Joyous Noel by Jenna Vick Silliman

When I was just a little girl about five years old, I loved the Christmas carols “Oh Come all Ye Faithful”, “The First Noel” and “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” I sang them over and over again and they became a part of me, imprinted on my memory. Now at Christmas time, it is still one of my favorite things to do to sing Christmas carols. Christmas doesn't feel like Christmas without singing those old time Christmas stories put to music.

During our “Prayer Watch” on Friday night the seven of us women were wondering what Noel really meant and so we looked it up. It is a word for the Christmas season of joy and runs from December 24 to January 6^th. So we decided to keep on celebrating this year and hold onto the joys of Christmas time and to me that means to keep singing! The Wise Men arrived after Jesus was born, so “We Three Kings” is a perfect song to sing for a joyous Noel.

Every year I like to think of something homemade to give for special gifts for friends and family. This year I made up booklets of Christmas carols with my top ten favorites. How handy to give them out just in time to do some singing! Usually people oblige me a few songs. Personally, I’d like to sing for a couple of hours! Hahaha!

This fall I took a watercolor painting class and I learned a technique with salt to make “salt stars.” The teacher gave me the class and supplies in exchange for working for her for about ten hours helping her sell her paintings and notecards at Scandinavian festivals. She provided paint brushes, a paint palette full of the basic colors of watercolor paint arranged in a color wheel, and she gave me odds and ends of watercolor paper of various quality and the last few pages in several tablets. Each color reacts with the salt a little differently, but I really like the way the midnight blue was soaked up by the grains of salt to make amazing “salt stars.”

Reading my Bible one morning I decided to read about the star the wise men followed. This one verse popped out to me. “When the wise men saw the star, they were thrilled with ecstatic joy.” (See Matthew 2:10 Amplified.) I decided to paint beautiful blue skies full of salt stars, but to mask off a bit of sky using masking tape cut into the shape of the special star the wise men followed. I think that was the hardest part—cutting out those stars on the sticky tape! At the bottom of each painting I wrote out the verse. What a great gift and Christmas card in one!

I started out with small three by five inch paintings, and as I gained in confidence I cut a bigger piece of watercolor paper to do four by six inch paintings. Then I got brave and did a few five by sevens. The technique is done with sprinkling salt. You paint the area with water, then add a few strokes of paint and wait until it is almost dry and quickly sprinkle on the salt very lightly—almost a grain at a time. There is this magical chemical reaction before your very eyes as the salt absorbs the pigment/color of the paint and makes a crystalline pattern—like snow or a starry night! You wait until the watercolor paper is completely dry, then wipe off the salt. It is amazing how each one comes out differently.

SO fun! I used every bit of watercolor paper I had, and almost all my midnight blue paint, because I didn’t want to stop. I got so absorbed in my project I stayed up until two in the morning painting!

The theme for Kingdom Bloggers this week is a favorite Christmas memory—my painting is one of them. Hahaha! I guess it shows I love my life, I’m enjoying the present, and living in the “now”. Have A JOYOUS NOEL everyone!!!

Three Books for Thee

I sometimes feel like a dunce when I am asked to list my favorite foods, shops, authors, or in this case, books. My brain stutters and I have a tough time answering. I think it is because I don’t want to be held to any proclamation--my favorite dinner today could be my least favorite next week. And having a favorite implies that you are categorizing all the others as “second-best” (like when one of your children insists you have a favorite child and wants you to name him or her out loud).

I will put aside this neurosis for today and name my current choices for books that have informed, challenged and inspired me.

Hands down, Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy is one of the best books I have read. Don’t be put off by its length--it will hold you in its grip until you finish. When I began the book, I knew only a little about Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a bit of his writing, some misinformation from other theologians, and from a great 2000 film, Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace). Too often we can easily dismiss people because they do something we see as wrong, or hypocritical, or even stupid, instead of looking at the whole picture of that person’s life (I once heard someone say that the sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin was a “jerk”).

Bonhoeffer was a complex human being who loved God fully, openly, and sacrificially. He became a pastor and theologian against his family’s wishes. He is described as lovable and difficult. As a 37 year-old, he falls in love with a 17 year-old. He and his family knew the dangers of Hitler long before the rest of world and he tried tirelessly to inform the outside world. He believed that a true Christian must love God and seek justice, and was horrified by German churches’ passivity regarding Nazism. Bonhoeffer, after living in safety in London for two years, returned to Germany to conduct a seminary in secret, and was constantly harassed by the Nazis. Through his well-placed family, he became a spy within Abwehr, a German intelligence agency that was actually the center of the resistance) and was later executed by the Nazis in 1945.

Metaxas does a masterful job of handling a very complex, compelling story, managing to weave Bonhoeffer’s developing theology, deep love for God, and his own humanity throughout a text that informs about Hitler’s rise. This book convicted and challenged me about my own faith and the need for ever-growing obedience to our call as Christians, which must include compassion, mercy and sacrifice for others.

Two other books that are well worth the read are Lauren Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, which will enlarge the reader’s understanding of the other war in WW II, the war in the Pacific, as the author unfolds the true story of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini (another complex individual with amazing resilience--and whose later life is just as difficult and then transformed!); and, because I love art and story, David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, my favorite book (and a gift from my sister Ann for my birthday last June!) of 2011.

This is a fabulous, excellent, get-the-artsy-juices-flowing book: you will learn more about French history in the 1800's, side by side with American history, (rather than how we learned in school--in isolation from other countries); you will want to run, not walk, to every piece of art and sculpture you have seen by Sargent, Cassatt, Healy, Catlin, Saint-Gaudens, because you have learned the back-story of many creations; and you will wish you were at the Exposition in Paris in 1889 when Thomas Edison was the rage, the Eiffel Tower was new, and 6,000 pieces of art were on display, and something new called a toy car by Peugeot was displayed.