A Pause in Advent - Essence - Others

Welcome to the second Pause in Advent! The posts from last week were diverse and fascinating, but also had some kind of unity amongst them - we often find that we are dwelling on the same ideas as we prepare for Christmas. Thanks for all your posts and to all who took time to read and comment on others' posts, which is so encouraging and interesting.

This year, as I've said, I'm thinking about the essence of Christmas - not the commercialised/generally accepted form of the festival ('flavouring'), but what it really boils down to ('essence'). This is very necessary, as I've taken on a lot more work, and also because no one now has the money to spend on Christmas that many took for granted a decade ago.

My first ingredient of the true 'essence' of Christmas was tradition. My second is 'other people'. It's generally suggested that the more you care about other people, the happier you feel. Focussing on addressing your own (and your family's) immediated needs, exclusively, is a self-defeating strategy - people who take time to help others are happier and feel more satisfied. There've been times when I've been pretty active on 'saving the world', but these last few years have been more about the family and me - I really don't want to get so insular that I forget there are others out there with far greater needs than our own. Dormouse has some great examples of how people are helping out around the world on her recent post here. Ben spends some time each year collecting food for the French Restos du Coeur (Restaurants of the Heart) - he was at a local supermarket charming old ladies (I don't doubt) today, for the big collection before Christmas.

A group of people in a town near us has got involved in the Sakado project (there is a great French pun there if you know where to find it...). Sakado is a national organisation which organises the collection of packed rucksacks (sacs à dos) for homeless people. The idea is that you use new or good quality second hand material to provide warm clothes/blankets, hygiene products, communications aids (like a phone card or envelopes with stamps on) and Christmas goodies, and pack these into a rucksack along with your own personal message of encouragement. The rucksacks are then given to homeless people in the area - Toulouse in our case.

I've picked up two adequate rucksacks and a few warm clothes from our budget sports store - for some reason, the charity shops aren't stocking rucksacks at the moment, which I think is missing a trick. I've been to the charity shop for gloves, hats, socks, blankets etc so now it's over to the boys - I'm going to give them the list of hygiene products and Christmas goodies and a budget, and send them off to Intermarché to choose whatever they think would be best for a homeless man. Son 2 is already intrigued, and wonders if he will ever see a man in Toulouse carrying HIS rucksack!

This is quite a costly exercise. Stocking up for it has already made me realise how absolutely impossible it would be to get properly kitted-out for outdoor life without an income. I hope that when the boys go shopping for the supermarket products they will also face some realities about how homeless people have to live. By getting involved, in this practical way, I pray that we are going to bless someone else this Christmas but will also count our own blessings more accurately. Maybe the essence of Christmas is that Jesus came to a difficult place, at a difficult time, among difficult people - for Others.

Neighbours, tropical and otherwise...

At Christmas they eat lychees on the island of Réunion !

Our neighbours spent many years living on Réunion, and now their younger son has returned there. They received a parcel of lychees this week and Nellie called me over the fence to come and partake of the bounty.

I’ve never had fresh lychees before, and they are great. I had to take a photo quickly… there’s no way they’ll last until Christmas here!

We’ve had some wonderful neighbours over the years. A kind reader might suggest that this is because we deserve them, but actually I wonder if playing the piano at midnight, having the odd scream at or between children and running a farm-style front garden truly make us good neighbours… but over the years, we’ve known real friendship and kindness from those who’ve lived next door to us.

In Cumbria, we had Dave and Maggie, a young middle-aged couple who sorted us out in all our ‘first house’ disasters – Dave found us an old bath when we did up our bathroom, and Maggie taught us about the folk music of the fells. In North Tyneside we had a succession of young women living in the flat below us, who put up with Ben practicing his trumpet at night and invited us round for curious food and sociable parties. In Harrogate our neighbours honoured us by chopping down the high hedge that they’d planted because they didn’t like the previous owners of our house! We shared the cherries from our tree with them on the only year it actually produced – they couldn’t believe they’d been living next to a cherry tree all these years.

On moving to France, we met with real kindness. The neighbours of our rental house spoke some English, and had real fun initiating us into cassoulet and all the wonders of living in this part of France. Serge and Nellie, our Réunionaise/French neighbours here, are sweet and generous. It took both families a while to work out how to be cross-cultural neighbours – in France people don’t talk to their neighbours much, I’m constantly assured, and when we did weird things like inviting all the locals to a bonfire party we were accepted but considered rather odd! So sometimes Serge and Nellie don’t talk to me for weeks or months, and I have to remember that they aren’t shunning me, but just behaving normally for France. But at other times they give us food (and indeed, we give them food too) and they have taken to giving us leftovers for the hens, which is just fantastic! They’ve set up a little table by their fence and I sometimes find a bowl of rice or a pot of shredded lettuce on it in the morning. What a very nice way to live with your neighbours.

 

PS The internet connection is back! What a relief...

A First Pause in Advent - 'Essence'

Welcome to A Pause in Advent 2012, as readers and as ‘pausers’ ! This Pause in Advent is more challenging for me than others I’ve organised, as I’m working close to full time right now and our internet connection decided to desert us last week. I wrote this post on Saturday night and am now (Monday morning) in a McDonald's restaurant near to my next lesson, taking advantage of McDonald's free WiFi (and a diet coke and a salad...) It's been an enormous pleasure to log on and read all the kind and enthusiastic messages you've left me since our internet connection disappeared - my apologies to those who asked questions which I haven't been able to answer yet.

So, having more outside pressures at the moment, I’ve had to think about my priorities for preparing Christmas. What is really essential, and what is just a pleasant trimming? Or, to go with the title of this post, what is the essence of Christmas, and what is merely ‘Christmas-flavoured’?

I teach French people who work in the food industry, and one group had an interesting conversation last week about which ice creams are entitled to a vanilla flower on their packaging. If real vanilla essence is used, the packaging can be illustrated with the vanilla flower. If flavouring which has never seen a vanilla pod is used, then there is no right to use a picture of the flower. (Although unscrupulous producers do use it. No surprise there…)

So there we are – essence (the distilled ‘real thing’) and flavouring (a commercial attempt at copying the real thing).

 

For me, I’ve decided that to distil Christmas preparations down to their essence, I will need to focus on four things. I’ll post about one of those things, each Advent Sunday!

The first part of the essence of Christmas may well be tradition. I love the old traditions and I really enjoy the way that families and other groups quickly create their own traditions – there doesn’t need to be much age behind a tradition to make it significant. I hope that some of the other ‘Pauses’ are going to talk about these traditions, old and new, and I’m really looking forward to learning more about them. But another, very practical, aspect of tradition has really made itself clear to me this year.

I was far too busy teaching English to food producers (and others) to prepare much for Advent this year. So on Friday night I went to the box labelled ‘Advent’ and pulled out:

The Advent Tree made by Ben’s mum when the boys were little.

The Advent Wreath made by Ben from one of our firewood logs two years ago, after we’d burnt a hole in the old fabric wreath in our 'Pause' logo. (I need to add some greenery - I haven't had time yet!)

The Advent Nativity Scene bought by me in the Harrogate Fair Trade Shop about eleven years ago.

If I hadn’t had these trusty, traditional pieces tucked away, we wouldn’t have been ready for Advent. Last year I really enjoyed getting creative and making a fresh Advent wreath. This year I’m delighted to be revisiting the old favourites, which have allowed me to establish a genuine atmosphere of preparation in the home, with almost no work. Traditions make it easy to hold on to what matters – my new discovery of the week.

PS Ben has just started playing ‘O come, o come Emmanuel’ on the piano – full marks for Advent Essence, that man!

The Old and the New, plus a little more info on Advent

Ben and I, belatedly, got round to trying this year's Beaujolais Nouveau last night:

It's an important tradition to us, not only because it's a good thing to join in French customs, but also because it marks an anniversary for us - eight years ago we came out to look for a rental house near Toulouse because Ben had been offered the job here. I was fairly ill and for many years I found it hard to look back on that time with any pleasure, but now I can taste the Beaujolais and reminisce with enjoyment on our first visit and all the years that have passed since!

Thank you to everyone who has already signed up for A Pause in Advent this year. We'll be starting on Sunday 2nd December, as Advent begins quite late in 2012! For those who want to know more, the idea is that we post on any subject which allows us to calm down and think straight at a busy time... Many people have a religious or spiritual take on the event, and many use the pause as a way to emphasise the value of simplicity or traditions old and new, and to dwell on the importance of people above profit at this consumer-driven time of year. We write about what we've been doing, what we've been thinking, and what we hope for. Will you join us?

A Pause in Advent, 2012

Some sweet people (in the USA, Britain and France) have expressed the hope that we'll be doing the Pause in Advent again this year - thank you so much to them for keeping the thought going while I'm so busy! The answer is yes, I will be delighted to host this four-week event again, where you are invited to post every Sunday or Monday in Advent, on any subject of your choice that helps us to think about the quieter, calmer aspects of getting ready for Christmas. Please see any of my posts in previous Decembers for examples, and let me know if you'd like to get involved this year! I'm so busy teaching that I may only manage the once-a-week posts, but I think I'll need those Pauses to take a moment to reflect on what Advent and Christmas should mean to me. Will you join us, please?

Family Celebrations!

Our frenetic activity over the last week was all to get ready for a wonderful celebration in Edinburgh:

I didn't think to ask permission to blog photos, so there are no faces in this photo, but the dashing naval captain is my father, marrying his beautiful bride, whom you see here holding her vintage family prayer book. It was a really special event. Maybe I'll be able to show you more photos when I've spoken to them after the honeymoon!

You have my permission to see me! I bought the outfit second hand, but at a rather classy (and therefore more expensive than usual) shop in Edinburgh called Mona's Catwalk - well worth visiting if you're in the area! Mona and I had a lot of fun playing dress-up, and I like the results. I wore my handmade mother of pearl button necklace, and a vintage coat that I picked up on the local sales page on Facebook - no photos of that yet, but I have high hopes that my brother in law got a photo of it!

I'm OK showing you these charming faces - they are my family's former minister (she's moved on to a new church now) and our two boys, who scrubbed up nicely for the family event, I think!

Purses from the elephant box

Some of the little wonders that I've shared with you over the past few days seem to have crept into the elephant box since my mum inherited it. But one thing I remember from the box's days with my grandmother was a collection of Victorian purses:

The three at the top are miser's purses. It's well worth 'Googling' these things - such a wealth of information and images which my grandmother would have loved! I think she did see the internet once or twice  - what she could have done with it...

Lovely little charms (the boar is my favourite) on this faded purse.

This one comes with a letter (I'm sorry - I can hardly read it but I know it's addressed to 'Dear Mary').

The purse with its ring was left to dear Mary - I think the ring was a family one and had been put onto the purse quite recently for her to inherit it. Really, it must be very old! I have got to knuckle down and transcribe the whole letter...

It's lovely to share these wonders with you, and to read your comments. Jenny, the elephant box is 'standard' box size - these things are just very small! Loved your comment, though.

Editorial note: I'm taking one of my blogging breaks - but this time it's going to include other internet activities too! I'll check my emails, though, for anyone who really needs to get hold of me... have a lovely week and I'll be back online Sunday 18th November!

Hand-decorated Pincushions

I can tell you one thing:

The women who made these pincushions would have been blogging about them, if they'd had the opportunity!



Can't you just imagine them, sharing patterns over the net?

Buying beads and silks online? Although, I think a trip to the shop would have been a lot more exciting - I'd love to have gone with them!

I imagine that they got a lot of their patterns in newspapers and periodicals.

This one has faded so much, but in a way the photo brings out some of the details, and the incredible depth of the painting.

Very textured paint, this one.

I love this one - shame about the mottling.

Punched and stitched cardboard - how incredible!

I imagine these talented ladies gave away quite a lot of their handicraft - so they'd have liked this challenge from The Year of Less! I'm going to be joining in, but I know I won't be able to make anything as beautiful as these 100-year old pincushions, collected over the years and found by me in the famous Elephant Box.

Shiny front door

I think I told you, back in September, that not only was I busy at work, but that I also had a front door to paint!

Our door was completely sound, but it had a couple of problems - Raja the cocker spaniel had scratched away at the 20+ year old varnish:

(Lovely Christmas wreath by a member of our local MOPS group, but weathered varnish quite visible...)

And the varnish was orange - no two ways about it. Cute summer wreaths can only hide so much varnish.

And orange varnish on the inside of the door (never photographed, because it was so horrible) made the whole of our entrance area dark and miserable. The light dawned when I stuck a white poster (Kings and Queens of England, from The Times) on the inside of the door and the whole living room lit up! I knew I had to paint the inside of the door shiny white (no photos yet - I have a few last things to arrange in the area) and Ben and I decided on Basque red, the same as our gate, for the outside:

This is the only photo where the colour really comes out, but here are a few other angles:

Did you spot the hen door mat?

I bought it for myself as a treat, for when the door was finished... it went down on Friday afternoon!

At the moment, I'm enjoying the pristine finish too much to add anything to decorate the door, but it was fun looking back over photos of what I've done in the past!

For Christmas, though, I'll certainly be contacting Amy to see if she's making her wonderful Christmas wreaths again! I'm happy enough creating my own seasonal efforts, but nothing beats Amy's proper wreaths for Christmas...

Little Mary and her six frocks

Little Mary has lived in the elephant box for decades - maybe a century!

She was an absolute highlight of my rainy Saturday afternoons with my grandmother.

She's so stylish, and she's all drawn by hand...

I've been guessing that she was 'born' in the 1860s and the similarity of her dresses to Tenniel's Alice in Wonderland could mean that I'm right. And don't you love her shoes?

I'm crazy about her travelling outfit, too!

I'm not so keen on the yellow with ermine (ermine???), although it looks warm...



I wonder if this is a party dress for winter, or an outdoor summer dress? I'm rather getting the impression that Little Mary has a winter wardrobe, so I'm going for this one as a Christmas party dress.

I think this is her day dress.

This is how she 'works'. I'm a bit upset about the lack of  hat for her hat stand - I really can't remember if there was one in the envelope when I was little, but there certainly isn't one now...

Good night, Little Mary!