Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Busy week


When I opened the blog to write this morning, I realized that I haven't posted in a week. I'm sorry. We've been trying to finish week 5 of the second quarter of school, the Christmas shopping and mailing, calling daily about hotel rooms in Tokyo for the weekend, arranging a shuttle seat for Tommy to get him to Seattle on Friday, and the packing.

After Christmas shopping, the packing is the most fun part because of the anticipation it involves. We are packing summer clothes! While it snows outside! It's a rather surreal feeling, and an exciting one at the same time. This trip to New Zealand has been a dream of John's and mine for most of our married life. And it's really going to happen. The last plane tickets are on their way to us via courier from our travel agent in Tokyo and should be here tomorrow. We'll be stopping at the train station tonight or tomorrow to buy the train tickets. Thanks to St. Anthony and the prayers of my sister, we have hotel rooms in Tokyo for Saturday and Sunday. Not at the fancy Navy hotel we were hoping for, but perfectly serviceable rooms in Roppongi (central Tokyo shopping and dining district) and within walking distance from that hotel so we can still go over and use their stunning swimming pool.

Most importantly, we can meet Tommy's plane on Saturday afternoon. Hooray!! Tommy's coming home. We have missed him so much and can't wait to see him. Matthew is waiting to ask him for a big "Tommy stooshie," which is a loud, smacking kiss that sends people flying around the room in hilarious ways only Tommy could devise.

And packages are arriving for Patrick's birthday and being secreted in the luggage. (Don't you dare peek, Patrick!) He will celebrate his 16th birthday in Rotorua, New Zealand. We have planned a fun sightseeing day with great potential for street luge riding in the afternoon. Even Katie, who experienced her first roller coaster this summer and loved it, is looking forward to that activity.

We will arrive in Christchurch on Christmas Eve and spend part of Christmas Day there before driving on to Dunedin for penguin viewing and Christmas dinner (not penguin!!). We plan to go to Christmas Mass at the cathedral in Christchurch. They have a midnight Mass, but the 7:30 a.m. traditional Latin Mass is very tempting, if only it weren't at 7:30 a.m. on Christmas morning. Either way, we are in for a treat. The music at the cathedral appears to be amazing, and even if the early morning Mass is a low Mass, it will be celebrated reverently and in Latin, something we have been missing very much.

On New Year's Eve, we will be en route to Japan from New Zealand via Hong Kong (only the airport, though. Visiting China will have to be saved for another trip). We should arrive in Tokyo in the late evening and hope to ring in the new year at our airport hotel. We'll return home by train on January 1st.

The suitcases go to the shipping company Thursday. So we're really going. It's hard to believe it's really going to happen.

We'll try to post during our trip if the internet connections allow. If not, you may look forward to photos after the first of the year.

A blessed Christmas and happy new year to all. See you in 2008!

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Yummy

Here's what Matthew thought of tonight's gingerbread:



Happy St. Nicholas Day to all!

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Happy St. Nicholas Day!



Our celebration of this day began early in the morning when the children ran downstairs to check their shoes. Today they found a candy cane, mandarin orange, some nuts, some chocolate coins, a few Hershey's kisses and some Werther's originals. There was also a note for each child that gave praise for accomplishments and one suggestion for improvement. It's a fun way to encourage the children in their Advent efforts to be good.

The Werther's, in their gold foil wrapping have served to represent coins in the years we couldn't find any chocolate ones at the right time, and now they are part of the tradition for us. This year, thanks to Elizabeth, I found some St. Nicholas coins. Perfect!



After breakfast, we prayed our morning prayer together. Today, we read the Mass readings and the prayers for the optional memorial of St. Nicholas. To conclude our prayers, we sang Veni, veni, Emmanuel! which we are learning in Latin.

Then it was storytime. We read Demi's The Legend of Saint Nicholas, our favorite St. Nicholas book since we found it at Inklings, our favorite independent bookstore in Yakima.



At the moment, Joseph is working on finishing his St. Nicholas book, which he has been coloring and writing in this week. Today's page includes symbols of St. Nicholas, which he is to add into a picture. I found the symbol information at my favorite online St. Nicholas resource: St. Nicholas Center.

Tonight we will have a (sort of) German dinner of bratwurst, sauerkraut, potatoes, and applesauce. For dessert (yes, a mid-week dessert in honor of our favorite Saint of Advent), we will bake gingerbread this afternoon: the cake kind, served with whipped cream. This might be more southern US than German, but gingerbread seems German to me, and we all enjoy the dessert, so it works for us. It makes the house smell good, too. :-)

Reading the Jesse tree story while we eat dinner has been working much better than the years when we tried to read it before dinner with waiting, hungry children jiggling in chairs. So we will continue this way each night. We are still reading a short meditation when the wreath is lighted before our Grace Before Meals. Thanks to The Magnificat Advent Companion, the meditation relates to the Gospel of the day, which we read in our morning devotions, so the day of prayer comes full circle with the dinnertime meditation.

Hope for Unity

Saw this on Zenit today:

Orthodox Patriarch Says Unity an Obligation

Sends Message to Vatican on Feast of St. Andrew

By Miriam Diez i Bosch

ISTANBUL, Turkey, DEC. 5, 2007 ( Zenit.org).- It is an obligation to reclaim the spiritual, sacramental and doctrinal unity that Europe enjoyed prior to the schism of the East and West, said the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople.

Bartholomew I said this Friday in a letter addressed to a delegation sent by Benedict XVI to Istanbul for the regular exchange of visits between the two Churches for the feasts of St. Andrew, Nov. 30, and Sts. Peter and Paul, June 29.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, led the delegation.

Bartholomew I affirmed the presence of the delegation "both strengthens and seals the bonds of love and trust between our Churches, bonds which have been cultivated in recent decades, and which have been especially established by the visit" of Benedict XVI in November 2006.

The patriarch also emphasized "that the peaceful coexistence of Christians, in a spirit of unity and concord, must constitute the fundamental concern of us all."

Here's a link to the full article.


Let us pray that the Eastern and Western Churches might again be united so the Church may "breathe with both lungs," as the beloved John Paul II once said we must.

Monday, December 3, 2007

A favorite book

I'm very excited to see that The Year and Our Children, by Mary Reed Newland, is back in print! When we first began to try to work toward the goal of making our home truly a domestic church, this book was instrumental in helping John and me to strengthen the Catholic culture we provided. It came to me through our parish bookstore when we lived in Baltimore. At that time, were just beginning our journey toward home education, which really began with my desire to live the liturgical year more fully at home (well that and a lot of divine pushes in this direction, which is too long a story for this post).

So hooray! I love this book's wonderful ideas and the way Mrs. Newland writes about incorporating faith into everyday life.

If you want to take a look, you can find the book here or here.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

First Sunday of Advent


Yesterday the great season of anticipation began. Over the years, we have enjoyed a lot of different Advent activities, and many have become traditions for us.

The tradition that John and I both brought with us from our families when we married is the Advent wreath. From the first year we were married, we have always had some sort of Advent wreath on our table during this season. Yesterday, we fixed up our Advent wreath at a parish workshop just in time for tonight's dinner celebration.

A family tradition that began when Tommy was small is to have an Advent calendar to help mark the time until the Feast of Christmas. We have a surfeit of Advent calendars. They are fun, though. I don't think anyone minds having three doors to open each day. The kids take turns opening the doors. They cycle through the days: from youngest to oldest this year so that Patrick will have his turn on the 20th, his 16th birthday.

Our first permanent Advent calendar was made by my youngest brother's class as a project for a craft auction/fundraiser for his Catholic middle school. I think all the parents made the ornaments. My parents gave it to us when Tommy and Patrick were small. The big boys never let me skip using this one--it's their tradition now--and I hung it in the hall outside their bedroom.


We placed our wood and magnetic Advent calendar (a gift from my parents several years ago, and my favorite) on the altar this year and the wreath in the center of the dining table.



A couple of weeks ago friends who live in Germany sent us this calendar:


It has a piece of chocolate inside each door. Yummy! This one is in the kitchen. So it's Advent all around the house.

On Saturday, Katie, Joseph, and I put away our fall table decorations and put the Advent table together. In each house, we seem to have found a different location for this table. Here, the seasonal table is in our entryway. It's the top of our shoe cabinets, so we see it many times a day as we come and go. I like the idea that it reminds us of the season as soon as we enter the house and again before we leave.


On top of the table are our Jesse tree and two smaller trees. I like to do things in threes as a reminder of the Trinity. During Advent, we usually don't decorate the smaller trees, but last year, Katie made some origami butterflies for the smallest tree, and she put them on right away this year.



We learned about the Jesse tree at our parish in Yakima and found a partial set of ornaments made of brass at the Seattle Catholic homeschool conference a few years ago. Each year, we make a couple new ornaments so that we will eventually have a complete set.



The ornaments symbolize different people in the story of salvation. It begins on the first Sunday of Advent with the tree itself, with the story of the anointing of Jesse's son, David, in the first book of Samuel (16:1-13) and the "a shoot shall grow from the root of Jesse" verses in Isaiah (11:1-10). The next night, we read about creation, with a dove as its symbol. Then the fall, with an apple and a snake. It continues with symbols like an ark for Noah, a trumpet for Gideon, wheat stalks for Ruth. We cover all of Jesus' family tree and a few others, like Moses, before we get to the end, with Bethlehem and the star. John and I hope that by the time the kids grow up, salvation history will be the most familiar of Christmas stories to them.

The ornaments for the Jesse tree are in a basket on our home altar in the dining room. That way, they are handy for carrying to the tree in the front hall after the verses are read at dinner each evening.

We enjoy celebrating the Saints of Advent during this season, too. Next week, December 13th, Katie's doll, Kirsten, will join us dressed in her Scandanavian St. Lucia costume. Katie already has her all ready to go. (Thanks to Grandmom for the beautiful, heirloom-sewn gown.)



Already on the Advent table is a statue of our beloved St. Nicholas, the protector of children, and patron of our miscarried little one, our Nicholas, who is with God. St. Nicholas always appears in the week of his feast day, December 6th.



We hung the St. Nicholas kilim from Turkey near the school table. He is carrying toys and the Christmas tree in this one, but his hat looks a bit like a miter, and surely that's a red soutane and cincture he's wearing. ;-)



In the center of the Advent table is an empty manger awaiting the Christ Child statue on Christmas morning. The children will fill it with a few pieces of hay each time they do a good deed during Advent. Since they are working hard to prepare their hearts for his arrival, Baby Jesus should have a nice, soft bed by Christmas morning.



Sometime this week, we will get the stable and nativity figures out: when John has time to climb up into the loft in the garage and retrieve them. I wasn't brave enough for that one this weekend. They will go in the living room/school room. As Advent progresses, the children usually add a figure each day or so to the nativity scene until the 3 kings arrive on the Feast of Epiphany. Usually, the kings move about the room to various shelves and tabletops throughout the Advent/Christmas season. They did have a long journey, after all. ;-)

The only unusual thing is that this year, the baby Jesus statues will have to appear while we are away on our vacation. I'll have to figure out how to work that one out. I do want the children to find them there when we arrive home. When Christmas morning comes, their first look the past few years has always been for the Baby Jesus in the manger that they have been preparing for him on the seasonal table. I suspect they will look for him when they come back in from our trip, too, even though it will be New Year's Day.

It all looks a bit bare and unfinished at this point, but that is the point. We are waiting. We are preparing our home and our hearts.



P.S. Note the Easter candle still on the altar--we are still working on our Christ candle. Preparation, remember (I have to remind myself, too :-)) It's the candle we're making each day during the novena before the Immaculate Conception. When it's made, we'll put it in the place of the Easter candle and cover it with a special cloth until Christmas, just as Jesus was hidden in Mary's womb until his birth. Then we will move it into the center of the (former) Advent wreath that will have gold bows and white candles instead of purple and pink. There it will burn brightly throughout the Christmas season.