. What fun. LightBoy is staying here with his friends on his team.

Maybe I’ll get Leopard installed next week … sigh!

The other day I was cleaning the kitchen. It was a long and frustrating task. You’ve heard of people being color-blind? My family is trash-blind. They do not see trash. It is invisible to them; it blends into the flotsam and jetsam of all the stuff surrounding it. So I was tidying up. I found the hotdog rolls in the hotpad basket. I found a hard crumpled roll behind the breadbox. I found two (2) empty papertowel tubes. Yeah, I don’t know why the person who was kind enough to replace them with a full roll of paper towels was unable to take two extra steps and throw the empty tubes away … but there you have it … trash-blind.

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Then I found this:

Emergency Vampire Garlic

Yes, that would be LightGirl’s handwriting.

I almost fell out laughing. I will keep this for a long, long time. Maybe it *will* keep the vampires away. Kinda like clapping your hands keeps the polar bears away.

Later on LightBoy and two FlamingLambs came through giggling and laughing, chattering happily about what Halloween costumes they had planned this year. LightBoy is going to be a dwarf, one FlamingLamb will be a devil, I missed the other descriptions. They all inspected the garlic and agreed that it was an important addition to the kitchen. The conversation continued as they discussed a neighbor girl who does not celebrate Halloween, “… she’s Catholic and thinks Halloween is of Satan. She just follows what her church tells her to do without thinking. But she’s nice anyway.”

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Wow. Out of the mouths of babes. We used to not *do* Halloween. We used to go along with the whole Halloween is evil thing. I never quite understood it, because I’ve always known about the real history of Halloween and understood it’s roots as All Hallows Eve … that is the eve for All Saints Day. I’ve always understood that the history behind dressing up in costumes and putting candles in hollowed out pumpkins was in order to frighten evil spirits away, not call them down. In any case, in this day and age, I was always a little confused about the whole evil spirits running rampant on Halloween thing anyway. It seemed a little … well … medieval.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to make waves over something so insignificant. So we went along with all of it. We kept our children safe and sound and went to “Harvest Parties” at church. Truthfully, I never saw what the difference was. All the children got dressed up, ran around getting pumped up on too much sugar, and came home with bags full of candy. The only difference was they’d stayed in one place doing it … and had boring, dorky costumes.

Then I got belligerent. If there truly was something wrong with Halloween, we plain old weren’t going to do anything at all. One year we went out to dinner with friends. Another year we went to the mountains. Then I began to realize … there’s nothing wrong with Halloween. So we decided to celebrate it.

My kids have been pirates and witches and cave people and this year LightGirl wants to skate as a vampire. She is infatuated with vampires this year. There is that last tiny part of my brain that wants to me to be afraid of this. The rest of me is assured that this is a phase. In part it is a phase of exploration of something new and shiny. In part it is to test me and see if I will holler. So I just look at her when it comes up and try not to roll my eyes at the ridiculous makeup.
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Here is the other reason I am unconcerned. I know her heart. During the years that we did not do Halloween, I was told that it was important to keep my children safe so that they would grow up to be “Godly.” I’m still wondering what that means. I thought I knew what it meant at the time. At the time, what I did know was that it was important to keep my children separate in order to be safe and thus become “Godly.” If they were not separate they would lose that chance … somehow. It was a weird and strange logic as I began to really think it through. There were some sane underpinnings to it, despite the oddness. But the stark command that I could not get past without bruising my forehead on it, was this:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. ‘There is no commandment greater than these.”

I began to consider that loving God and loving our neighbors included living and being amongst them … including on Halloween. That there was nothing to fear. And so … there is nothing to fear. Including vampires. LightGirl’s heart is wonderful. She is of an age now where she is struggling through who she is and what she believes. She is discovering what her faith is and what it will become. But I rest easy in the fact that she has the heart of a Jesus-follower. She does not know this yet, but she loves God and she loves her neighbor. She has learned and is learning the role of being a light in the world. I see this played out over and over again as she brings her teammates together on her hockey team. It is a remarkable thing to see 11 or 12 eleven, twelve and thirteen year old girls who get along and do not form cliques. The parents all shake their heads in wonder at this … but I know that a very small part of the reason is that LightGirl wanders amongst them with her shepherd’s heart looking for the lost sheep; pulling them back into the flock. And that is the best vampire protection of all.

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The October 24th SynchroBlog includes 26 people sharing their thoughts, their experiences, and their expertise on the subject of “A Christian Response to Halloween” (or at least something remotely connected to that idea.) Perhaps not all the writers are Christian, and that is actually even cooler. Please check out these offerings of love, and gore…uh, I mean lore.

The Christians and the Pagans Meet for Samhain at Phil Wyman’s Square No More
Our Own Private Zombie: Death and the Spirit of Fear by Lainie Petersen
Julie Clawson at One Hand Clapping
John Morehead at John Morehead’s Musings
What’s So Bad About Halloween? at Igneous Quill
H-A-double-L-O-double-U-double-E-N Erin Word
Halloween….why all the madness? by Reba Baskett
Steve Hayes at Notes from the Underground
KW Leslie at The Evening of Kent
Hallmark Halloween by John Smulo
Mike Bursell at Mike’s Musings
Sam Norton at Elizaphanian
Removing Christendom from Halloween at On Earth as in Heaven
Vampires or Leeches: A conversation about making the Day of the Dead meaningful by David Fisher
Encountering hallow-tide creatively by Sally Coleman
Kay at Chaotic Spirit
Apples and Razorblades at Johnny Beloved
Steve Hayes at Notes from the Underground
Fall Festivals and Scary Masks at The Assembling of the Church
Why Christians don’t like Zombies at Hollow Again
Peering through the negatives of mission Paul Walker
Sea Raven at Gaia Rising
Halloween: My experiences by Tim Victor’s Musings
Making Space for Halloween by Nic Paton

We have a new rhythm to our life now.

Hockey.

LightBoy has now joined a team. His team has the traditional o’dark thirty practice on a weekend morning. So this morning saw LightHusband and I up before dawn, traipsing to the rink to watch LightBoy at his first official hockey practice. Today was evaluations. They herded all the Squirts together and put them through their paces. This was to make sure that the talent, and the need, is evenly spread out throughout all three teams. I’m happy to say that while LightBoy towered above all the other children in height, he was dead center in terms of talent and ability. He was also very polite and listened well. It was fun watching all the kids in the rink. I saw something I never saw before. I saw a boy a skate with an imaginary sawhorse between his legs. It was quite a feat, but he accomplished it. With grace.

Then the whole lot of them had to skate backwards. That was priceless. For some, their feet went faster than their legs. For others, their legs moved faster than their feet. Still others it was their bodies which were out of sync with the whole process. But in any case, it was comical all around.

This is LightBoy taking instruction from one of the coaches:

We got home at 7:30 in the morning.

I took a nap.

We then began the process of preparing the livingroom for painting.  It was a mess.  I had LightHusband take some before photos.  Here are one or two.  Just so you know what we’re working with.  Tomorrow I’ll post a photo of what we did today.  Today we cleaned up the room, and moved all the furniture into the middle of the room.  We took everything off the walls, and vacuumed.  Tomorrow I’m going to wash the walls, tape and spackle the holes.  We’ll be ready to paint on Monday.

We missed our deadline.  But I’ll have photos to show my counselor that we’ve made some serious progress.  It will be finished this week.  Our goal is to have the entire downstairs and our bedroom painted by Thanksgiving.  LightHusband’s family is coming for Thanksgiving.  But hey, with every weekend day being 4 days instead of 2 because of this new hockey rhythm we might just accomplish this goal.

UPDATED Sept. 3 to include photos from the slightly famous LightHusband.

Today was a momentous day in our family.

It was the 106th anniversary of my grandmother’s birthday. She’s been dead for seven years, but I still mark it.

Nooooo … that wasn’t it.

Today we took LightGirl to a local tiny airfield and she rode in a glider. She had a fabulous time. This was an early fourteenth birthday gift from her own grandmother, LightMom. Her cousin who just turned fourteen also had a glider ride to mark her fourteenth birthday. So to mark their coming of age and their great-grandmother’s birthday they flew up in the air with remarkable ease. They loved it.

We had a marvelous time watching and the weather couldn’t have been better.

There was something coming-of-agey about the whole event that I didn’t really anticipate. The glider is towed up into the air by tow-plane. Once the plane and glider are at a certain height and place (the two pilots know what the right place is) the tow-plane releases the glider and the glider then rides the thermals for a while.

I thought about that as LightGirl walked away with the glider pilot and nonchalantly got in. The tow plane and glider lifted off and she was gone for a while.

That’s what college will be like. We’ll take her away to be under the tutelage of other older adults. They’ll tow her around for a while. Sometimes she’ll be in direct contact and they’ll be towing her. Sometimes she’ll be on her own. But she’ll be gone for a while. Then she’ll come home. Pretty soon the periods of time that she’s gone will grow longer and longer and then she’ll be gone and on her own. She won’t need that tow rope anymore. She won’t need an older pilot helping her either. She’ll be ready to fly all by herself.

It’s not too much longer now. I hope I’m ready.

As I may have mentioned here before, my family gathered together this weekend. We usually do this once a year. We try anyway. It almost didn’t happen this year because of sundry different events in all of our lives. It wouldn’t have been the end of the universe, but we would have been sad. We don’t make a huge deal of this gathering, but we do attempt it. It’s important to each of “us kids,” for different reasons I suspect. But important nonetheless.

My brothers amaze me. Both of them and in different ways. My youngest brother was such a goof growing up that I never really could imagine him as an adult. But he’s an amazing adult … yet he’s never quite lost his sense of wonder and silliness that make him so much fun to be around. He’s the one who simply decided he wanted to learn to sail. So he took the little sunfish out into a 12 mile an hour wind and made the boat go. It went backwards at first … for quite a ways. Then he made it go forwards for a long ways. Then he got it turned around and came back … after he tipped over a few times. But he did it. I’ve wanted to sail my whole life, but I doubt I’ll ever have that kind of courage. He never sits still … and when he does, he falls asleep. Just like he did when he was a kid. He runs a tent rental and party goods company in western Massachusetts. But he’s not content with that. He’s also building temporary structures all over the country. Oh … and he’s making new structures for the Red Cross to use instead of tents for the next hurricane season. They are like small houses and they’re beautiful. So much better than tents and can be stored in cargo crates like they put on 18 wheelers to be trucked to where-ever at a moments notice.

My other brother already lived one life as a vice president for a blood products and testing company. He made enough money to take a year off and travel around the world. When he came back he got married and now he’s running and building the jam company that my parents started. Oh … yeah … and he’s refinishing a house while raising his family. This involved taking off the roof of the house to add another floor to it. Literally … raising the roof!

Now both of my brothers could not do what they do without the help of their wonderful wives. They are both married to strong women who support and push them to greater things than they could do on their own. You know … the sum is greater than the parts, yadda, yadda … They are fortunate to have married well. I am fortunate to have gained sisters-in-law who fit into our family so well. I am fortunate too because we have such a grand and diverse group of nieces and nephews.

Here’s a picture from my favorite time this weekend … it was after dinner on Saturday night when LightMom, LightGirl, my oldest niece and I all did the dishes together. I washed, the girls dried, and LightMom did the organizing of dirty dishes … she kept the goods flowing. We had some great conversation … some of it was light, some heavy. But it was all good. The girls whined at first, but then we got to talking and they pitched in.

We had a really great time and the dishes flew. The time did too. LightMom observed, when all was said and done, “You know, one of the worst inventions has been the dishwasher. It took away the talking time.” I agreed with her. There is something about sharing a task that allows people the freedom to talk in ways that they don’t otherwise do. In particular, I treasured that evening because my niece isn’t always terribly open. But she was with a dish towel in her hand. In that room with her grandmother and her aunt and her cousin … and a task to perform, she felt safe enough to talk a little about the things that were on her mind. They weren’t terribly big or important … but the fact that she finally opened the door a crack was a treasure to me. It reminded me of the value of working together and doing small things together.

Those are the things that build a relationship and give it a foundation. Some how it’s not the fun, but the work that brings us together and keeps us there. I wonder why that is?

One of the good things about being a mother is that I get bragging rights. I don’t use them often. I like to save them for just the right occasion.

Today is one of those.

We’re having a rest and recuperation day. This weekend was fun. We had my whole fam damily here. As soon as they left, LightHusband’s mother and father arrived with nieces and nephews from his sister’s family. Then his sister and her husband came for dinner. So last night we had dinner for 12. Dinner for 14 on Saturday. Dinner for 12 last night. Yep … we’re ready for a low day. So it’s fishing and sewing and swimming and reading and …. what. ever.

LightBoy casually announced that he was taking his pole down to the Big Dock and drowning a worm. Here’s the result:

A twenty inch large mouth bass!  (LightHusband guesses it might have weighed over three pounds!!) Which he hooked, set, and caught … all by himself. Then he released it to live to tell the tale another day. But the grin tells the whole story. He’s one happy guy.