Advent: The Jesse Tree

I'm always looking for new ways to celebrate the Christmas season. For many years we've done some form of Advent celebration at home, along with what we do on Sundays at church.

Some have been really great (like the Advent "I Spy"-ish book we did a couple of years ago) and some a little dry (like when we tried reading a different scripture every night for all 25 days, including the many prophecies from minor prophets...not so riveting for girls who were all under the age of 8 at the time.)

This year I found a book called "The Jesse Tree".

Evidently, there is a tradition I'd never heard of, in which churches used to either have wood carved or stained glass windows of a tree with symbols on it. Each of the symbols denoted a Bible story, most from the ancestral line of Jesus, and some from the prophets who foretold his arrival. Here's the oldest known stained glass Jesse Tree, from the Chartres Cathedral in northern France.

The book was fashioned as an exchange between an older man who is carving a new Jesse Tree for his church and a boy who wanders in daily during his work and wants to know the stories behind each of the carvings. So as the tree develops, the boy, and we, hear the story of Jesus' birth from the Garden of Eden through the Magi and Angels.

We used each reading as an opportunity to make our own version of the Jesse Tree which we displayed on the wall in our hallway.

Each night after reading we'd add a picture, or something simple we made, or a piece from our girls many Playmobil sets that corresponded to the story for that night. And at the end, we had a complete tree, full of symbols that remind us of the Biblical narrative and each part along the way that led to the birth of Jesus.

Each night, we'd still light the candle, or candles as we got closer to Christmas, before we read the story. Then once we'd put our symbol on the tree, we'd blow them out until the next night.

As Advent celebrations go, this was a good one, definitely a keeper. It was good for me to think about Christ's birth within the context of the whole story, not just the 9 months at the beginning of the gospels that we usually concentrate on. And the story was written in a way that made it interesting for us parents as well as for the girls.

And alas, now that Christmas is over, our Advent celebration will stop for 11 months.

But not the memories, the stories, and the reminders of God's plan and faithfulness over the centuries.

Christmas fun

For an early Christmas present, we received from our "Honey Karen" and Joe (the affectionate name we have for my aunt and uncle) a gingerbread house kit.

So on the Saturday before Christmas, we began to assemble our confectionary homestead.

It was a team effort, requiring lots of concentration and creativity.

But the final result was most definitely delightful...and delicious.

Big fun for all of us. The girls had done this in the past with their G'ma and G'pa. It was my first gingerbread house ever. Loved it. Might even have to become a holiday tradition.

Thanks Honey Karen for sending that load of yummy construction our way!

Having finished our building project, we headed out for a quick photo shoot.

Quick, I say, because it was about 28 degrees and I told everyone they couldn't wear coats for the pics. They weren't overly fond of me for a few minutes.

But hey, I let 'em wear scarves. Sheesh.

Merry Christmas from the Smithereens!

(and no, I've no idea why there is a random dog in the background of our picture.)

Bearded Lady

One of the classes that Anya has this year is Theater Makeup. She's learned how to not only do regular makeup (say for someone who simply looks their age, gender, and species), she's also practiced more advanced designs, like a lioness,

a person who's survived a car wreck,

an old woman

(she wasn't particularly fond of that one. It wasn't her best grade. However it does look better on stage. I don't think it could look worse)

even a Kabuki player.

As you can see, most of these she's done on herself, and then taken pictures so we could see later.

They're rather striking. (I love to state the obvious).

For a recent project, however, Anya's teacher told her and her fellow students that it would be advisable to use a model for this endeavor. They would be putting on a beard, and it is more difficult to do to oneself, evidently. So, Anya needed a model. A mannequin, as it were, on which to construct her work of art.

Jenna volunteered. Actually, Emily and Jenna both volunteered, but the bearding process involves latex, to which Emily is allergic, so she was axed as a potential for facial hair.

Jenna was delivered to Anya's school, and after an hour of laborious latexing, gumming, hair application and trimming, our bearded little girl emerged.

I think she most closely resembles a turn of the century Russian immigrant.

A really cute one, though.

Christmas tree...and lights

You might remember my somewhat paranoid, conspiracy-theoryesque post from last December about replacing the lights on a pre-lit tree. After much pain, time and grousing, we bought 600 new lights last year to adorn our formerly pre-lit artificial Christmas tree.

At the end of last year's holiday season, I carefully removed all 6 strands of lights from the tree. Correction: I carefully removed all 6 strands of fully working lights from the tree. (Do you sense the foreshadowing? I like to keep my readers engaged, waiting anxiously) We put them away along with the tree and all other Christmas decor.

Upon our return from Moab this year, we excitedly pulled out said decor from it's storage spot, ready to disperse Christmas cheer throughout the house, but most specifically via our tree. We assembled our fake fir, fitting its three simple parts together, allowing its perpetually green limbs to drop into place, and addressed its obvious emptiness by pulling out those 600 points of light from their cozy storage bin and plugged them into the wall to check for burned out bulbs before we bedecked the lonesome tree.

These lights that we purchased last year, these lights that we so laboriously replaced last year, these lights that faithfully lit our room with holiday joy just last year, these lights were now an utter disappointment. Because although our intention, when plugging them into the wall, was to find the one or two stray, lifeless bulbs, what we discovered instead was that all 6 strands of lights were dead.

Lifeless.

Lightless.

Actually, I exaggerate. Of the 6 strands of lights, half of one strand did light up.

Whoopee.

And we discovered the same fate for our smaller strand that adorns our mantle, and for the lights that make up our outdoor wreath. All of them: useless as a New Kids On The Block LP.

We found ourselves wondering, is there some sort of bulb-killing gas emanating from our storage room? Have we a gremlin that secretly digs through our Christmas boxes during the summer and mischievously disables our strands of lights? Is God trying to convince us of the innate evilness of holiday lighting?

Or, could it be that my wild-eyed conspiracy theories about the China-based Christmas lighting industry aren't so far fetched after all?

In any case, the Chinese conglomerate got some more of our money as we shelled out for replacement lights...again. And after much angst, our tree is festively glowing as it should be.

The lights on, beads strung, and ornaments hung, Emily (sometimes known as Shorty McShort-Short) put the finishing touch atop the tree.

With some assistance.

Last Day in Moab

Our final day of our adventure in Moab started with breakfast at Denny's. Yes, I know, quite adventurous. But since we didn't end up there on Turkey Day, we thought we'd enjoy breakfast there on Black Friday.

Having fueled ourselves with loads of smoked, burned pig and carbohydrate-rich griddle offerings, we cleared out of our motel and headed to the park for our last destination.

The Fiery Furnace.

Those gorgeous red rocks, called fins, are what virtually all arches begin as. They are sandstone walls, each anywhere from 5 - 15 feet thick (some even thicker) and as softer sandstone underneath erodes, you are sometimes left with an arch.

The Fiery Furnace is a particularly dense area of fins, with no marked trail, so you either have to get a hiking permit and somehow prove that you aren't an idiot and have the capability to navigate your way through the unmarked maze (I would be unable to prove my lack of idiocy), or you go on a 3 hour ranger-led hike through a small portion of the area. Given my already admitted inability to find my way, much less convince anyone in charge of permits that I wouldn't get hopelessly lost, we chose to follow a ranger.

The Fiery Furnace is so named because it appears to be aglow with fire, especially in morning and afternoon. Even from a far, it's a truly awe-inspiring vista.

We met our ranger in the parking lot along with over 30 other people. Yes, that means with our family there were over 35 of us. When we signed up, they told us the hikes were limited to 25. I guess maybe they counted some of the kids as 1/2 a person...or something.

In any case, at noon we headed into the furnace, following our trusty ranger. As we strolled down the hill to the base of the outer fins, our ranger stopped, once to remind us to minimize our impact by staying in a line, and then a second time to give us a little info on the formations we'd be seeing in the Fiery Furnace.

We were a little worried when, by 12:30, we had spent approximately 22 minutes listening to Mr. Ranger and 8 minutes actually hiking. And during those 22 minutes we heard as much about his former professor's revolving Cadillac collection, and the places our ranger has lived, as we did about the formations themselves. While his professor's car fetish was mildly fascinating...or simply odd...we really wanted to see the fiery furnace. After all, that is what we signed up and paid our hard earned cash for.

The face says it all.

Eventually we did get to enter the fins and begin to see the wonders.

This one is called Skull Arch. Can you see it?

This is Kissing Turtles Arch.

So cute.

There were plenty of tight spaces to crawl through.

And lots of magnificent sights.

This is what the Smith girls look like while sitting through the 7th ranger "talk".

Please, just make it stop.

In truth, we were all glad we went. It was a spectacular way to end our trip to Moab.

And we have many funny memories of our ranger.

Perhaps the best being the ever decreasing vision of him in the rear view mirror.

Thanksgiving Day

Since we were in Moab, we had several options when it came to Thanksgiving Dinner. Most of them involved ridiculous amounts of money. Lots of local restaurants were serving some variation of a turkey dinner, but they were very fond of their fare; it would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of $80-100 smackeroos for our family to enjoy any of their offerings.

We weren't paying that much to watch our girls eat a small helping of turkey and mashed potatoes and a roll. Not that that's all the restaurant would offer them, just that that's all they'd want to eat. And Anya wouldn't even eat the potatoes.

What we discovered, as we were sitting around our hotel room that morning, wishing each other a Happy Thanksgiving, is that if you're not at home cooking a turkey and all the stuff that goes with it, enjoying the smells that fill the house, or heading to someone else's home to enjoy that same bounty, it really doesn't feel like Thanksgiving. It just kind of feels like a generic Saturday.

Except it's Thursday.

That's not a bad thing. I mean, we were already LOVING our getaway in southern Utah, having a great time together, perfect weather, beautiful scenery, wonderful stuff to do. It just didn't feel like Thanksgiving.

So we decided to really think outside the box. What if we didn't have turkey at all? That narrowed our options. Fast food places were all closed. One sandwich shop was open, and of course Denny's, which I don't think ever closes. We were actually on our way to Denny's, when we saw that this place was open.

Huzzah! We all love Chinese food, and what better way to thumb our collective noses at tradition than to get food from a completely different continent. They were offering a more reasonably priced turkey dinner, but later in the day, and besides, who wants to go to a chinese restaurant and have turkey? We stuck to the asian cuisine.

It was a great choice. Incredible meal. I'm salivating just thinking about it again.

Having loaded up on rice, veggies, chicken and beef all simmering in various delectable sauces, we headed back into the park to hike to Delicate Arch.

We were pretty surprised at the number of non-traditionalists like us who were forsaking the usual Thanksgiving activities and spending it on this trail. Those little dots trailing up the slick rock are fellow hikers.

Quite a few fellow hikers.

We were a bit worried it might be crazy crowded when we finally reached Delicate Arch, but it was only mildly so.

As always, we snapped and climbed.

Those two little ants under Delicate in the previous picture are Em and me. That arch is stinkin' big!

We ended the day with a loaf of crusty sourdough bread, cheese, popcorn and chocolate, while we watched the DVD of Charley's Aunt together and annoyed our motel neighbors with our laughter.