Not-So-Totally-Frugal Christmas Suggestions

Around here, a lot of knitting and glitter-gluing and making of things on little weaving looms with those loop thingies is going on. Quite possibly a lot of the same is going on in your house, too. But if you are in the market for thoughtful, unique bought gifts, a number of which support good causes and others of which are just cool, here are some suggestions:

The Anchoress has some excellent gift ideas here, here, and here.

Of course, there's a whole world of fabulous handmade gits at Etsy. Er, "gifts, I mean. Not "gits." Anyway.  If time permits this week, I'll do some more Etsy browsing -- you'll recall that I hunted up some lovely Advent items for Black Friday -- and make you a list of high-quality handmade recommendations. I do not, dear FTC, get any kind of kickback for these suggestions;  it's just that I'd so rather see artists and cottage industries get our support, than Wal-Mart and Target.

Speaking of artists, my brother and sister-in-law held their annual Christmas show this past weekend, and hopefully some of you Memphis locals were able to drop by. If you're looking for something big and impressive to give someone very, very special, why not consider a painting or a one-of-a-kind piece of handmade wood furniture? Again, dear darling FTC, this is a recommendation completely unmotivated by worship of mammon -- I just happen to like my family, kwim?

On the other hand, I can be bought. Here's how:

Usborne Books. It's been a while since I actively sold Usborne Books, as in handing out business cards,  having parties, and so on. But I still have the shopping site, and it's worth checking out for kids' Christmas gifts. The Usborne books we own, and there are too many to name right now, have been favorites for years. Just yesterday Crispina pulled out her copy of I Can Draw Animals and more or less drew her way through it. Both the big kids use the Illustrated Math Dictionary and the Illustrated Dictionary of Biology for reference on a regular basis.

The site is huge and can be overwhelming if you don't have an idea what you're looking for. If you like, leave me a request in the comments here, with children's ages and/or interests, and I can draw you up a customized shopping list.

If the idea of free books appeals to you, here's an idea:  host an e-show. Just follow the simple directions on the page, fill in the form, and invite anyone you know to come and browse. I'm not a natural salesperson, and I often feel uncomfortable about inviting people to come and spend money, but this time of year, people are looking for ideas and welcome some direction. And you can get some free books out of the deal, which is always fun. Check it out!

Castle Shop. Also see the widget in the sidebar. We've hand-selected (so to speak) our favorite and/or most-wanted Christmas children's books, cookbooks, DVDs, music, and more. We'll be adding items as we stumble across them, so be sure to check back periodically. Lots of gift ideas in various price ranges:  think of this as our customized shopping list. As always, any Amazon purchase through these links generates a little income for this site, for which we are always grateful. Two years ago I did a lot of my own Christmas book-shopping on a budget raised by sponsored Amazon links -- let me just thank those readers out there all over again!

My personal favorite wanna-see at the moment is this comic-strip cookbook. I'm not even Italian, and it looks very funny. I've also added DVDs of a number of BBC shows I've loved, chiefly Foyle's War and Last of the Summer Wine. The latter, starring Peter Sallis, who voices Wallace of Wallace and Gromit,  seems to be less well-known in the U.S., but it's a hilarious ensemble show.

And finally, don't forget the Mystic Monks:  coffee, mugs, t-shirts, hoodies, and more. Sign up the coffee-lover in your life for a monthly subscription, or give a gift set. Or get some for yourself, to power you through Christmas morning after the midnight service. Just click the banner to start shopping.



Again, dear FTC, like the Amazon links the Mystic Monks banners do generate a teeny little bit of income for this site, which is itself something of a cottage industry for the knitting-challenged. Nobody would buy anything I made by hand, but I can do this. I realize that many of my readers are, like me, keeping Christmas simple and as un-bought as possible, but if you are looking for gifts to purchase, and you happen to find something here, the Castle denizens thank you in advance for your business.

Advent II, Vespers

Vespers and Carols, Blackfriars, Oxford, 5 December 2008.

Hymn:  Savior of the Nations, Come

Pray the Office.
(Read the meditation on Saint Nicholas, whose feast is today, then click the "Evening Prayer" tab for the Office).

Meditation to follow. Aelred delivered the second of his Advent Vespers addresses earlier this evening at St. Dymphna's, but said he wanted to tweak it a bit before I posted it. So pray the Office before it gets too late, and meditate with Aelred anon.

UPDATE:  HERE'S THE MEDITATION

The dead shall not praise the Lord,
Nor those who go down into silence.
But we who live bless the Lord,
Now and forever. Amen.
(Psalm 115: 17)
+   +   +  
Among the things we are waiting for this Advent is death.


What I mean is that it is unavoidable.  We wait for death every single day, whether we realize it or not.  Mostly, we forget about it, which means that we do not wait—we cover it over with many things—with anything—that might shield its horrid face from our sight. 


Or, if we do not think its face horrid, at least the thought of death leaves us numb.  We would rather not wait on death, or think about it.


Advent is a time in which the end of the world is expected—Jesus’s promised return--but the world ends for all of us in another way; we die.   For those of us gathered here, Jesus’s return to our sight will most likely happen in this manner, even though we really hope for the cosmic event of Christ’s return.


Last week at this service we concentrated on the ways in which we are at odds with the world and its notion of time-keeping.  We spoke about the stark contrast between the Christmas rush and the stillness of waiting in the Church’s observance of Advent.  We highlight the same at-odds-ness today, because the rushing world around us is not centered on the end of things, especially not with respect to personal death. 


The Christmas season is not unusual in this respect—just about any season in the workaday world is carried on in the absence of contemplation of death.  Think about the spring and Easter seasons.  No death there.  No cross, no crucifixion, no passion and death, no Holy Week, no Good Friday: just bunnies and spring chickens.


But even this death-denying strategy can fail once in a while.  When my older sister was quite young, before I came on the scene, my mother and father bought her something for Easter that was in vogue at the time (the early 1960s)—a time when the term “animal rights” probably only meant “eating an animal correctly.”  They bought her a dyed chicken.  I think it was red, or pink, even.  They also bought her a duck, but it was un-dyed, natural yellow; and they called it—or my sister named it—“Ducky-Luck.”  The not-so-lucky chicken they named “Doodad.”  I have seen home movies of these creatures.  The chicken perished in Easter week.  The duck they eventually introduced into a pond at the local park.


The trick became—in this time of unrelenting, Easter bunny, spring rejoicing—how to break this grim news of Doodad’s demise to my young sister.  Perhaps it made one wish to be back in Holy Week—Good Friday, even.  I wasn’t there of course, but my sister later told me that the very sensitive strategy of my parents was simply to say, in an offhand kind of way, and only when my sister asked where the chicken was, “Well, you know those dyed things don’t live very long.” 


It is amazing, outside of a few events related to fallen military heroes, how death-denying our culture is.  Its calendar bears witness to this, and its twisting of the Christian calendar bears scandalous witness to its death-denial.


Advent is so important  for this very reason: we know that Christ has been born into the world, and that he plans to come again, but whether we live to see the coming Christmas or any Christmas thereafter is another matter.  Advent is the time when we learn for certain that if death comes for us, it does not come except the Lord comes to meet us, as well.  For Christians this is a marvelous hope and release.  It is almost as if Easter comes in winter.


Many of you will know the name of Father Richard John Neuhaus, who died last year.  He was the editor of the important religious journal First Things.  Before he died of cancer last year, he almost died of an acute stomach ailment in the 1990s.   As he lay in desperate condition at that time, on the verge of death from internal bleeding and the like, he heard as distinctly as anything he had ever heard in his life, above all the pain and medical commotion, a voice or voices say to him, “Everything is ready now.” 


“Everything is ready now.”  For the believer that is certainly true.  Whatever our thoughts or feelings about death or our own death, in Christ, “everything is ready now.”  Hell has been harrowed, reconciliation reestablished, the Son of Man come into the world for the redemption of his people.  We have simply no idea how important all of this is to us personally, now—and in the hour that awaits us as surely as the coming of Christ himself, the hour of our own death.


Not terribly long after I finished my Ph. D. in theology at the University of Cambridge in England, my doctoral supervisor, Prof. Daniel Hardy, died.  It was quite a shock; it had not been too long before that I had requested recommendation letters from him and the like.  I had not even known that he was ill.  I could not fathom death claiming a person I had worked with for four years on such an intimate basis.  I guess I thought that if he could survive supervising my wretched work, he could survive anything.  This was, alas, not the case.  I could only picture in my mind a living presence, full of words and admonition and advice—not an absence.  There have been others among my mentors who have gone on—priests, pastors, professors—all of them put to the test on the standard of the Gospel which they taught:  all of them, in the end, clinging to the hope of eternal life which they examined in such fine detail and pondered in such profound ways.  I am thinking of them all in Advent, and praying for them.  And I am praying for myself and those dear to me.  Advent reminds me that the coming of Christ is personal, always, never a take it or leave it sort of phenomenon, not simply a theological proposition, though it is that, at least.  More than anything Advent has to do with who and what will meet me in the end—be it at my death, or at the end of all things together. 


I know whose face I wish to see.  I know whom I wish to conduct me to that great Lamb of God:  our Lady and all the saints, and the angels, who visited Mary to announce-- and shepherds to celebrate--that the end and goal of all things had arrived in the lives of mortal men.  That great author of Salvation came that we would never need to be separated from him.


And, indeed, we are not separated from him.  In this life of death, we live the life of the world to come, already.


In his body, blood, soul, and divinity, in the Blessed Sacrament, he is with us until our death, however long that takes.  He is with us until his promised return, however long that takes.  And he has promised to search out and find us, however long that takes.


Blessed be God in his angels and in his saints—and in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.


Amen.

Aelred, St. Dymphna's, 6 December 2009. 

 

Advent II: This is the Record of John

Advent II: Populus Sion

Thrift-ish Birthday Party Activities; or, What To Do When Even Ugly Pinatas Cost Fifteen Bucks

To make a small frugal pinata, you need: 

1. The cheapest paper plates you can find
2. The cheapest bulk kiddie-pack candy you can find
3. Staples you already have
4. Crayons you already have
5. A child you already have, who likes to color

With paper plates and staples you can easily make either a flower or a butterfly pinata. Staple pairs of plates together, leaving a gap for candy-stuffing, to be stapled shut at the end. These stapled circles can be either flower center and petals, or sections of butterfly wing. You need five circles for a flower, four for a butterfly. You can make the butterfly's body by rolling another plate into a burrito, stapling the bottom shut, and leaving the top open for more candy. Staple all parts together.

Let the enthusiastic child color the wings/petals any way he or she likes. Stuff with candy and staple shut. You may decorate further with crepe paper streamers, sequins, or other ornamental stuff you might happen to have lying around, which you don't mind hoovering up later. Affix a string for hanging, and you're good to go. Good for  a small party of smaller children.

UPDATE:   Good for a small party of smaller children with a sense of humor and low expectations. I recommend tying the string around the butterfly's waist, if you make a butterfly, because until I thought to do that, ours fell down a lot, and we kept having to staple wings back on so that everyone could have a whack at it.

Other ideas: 

* Dollar Tree has 12-packs of plain gold plastic ball-type Christmas ornaments right now. These can be used as party favors (good if you're having roughly a dozen children, as we are today), and decorated with glitter glue as an activity. I also got a 12-pack of candy canes. We'll use these as prizes in our Go-Fish game, and then children may sit at the kitchen table and glitterfy them if they like.

*They also have, in the wedding and baby-shower aisles, packs of 60 tiny plastic doves, and 36 tiny baby bottles, baby rattles, dolly-sized pacifiers, etc. You can hide these all over the house for a treasure hunt, in teams, and everyone gets one or two  of each thing at the end. That's a lot of party favors for a dollar a pack for a little-girl party. Much, much cheaper and more interesting than the packs of purpose-made party favors on the party aisle, which generally come six to a package.

Needless to say, we're also making our own cake, though not from scratch, I'm afraid, in the interest of time. It's light purple, at the birthday girl's request.

You can have a thriftier party than this by planning ahead and scouring the secondhand shops and bargain bins, and by making your cake from scratch, but for last-minute-ers like us, a party for twelve children for about $15 isn't bad.

Today's Headlines: Brown-Eyed Girl Turns Six; Polly Pocket Shares Rise; Dog Wears Makeup

Film at eleven.

Frugal Room Redo

The other day I described a child's room as looking "like Monday morning after the apocalypse." That was probably an understatement. Actually, I'm sure it was an understatement. I cleaned that room today, with token help from its regular inhabitant, and it was more like six months after the apocalypse -- no garbage men Left Behind in this neighborhood, let's put it that way.

The floor was covered with more items than I care to detail right now, but among them were several floor-to-ceiling length sheer green curtain panels, which used to grace the window in Aelred's and my bedroom. Our bedroom was when we bought this house, and is to this day, a sort of amateur-sponge-painted forest green. The windows were draped profusely with swags of shiny stripy green material and then these sheers, layered like petals, or like a lady leprechaun's petticoats. Green was hanging, green on green/ green on green -- to coin a verse. It was Miss Ellen's poteers and then some.

While I like green just fine, too much of it puts me right back in the first trimester of my first pregnancy, when anything green made me urk. Broccoli, spinach, Gumby:  I couldn't stand any of it. In the first trimester of my second pregnancy, a particular album by a singer called Tish Hinajosa had the same effect on me;  even now, whenever I listen to this otherwise-unobjectionable community-radio-station-type soft world-music, I have to go eat some saltines and drink ginger ale.

So these curtains produced what I shall call the Verdant Hinajosa Effect in me, and as soon as I could, I ripped them down and put them in the dress-up box. What can't you do with yards of green, I reasoned. Of course, what I should have anticipated is that what you can do with yards of green matters less than what you -- or somebody -- do or does do with it, which is generally to strew it across the first available floor and leave it there.

Meanwhile, as I was picking up these many yards of green, I was also noticing the wall beside this child's bed. Our house was part of an estate -- not as in Pemberley, but as in "the effects of So-and-So, Deceased" -- and the heirs to this estate, wanting a quick and lucrative sale*, ran through the house with rollers and cans of flat off-white latex paint, which they applied to many surfaces, regardless of what might have been covering those surfaces previously. Thus it is that we have white-latex-paint-over-oil-paint-over-wallpaper cracking off the walls and ceiling of our upstairs bathroom;  thus it also is that few surfaces remain unbesmirched by hand- and footprints in sizes mostly smaller than Aelred's or mine.

The wall beside the bed, in the room in which I was so heroically turning back the clock from beyond the end of time, has been particularly non-unbesmirched by footprints. A certain person likes to kick the wall while falling asleep. So there I was standing with these curtain panels in my hands, looking at the gray-smudged wall, when an idea came to me.

Two hours and many little nails later, the wall beside the bed was transformed into  . . . well, if you use your imagination, it's sort of like the Arabian Nights, maybe, all curtained with sheer silken veils, tacked to the ceiling molding and tucked down behind the bed. I draped one leftover sheer panel into a swag over the head of the bed -- it sits in a corner, so I had more ceiling molding to nail the fabric into with thin little nails. With the bed made up neatly and piled with pillows which were formerly tangled on the floor with the curtain panels, it all looks quite nice. Transformed, even. At the very least, cleaner.

So . . . you  never know. Don't throw stuff out, is the moral of this story. Also, cleaning is good and not to be so strenuously avoided as it often is around here. A freshly-cleaned room is a renovation in and of itself.

Meanwhile, check out the thrifty winter-clothing tips over at Frugal Hacks (great gift ideas, too). More wintry thrift from the DHM at The Common Room.


* They got neither. They paid the house note and the taxes for something like 432 days, and then they sold it to us. Lucky us.

We're Gonna Chant Your Socks Off

Eighteen Gregorian chant Mass settings of the Ordinary!

Seven Credo settings!

Chant notation!

Organ scores!

Audio!

And more!

Not sold in stores!

Click now!

(via Aelred's student Doug)

Yesterday: a Rainy, Rainy Homeschooly Day

Today the sun is shining and we're off soon for a long day at church:  Mass, Latin classes, study hall, hanging with friends, Holy Hour. Of course, I've got to pray my novena about fourteen more times, too. Maybe I'll do that this afternoon in the church, when it's quiet. Our church is not beautiful, but we do have a lovely new altar rail, made by a woodworker in the parish, at which one can kneel;  besides, I love the smell of candles recently burned, and of lingering incense. If those things don't help my prayers, nothing will.

Yesterday when we awoke, it was raining. Rain rain rain rain rain. That kind of rain, which continued all day and into the night, letting up only around ten p.m. When I went out with the dog for a breath of air, the sky had cleared, the moon was riding high, and scraps of cloud were streaming across the sky like flotsam caught in a swift current.

But all day it rained. Aelred and Epiphany had to wade out to Aelred's new car -- the 1996 Saturn of which I wrote a week or so ago -- which does indeed run beautifully, but sits very low to the ground or, in this case, the surface of the water. The rest of us lit the gas fire in the study, drank tea (them) and coffee (me), and settled in for a day of lessons. Here's what we did:

1. Cleaned off the mantel above the gas fire, which normally holds framed family photos. I'd pulled out this wooden Advent church which I bought at the Goodwill last year, and which is essentially a wooden box with a  hollow wooden tower affixed to the front, with twenty-five doors cut into it, all painted white with light-blue trim. We haven't actually filled all the doors yet -- one problem with this thing, as I've only now discovered, is that there aren't dividers inside it, so each door does not open onto a discrete compartment in which you can hide things, but onto an open space in which things rattle around at will. It has floors, if you take my meaning, but not rooms. Anyway, we put it on the mantel, and we took two purple fruity-scented votive candles in little holders, and we processed into the study with them and put them on the mantel on either side of the church and lit them.

Now, we'd already opened Door #1 on Tuesday, when the church resided on the butler's pantry in the kitchen, not a good place as I discovered, because even 7- and almost-6-year-olds can't resist rummaging through all the doors (fortunately there wasn't much in it yet). So we had this solemn ceremony of putting it on the mantel, where it's not quite so temptingly play-able.

Door #1, as it happened, had yielded a sprig of nandina, which stood for trees, which stood for Creation and also for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We might also have talked about the branch springing forth from David, the Root of Jesse, etc., but we didn't just then.

Door #2 was a rosary ring. Helier was the one who opened the door, so he led us in praying the first Joyful Mystery of the rosary, instead of Morning Prayer, which we usually pray. We use a scriptural rosary, which tells the story, verse by verse, with each Hail Mary bead;  you can access something like it by signing up for our friends' free Advent Adventure, which features a scriptural-rosary audio. (Dear FTC:  My friends didn't ask me to provide them with advertising, and I receive no remuneration for doing so. Thanks for playing.) So we sang "Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending" to the tune of the "Tantum Ergo," which is easy for children and very solemn, and prayed the Annunciation. (here's a totally sweet video of a small child singing the "Tantum Ergo," by the way).

Door #3, by the way, will be a nandina berry, standing in for the apple.

2.  Amicus went off to do religion (church history right now), math (introductory-level geometry, plus area and volume), Latin, and history on his own. After lunch we talked through the test at the end of his chapter on the Roman Empire, and I had him choose a discussion question to answer in writing. He worked on merit badges, of which he has about three going right now:  reading, scholarship, and something else I can't remember off the top of my head.


3. With Helier I worked on math -- subtraction of two-digit numbers -- English grammer (nouns) and Latin (also nouns). He's taking Epiphany's Latin-primer class which meets today after Mass;  for this class she's chosen this workbook, with accompanying reader, which we all prefer to the better-known Memoria Press Latina Christiana series. (no, I don't get a kickback from these links, either, dear FTC). We spent a lot of time yesterday on functions of nouns -- as subjects and predicate nominatives -- and on what prepositions are. My explanation for a predicate nominative, by the way, is to write the sentence in mathematical terms:  S=PN. We did that with a variety of "being-verb" sentences in both Latin and English. For prepositions, I asked these kinds of questions:  Where am I in relation to you? (I'm beside you). Where  are we in relation to the couch? (We're on the couch). What are we on? (The couch). So "couch" is the object of the preposition "on." We do this over and over and over, and it's starting to sink in.

Aelred has college students, by the way, who have zero concept of what a sentence is. When he asks them how they write a sentence, they say, "I just write a bunch of words, and then I stop." If he asks them to identify the subject, they point to some word at random -- "if," for example. This is what Helier was doing when we first began to work on these things. He's 7. He now kind of has he idea that there are different parts to a sentence, and that they have different functions, and that they're there for a reason, and that if we understand them, we have more of a handle on what we're thinking and saying. He also thinks all this is cool, because it's like a code.

Moral:  High school is too late. Start talking about it now. If even I, flaky arty I, think this is important, then surely you can, too, and your college students will be able to write coherent sentences because they know what they are and how they work.

4. Advent read-alouds with Helier and Crispina:  early chapters of Marigold Hunt's Life of Our Lord for Children. Highly recommended. (And yes, dear FTC, for these Amazon links I do get kickbacks.)



We're also reading Eleanor Estes' thoroughly charming Pinky Pye, which has nothing to do with Advent or Christmas, but is, as I say, thoroughly charming.





Crispina, in case you were wondering, began her day at 4:30 a.m. by throwing up on the floor beside our bed. It was a clear case of too many cookies the night before, and she was no worse for the experience afterwards, but did earn herself a day of playing quietly while school went on with the others and listening to read-alouds. She did some writing and drawing on her own, too.



Besides, at lunchtime the downstairs toilet backed up and overflowed all down the hall as far as my desk, and after I'd dealt with that for about an hour, I was too limp and lethargic to do much else. And it was still raining. I have rarely felt so soggy in all my life.



But today the sun is shining, and the very air is full of grace.

A Wednesday Miscellany

Here's a random selection of items I've been meaning to post for a while now. First up, some news links which have come to me by email, with thanks to David, Kamilla, and Greg for sharing them:

When "Girl Power" goes wrong.

Just have a seat in the waiting room, sir 

Utah Babies More Likely to Be Born With Down Syndrome; or, Down Syndrome Babies More Likely to Be Born in Utah.  

In recent months  I've heard more than one  social worker  or special-education teacher remark that the number of Down Syndrome children  in their caseloads or classes has dropped drastically in the last ten years. Before anybody stands up and cheers this as a sign of progress towards an improved national health standard, ponder the fact that Down Syndrome isn't a disease. It's not a condition to be avoided by improved prenatal care. The only way to reduce the incidence of Down Syndrome in the population is to eliminate it on a case-by-case basis, by killing people who have it.

This is now, at a rate of 90%, the standard medical treatment for a Downs diagnosis. We're encouraged  to call it  "mercy," but our language provides a more accurate word:  eugenics.


MEANWHILE, CHANGING GEARS: 

Tattoo me the story of Jesus. 

Flu-Vaccine Phishing

New Pandemic: Loneliness. U. S. Bishops Recommend Hugging, Kissing During Sign of Peace, and Other Precautions.

 Why They Want to Wash the Dishes Before They Don't Want to Wash the Dishes; or, High School Is Too Late to Start.

Facebook Too Public! Facebook Too Private! Facebook Cognitive Parasite -- Wait, Nobody's Complaining About That.




And on the Seasonal Aisle:  

Kitschy Nativity Contest 2009, at my Carolina neighbor, The Crescat.

You Can Lead a Boy to Latin

. . . if you do what Epiphany does, apparently. Just a little while ago I overheard this conversation:

Epiphany:  Soldier!

Helier:  Sir!

Epiphany:  What are your orders if you're a noun, soldier?

Helier:  Nominative:  be the subject! Genitive:  Possess!  Accusative:  Direct the object! Dative:  In-direct the object! Swim in the River Ablative to Fort Vocative, and call!

Epiphany:  Sir!

Helier:  Sir!

Epiphany:  Good work, soldier.

Helier:  Sir!

Boy, have I been doing it wrong all this time.

The Jeeves of Prayer

A propos of the St. Andrew Novena, my dear Pentimento has asked me to write a post on this theme. "The Jeeves of prayer" was a phase I'd tossed off in a comment to qualify my use of the word "Indeed."  I'd meant to respond, "Indeed I will," to a request for prayer, and instead I said only, "Indeed," which is what Jeeves always says when, for example, Bertie Wooster insists on bringing the white mess jacket down to Brinkley Court for a weekend of sorting out Angela and Tuppy and Gussie Fink-Nottle and The Bassett.  It's not really the kind of thing you say to someone for whose intentions you mean, in good faith, to pray.

In fact, there's not much I can say about being "the Jeeves of prayer," because I'm not. I'm the Bertie Wooster of prayer. My prayer life is Bertie Wooster's love life:  frenetic, chaotic, and largely driven by avoidance of commitment. It's not that Bertie doesn't fall in love, sort of, and it's not that I don't pray, sort of, either. As it happens, I pray a lot -- sort of. I'm the person going, "I say! Right ho! Tinkety-tonk, then!" while someone else behind the scenes arranges everything with serene competence, a raised eyebrow, and a lot of hair pomade.

I've frequently wished I had a Jeeves. Everyone in this house wishes he or she had his or her own personal Jeeves, which is a testimony to the scattershotness of my domestic genius. How lovely, we all think, to be awakened with a cup of tea, to have our baths drawn for us, our clothing ironed for us, our telephone answered for us, our personal triangulations straightened out by someone reliably smarter than we are, though we hate to own the truth of it. How good to be taken care of, always.

I was thinking all this tonight, in deepening dejection, as I was putting a child to bed in a room like -- well, like the kind of room an abused and neglected person would sleep in, which was more or less the tone of the whole putting-to-bed episode. I have been butting heads lately with this particular child, and our evenings have taken on the flavor of predestination:  child does x, I say y, child says z, in a tone up with which I cannot put. Bedtime stories get cut short, and the house fills with screams. And on top of that, this child's room looks like Monday morning after the apocalypse, and so does the study, and so does at least one other child's room, and let's not even talk about the laundry, and who's running this show, again?

Jeeves! Where on earth have you been? Because frankly, things are going just the tiniest bit to hell around here.

Whenever I go to Confession, which is frequently, the conversation inevitably cycles back around to this  theme of chaos, and also sloth, of which the chaos is largely a function. My confessor knows me, and I know he knows me;  we've given up the charade of anonymity, so that he says, "Now, two weeks ago you were telling me . . . ," and I say, "Last week you called me on X, and I want to say more about that." So it's not entirely because he's decided to tell everyone to pray the second Joyful Mystery for their penance on a given Saturday that his counsel to me always has to do with praying more, and praying better. That's not all he says, not by a long shot, but it's a consistent enough motif that you'd think I'd have done a better job of amending my life by now. This one thing! It's why other things are out of whack;  it's why I can't deal with the out-of-whackness. And yet, instead of spending more time on my knees, I spend time on -- this, for example, and on running around going, "What ho, old thing?" at God.

But I did pray that novena fifteen times today, I think. I did. Didn't I? I did . . .

The Holy Spirit, about now, is raising one eyebrow and answering, "Indeed."

P.S.  If you wanted to include this child and me in your novena intentions, I think we'd both thank you.

Advent Novena

Via Pentimento, with many thanks, a Saint Andrew novena for Advent:

Hail, and blessed be the hour and moment at which the Son of God was born of a most pure Virgin in a stable at midnight in Bethlehem in the piercing cold.  At that hour, vouchsafe, I beseech Thee, to hear my prayers and grant my desires (mention your intentions here).  Through Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother.

You pray this prayer fifteen times a day, from today, which is Saint Andrew's feast (and happy name-day to all the Andrews I know) through December 24.

Pentimento asks that anyone with prayer intentions or needs for  which she can offer the novena please leave them in her combox. I'll offer the same -- if nothing else, having your needs to pray for will make me remember to pray the novena at all. I'm very good at starting novenas, not so good at keeping them up. But as she says, it would be a privilege to join my prayers with yours, friends in real life and friends unmet, except in the hiddenness of cyberspace.

ADDENDUM:  I happily typed out the directions for praying this novena without considering, until I went to start it this morning, exactly how one prayed it fifteen times. I think I must have had this hazy idea of a wacked-out-on-overdrive Liturgy-of-Many-Hours type of thing. What a relief to discover that, no, you can just sit down and pray it fifteen times all at once. I feel like an idiot, but then again, I'm just as happy this way.

I will say, too,  that anyone praying this novena with me could pray for the following intentions:

continued strength and hope for a couple of friends who bear overwhelming family burdens with grace and good cheer

for two friends undergoing cancer treatment right now

for several other friends struggling through the early stages of bereavement and for the souls of their beloved dead

for my eldest daughter as she wades through heaps of college admissions material and thinks about the coming years (and the rest of her life)

for several friends trying to discern their vocations through the babel that is graduate school

for greater love of God, contrition for sin, and perseverance in hope

Again, please feel free to add your petitions. 

We Have a Winner

 So last night after Vespers and dinner and story time, I painstakingly wrote down on a sheet of standard white printer paper  the names of all entrants in the Great Castle Rush-the-Season Giveaway. I tore the paper into uniformly-sized slips and folded them up into indistinguishable little wads.

These I placed in my hat -- I am not, by nature, a hat-wearer, but once in a musical about Noah I played Mrs. Japheth and had to sing a three-line solo in the course of which my hat fell off into the imaginary water. I haven't worn the hat since, and we've had four mailing addresses in the time intervening between the last moment of that play and now, yet somehow it has managed to be hanging on the pegs in the hallway which doubles as my office, a.k.a. the nerve center for this blog. Go figure.

So I shook the hat with the little wads of paper in it. Then I shook it some more. Then I carried it into the dining room, which doubles as Aelred's office when he's at home, and I said, "Could you possibly help me do something?"

So it was Aelred, a man of unimpeachable integrity and high-quality Advent meditations, who shut his eyes, waved his hand around in the air above the hat, and then plunged it in, pulling out the winning name.

And the winner is:  VA.

Email me, VA, and we'll take it from there.

Many thanks to all who entered the drawing -- it's fun to know who's out there reading. Please don't be strangers.

And do please visit the monks and check out their many excellent Christmas specials and sets:  mugs, sampler packs, and subscriptions all make excellent gifts for the coffee lovers in your life. I'd love to say something about a certain stocking in my house being heavy with the bean of the Rockies come Christmas morning, but I don't want to give away the surprise.



And naturally, as my friend The Anchoress puts it, coffee purchases through this site do drop a little change in our tip jar, for which we are, as always, very very grateful.

Vespers Advent I

 Exulta filia Sion



V:  God, come to my assistance.
R:  Lord, make haste to help me.

V. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
R. As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen. Alleluia.

Pray the Office. 
(click the "Evening Prayer" tab for Vespers)

A Meditation on the First Sunday of Advent, by Aelred.
Used by his kind permission.

One of the most well-known characters from the Arthurian Legends, is Merlin, the wizard.  There are many unusual things about Merlin, but the fact (in T. H. White’s telling in The Once and Future King) that he lives from the future into the past is an important parable for us.  Again, Merlin lives backwards through time.  He is an old man getting younger.  He is able to bring young Arthur into the knowledge of many important future events.

I seize this image because we Christians have set up our year, the Liturgical year, much like the life of Merlin.

We begin the Christian year today, talking about the end of all history.  That’s strange.  We obviously don’t care much for chronology if this is the way we start our year.  If we don’t exactly live backwards like Merlin, we do proclaim that there is nothing about the end of this coming year that will be any more important than what we expect right here at the beginning:  the return of God to judge, to consummate, to reign.

We hold that what God does outside of time redeems our time, gives it a focus it cannot give itself.  Our time, after all, is passing away, perishing with the personal life of each of us.

You see, we believe that our time can only be used aptly if we continually celebrate what happens in God’s time--so to speak—which is, of course, beyond ours, before ours and more than ours.

Think of Merlin again:  Living backwards, he has a problem getting his tenses right when he talks to people.  Future and past, past and future, collide with each other in the present—and so Merlin gets the reputation of being a prophet—and of being quite a useless person in matters practical and punctual.
Christians, in the same way, have this style of communication and have real difficulty placing their hopes in any kind of linear progress (social or technological),  any kind of “advancement”, any kind of “new world order”, any kind of “global tomorrow”, or even in experience or the wisdom that comes with age.  We, of necessity, must share the odd-ball time-keeping of Merlin.  Backwards might bring no loss at all; Forwards, not necessarily progress.

Clearly we will be at odds in the next four weeks with the time-keeping of our society.  Most everyone around  us is preparing for an infant whose memory will pass away a few days after the holiday.  This kind of  so-called “Christmas” leaves our linear time undisturbed, and its main character judges no one, redeems no one, and simply comes again year by year with dreary regularity.  This pageant has nothing to do, of course, with Jesus Christ, and points out the deep tragedy of the failure to keep Advent as a discrete season in preparation, in anticipation of a time when all Christmases, like all forward march of time, like all death and suffering, will be at an end.

God, on the other hand, is setting up the stage to rule and reign—and already the signs are here:  Prophets come, for instance—“Merlins” with a strange message and an odd character.  One thinks of Elijah, Jeremiah (whom we read this morning), John the Baptist (whom we will meet next Sunday) and the rest.  The Prophets are testing the microphones.  If you can’t hear the sound check, you can’t possibly be ready for the big event.

We wish to warn and admonish everyone around us that what is coming, that what actually came, is the end of our era, and the judgment on our trifling, our banalities, our appetites, and our despair.  “Wake up!” we wish to say.

To ourselves and to all who will listen, we say, ‘Be Ready!”

“Lay aside every weight!” we say.  Confess your sin and be rid of it!  Storm the confessional with your penitence and tears.  Give the light some room to be born in you, so that at the day of His coming you won’t be found to be all Darkness.

“Watch and Pray!” we say--knowing that prayer will be the official language of the Kingdom of God and that it is never too late to learn it.

“Let the King at his coming,” we implore, “find you in the midst of a good work—not an evil or mindless one!  Bear fruit fit for the King’s pleasure!  Please him first, and at his coming you will be pleased!”

All of this is our Advent proclamation—our solemn declaration that the rule of God is on its way to redeem our time.  Everything, simply everything, hangs upon this.

Poised as we are, then, on the brink of a coming—eyes fixed on the front door to see who will burst in—we do not yet notice the thing someone is quietly laying on the back steps.  In a few  days, not yet, we will ponder a thing so weak and small, a mercy so tender that it judges the hard heart of the world completely.  It will be a power beyond mere power.  It will give a fire of love that cleanses exactly, and leaves in men and women only the golden stuff that God created and loves so dearly.

But we do not need to wait, really, for He is here, in this Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, our constant companion in the exploration of all the mysteries that He is.  Already he is a fire of love, and the fire is kindled upon all the altars of the world until that time he bids all Sacraments cease, and his great Kingdom takes us up.

Amen

Come, Thou Redeemer of the Earth

Come, Thou Redeemer of the earth,
And manifest Thy virgin birth:
Let every age adoring fall;
Such birth befits the God of all.

Begotten of no human will,
But of the Spirit, Thou art still
The Word of God in flesh arrayed,
The promised Fruit to man displayed.

The virgin womb that burden gained
With virgin honor all unstained;
The banners there of virtue glow;
God in His temple dwells below.

Forth from His chamber goeth He,
That royal home of purity,
A giant in twofold substance one,
Rejoicing now His course to run.

From God the Father He proceeds,
To God the Father back He speeds;
His course He runs to death and hell,
Returning on God’s throne to dwell.

O equal to the Father, Thou!
Gird on Thy fleshly mantle now;
The weakness of our mortal state
With deathless might invigorate.

Thy cradle here shall glitter bright,
And darkness breathe a newer light,
Where endless faith shall shine serene,
And twilight never intervene.

All laud to God the Father be,
All praise, eternal Son, to Thee;
All glory, as is ever meet,
To God the Holy Paraclete.

Text:  Ambrose of Milan (c.397), tr. John Mason Neale

---

Tune:   Puer Nobis Nascitur, by Michael Praetorius

Last Chance

For the Great Castle Rush-the-Season Coffee-and-Chant Giveaway.

Click the link and leave a comment. We'll draw a name sometime tomorrow. Don't hold your breath, though, because that's still, like, a long time away, and I can tell you from bitter maternal experience that nobody, but nobody, wants to watch you turn blue and pass out.

The Advent Castle: Preparing to Prepare

Around here, we love Advent. That is to say, I love Advent. The children love Christmas. As the tree lots sprout up in parking lots all over town, and the illuminated reindeer do their Rockettes routine on the roof of the World Wide Imports out on the business route, the children dance through the house and sing uproariously, "Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!"

"No," I say, "it's Advent. Advent first. Then Christmas."

"Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!"

Etc.

In years past, I've written many posts about Advent:  simplicity and Saint Nicholas,   the dragging out of decorations, the music stuck in our heads, the music we wish would stay stuck in our heads, on not rushing the season, on gift-giving, which you have to think about even as you don't rush the season, Advent in the domestic church, the refusal of boxes of decorations to declare their whereabouts, the O Antiphons, and more. I've written so much about Advent that it's hard to imagine, at this late date, that I could possibly have any more to say.

And yet I do.

Several years ago, Epiphany made, as a gift for Helier and Crispina, an Advent Castle. (see? Told you I'd written a lot). It was a thing of beauty, a marvel of ingenuity, maybe the most loving gift any child of mine has yet given to any other child (or children) in the same house -- and alas, like so many beautiful things, it was also a thing of fragility and transience. Pieces of it keep turning up, but it's in such a state of disintegration that even its hopeful maker acknowledges the futility of trying to put it back together.

Last year, sometime after Christmas, I went to the Goodwill and came home with a blue-and-white wooden church. I'm not sure why my eye fell on it in the store, but I remember looking at it for several long minutes, wondering what on earth it was for, until it dawned on me that it was covered with numbered doors:  twenty-five of them, in fact. Aha! So I bought it, for a whopping $1.99, which I know because when I pulled it out today, the price tag was still on, and I brought it home and put it away for -- well, for today, right?

So now we've been trying to figure out what to put inside all these little doors. Baby Jesus in the manger for Christmas Day is a given, and I put the corresponding Mary, a plain white china one, in the door marked "8" for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Epiphany and I rounded up a handful of rosary rings, which we've planted behind random doors, so that the finder on each of those days can lead us in one of the Joyful Mysteries. We've got an angel, and I want a tiny Santa figure for the 6th, the feast of Saint Nicholas. Two little worry-doll figures will do for Adam and Eve on Christmas Eve;  I added a medal of the Infant Jesus as well. I'd like a tiny apple to put in someplace, for original sin and for "Jesus Christ the Apple Tree."



And some animal figures would be nice, to be present at the Manger, and to signify Creation and perhaps Noah's Ark.

Beyond that, I haven't had many very clear thoughts:  what else would you put in an Advent calendar? Enquiring minds, &c.