Early Morning Conversations

Occasionally, while at grandparents' houses, Sam has slept in the room with us for one reason or another. And with Joy pregnant, she often likes to sleep in a recliner to help ease any pain in her back. As a result, I'm often to first to hear Sam wake up and take care of whatever needs he may have.

Friday morning, around 6:00, I was awoken by Sam struggling mightily in his bed. He was flopping back and forth in a prelude to wakefulness, so I lay still, hoping he would return to sleep.

His groggy little voice dashed that hope, but left me something to laugh about the rest of the day in exchange for a little lost sleep. Right before he spoke I heard two distinct "ppffffbbpptttt" sounds from the crib. They were quickly followed by three statements of waking up fact:

"I have gases."

"I have two gases."

I thought he was finished at that point and made to retrieve him from bed, but stalled long enough for Sam to deliver the most profound of his observations:

"I am full of gas."

Handel's Messiah, the History, the Traditions, the Strangeness

It's Christmas night, which means that while the family is watching a movie, I'm sitting at the computer thinking about the iconic Christmas music, Handel's Messiah. I suppose I'm suffering the gift and the curse of being a musicologist.

I began thinking about Messiah because my father-in-law introduced me yesterday to Christopher Rouse's Karolju, a work he heard on the radio and thought I would find interesting. I did think the music had merit (though I'd like to hear the entire work) but it got me thinking about how hard it is to create new "classical" Christmas music. Handel and Tchaikovsky pretty much have the market cornered, and of the two works, Handel's gets the most play this time of year.

Handel’s greatest success certainly was Messiah. It was first produced in 1742, written when he was 56. The work was commissioned from the composer as a benefit for various Dublin charities, and so was premiered in Ireland.

On the face of it, you would never expect Messiah to be the work Handel is remembered for. It doesn't match up with most of his oratorios. First of all, unlike most of Handel's oratorios, it takes its text directly from the Bible. Because of that fidelity, it lacks any real plot in the traditional sense. It doesn’t really develop any drama, but instead is more detached and philosophical. It is a vast musical panorama of the life of Jesus broken into three parts - Old Testament prophecies, Christ's Birth, Christ's Crucifixion and Resurrection - although most often we only hear the first two parts at Christmas. In addition to the lack of plot to hook in an audience, the whole thing lasts about three hours.

Still, this oratorio, which took Handel only 23 days to write the first draft of the entire thing, is the single work that survived Handel's life. In fact, there is a long tradition that developed around it. In 1859, for example, there was a celebration in London commemorating the centenary of Handel’s death.Included a performance of the Messiah with 2,765 singers, 460 instrumentalists, playing to an audience of over 81,000.The kind of festival happened every year thereafter for more than 60 years, and the Messiah was always the centerpiece.This sort of thing still goes on every year to this day in cities around the world. I know that in Kansas City, they have a yearly Messiah sing-a-long, in which the general public is invited to bring its scores and “perform” the piece.

I can't think of another piece of "classical" music that has this kind of hold on the general imagination. The hold is so strong, that when you hear examples like this one, you immediately know what is wrong and why it is funny. And probably you have heard examples like that one in your own lifetime, as everyone has tried the Messiah out at some point in their lives.

Reflecting on the situation, I can't help but recall George Bernard Shaw's penetrating remarks on the work – “I have long since recognized the impossibility of obtaining justice for [Messiah] in a Christian country…. A mood of active intelligence would be scandalous.Thus we get broken in to the custom of singing Handel as if he meant nothing; and as it happens… he meant a good deal….Why, instead of wasting huge sums on the multitudinous dullness of a Handel Festival does not somebody set up a thoroughly rehearsed and exhaustively studied performance of the Messiah…with a chorus of twenty capable artists?Most of us would be glad to hear the work seriously performed once before we die.”

Day 4 of 100 Christmas Gifts

1. Contagious laughter
2. Hot Showers
3. Uninterrupted Sleep
4. Time to yourself
5. Getting what you need before you even know you need it
6. Christmas lights
7. The wonder of a child
8. Firemen who let you drive their fire trucks
9. Granddads who take you to see fire trucks
10. Nanas who play with you in the white van
11. Dickens's A Christmas Carol
12. Fellow journeyers who share their story
13. Holy Communion
14. The excitement of a child at Christmas
15. Watching a child at Christmas
16. Late afternoon naps
17. The smell of cornbread dressing cooking
18. The adventure of making chocolate covered cranberries
19. Candlelight Christmas Eve services
20. God's Radiant glory

Day 3 of 100 Christmas Gifts

Day three of our Christmas gifts, a day of rest and reflection:

1. Sam exclaiming at lunch: "My juice makes music!"
2. Live nativities
3. A little bit of a nip in the air
4. Reunions with old friends
5. Sunday afternoon naps
6. Christmas music at church
7. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
8. Hot rolls after lunch
9. Cheesecake
10. Cherries in December
11. Families who love you enough to be interested in what interests you
12. Feeling the baby kick
13. Deep, open conversations about faith
14. Late afternoon sunlight
15. Being understood
16. Being heard
17. Answered prayers
18. An empty work e-mail inbox
19. The promise of being able to live life to the fullest

Day 2 of 100 Christmas Gifts

Today Sam's regular mealtime prayer took on a slightly different form. Normally he prays, "Dear Jesus, Thank you for trucks and buses. Amen." We have to prompt him to think of other things he might be thankful for or to ask God to bless the food. However, today was different. Today's prayer before lunch went as follows: "Dear Jesus, Thank you for Nana and GrandDad and the dogs. Amen."

The dogs are Rinski and Tucker, Heather and Adam's two dogs, which Sam has been looking forward to seeing all week. In fact, when we arrived at Nana's house, he had to inquire as to where the dogs were. Today, they finally arrived with Heather and Adam. Of course, when they all got here, Sam didn't care that Aunt Heather and Uncle Adam had walked in the door, only the long awaited dogs, which immediately brought squeals of delight and uncontrolled giggles.

All this to say, I think the dogs would make the top of Sam's list of ways God has blessed him today. Here are the other ways we have seen the light of God in our lives of late.

1. Car transporters
2. Blue juice (otherwise known as some special frozen drink for kids from Chili's)
3. Barnes and Nobles with Nana
4. A satifying meal for a pregnant tummy from Chili's
5. Watching Sam's delight over drinking said "blue juice"
6. Unexplained hand swelling that is finally gone!
7. Singing Christmas carols around the piano as a family
8. Sisters
9. Memories of loved ones
10. 4D ultrasound pictures and video of a new niece
11. Finished work and time off for family
12. The grace to remember when to stop
13. Long car rides that give unexpected time one-on-one with family
14. Rain (instead of snow)
15. Toddler pronunciations of the phrase "yellow jello"
16. Sleeping in
17. Sleepy ramblings over the baby monitor
18. Catch Phrase with the family
19. Discussions of differing viewpoints where respect reigns
20. Health and healthy loved ones
21. And of course, the dogs.

One Hundred Christmas Gifts

Since we always travel home for the holidays, Joy and I have started a tradition of celebrating Christmas with our family the two days before we slide into the car and strike out on the road. This year, we decided to take Sam down to Union Station where every year they set up a large model train display. The trains set up are in G, S, and O scale, which meant for Sam, they were larger than any model train he had ever seen.





As you can see, Sam was enamored, especially when he discovered they had an entire section devoted to Thomas and his friends. He must have watched James and Thomas make the circuit for twenty minutes alone. There was also a train he could have ridden, but it was closed for the operators to run to lunch, so we had to content ourselves with watching the trains for over thirty minutes. Sam could have stayed there all day, which sounds a little impossible, until you realize just how large this display was. Here is about a fourth of the entire display:
This really was a bit of Christmas, or any day, heaven for Sam.

Finding this display was a bit of serendipity for us in that it helped solidify something Joy and I have been mulling over for a few weeks. In early December, we started our annual Christmas letter. With painting Sam's room and then our computer crashing (taking our Christmas contact list with it) we couldn't finish and get our Christmas cards out this year, but we had decided that we would share thoughts we had on trying to communicate to Sam the light and love of God that were sent to us in the birth of Christ.

One of the practices we've been practicing this year is from a blog on which Joy discovered the practice of counting “One Thousand Gifts”. The idea is to seek God in the ordinary, daily mess of our lives midst laundry and grading papers by simply pausing to see Him in the daily gifts He provides. But beyond that, the list of one thousand gifts is meant to inspire us to thank God (or simply to be thankful) for the gifts we have, rather than to spend this season making lists and then wondering why we didn't get everything we desired.

Truthfully, this is hard for us. Wanting makes us want more. We find ourselves too busy, too preoccupied, too scattered; but we were inspired and wanted to share the inspiration with you. Still, we wanted to start small, so here are our One Hundred Gifts of Christmas, twenty each day through Christmas (in no particular order, and from me, Joy, and Sam).

1. New step stools used to climb on beds
2. Handel's Messiah
3. Choo-choo trains at Union Station
4. Seeing our new baby on an ultrasound
5. Unexpected plates of cookies
6. Little boys who look up at you with big sleepy eyes and say, "can we snuggle?"
7. Buses and trucks of any shape, size, or color
8. Finished rooms painted deep blue
9. Packages with Christmas presents that ship faster than they should
10. Computers fixed by prayer because there is no other answer
11. Construction diggers
12. Playing piano with Sam sitting next to you, playing along and singing
13. Christmas lights in the shapes of trains
14. The warmth of the winter sun after a week of clouds, ice, and snow
15. Healing in the body of Christ
16. Birthday parties for Jesus with 2,3, and 4-year-olds
17. Snuggling on the couch under a warm blanket and watching a movie
18. Hearing Sam sing "Away in a Manger"
19. Unexpected Compliments
20. Uncontrollable laughter

So, there are our first twenty. This practice has been so grounding for us, we encourage you to join with us, either by posting some of your own in the comments over the next few days or by joining in on your own blog.

Big-Boy Room - The Painting Phase

In addition to our broken computer, painting Sam's room has kept me away from blogging. We decided with the coming of TK that we wanted to keep our nursery the way it is (we painted it a neutral green for that purpose two and a half years ago) and move Sam into the guest room. We bought the big-boy bed a few weeks ago and figured the next step was painting the room. Usually, painting would not be a big deal, but we were starting with the beige room:We call it the beige room because everything, I mean everything was beige - the ceiling, the trim, the walls, everything. And the beige must have been there for a while because the walls sucked up all paint we stuck on it and was a bit dirty looking. So first up, we had to paint the ceiling. To give you an idea of how beige the room was, here's the first coat on the ceiling:Then, because the paint on the walls was so old, we decided to prime the walls with a tinted primer. The color is what I delightfully call the blue pepto bismol would be if it decided to be blue:Then we got to the paint itself. Joy has a thing for dark, deep colors. Our dining room is a rich, deep red, and deep, dark colors are a pain to paint. Joy has never been happy with how the paint job on the dining room turned out, so she spent about two days looking up how to paint the deep blue, called Starry Night Blue, evenly. It took a few coats, but we finally figured it out:Doesn't the color just cry out for glow in the dark stars around the ceiling? I finished up all the trim last night, which was bright white, and it turned out well. Sam certainly likes it, and periodically puts his head in the room, points, and declares, "It's blue!" After a week and a half of painting, it finally is.