Enjoying the end of the year

Here’s what the Hampton family has been up to since Christmas:

• Eating from the generous amounts of leftovers (all of us)
• Playing sudoku (C, E, J)
• Writing (letters of recommendation (B), syllabi (C and J), and end of year letter (E))
• Sweatin’ to the oldies with Richard Simmons (K, J and B--in an effort to help Karen find some exercise she would enjoy doing)
• Seeing and passionately discussing “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,” the movie version of one of our all time favorite family read-alouds (all of us)
• Cleaning, sorting, tossing (B and especially E, who has worked her way back to the college stuff) and even…
• Painting bedrooms (C). He wants to do three bedrooms and one study before going to the math meetings in San Antonio Jan. 11, but if the work it took to do our bedroom is any indication, that may be an ambitious goal.
• Recouperating from a very nasty cold and/or the flu (E) and trying to not to catch it from her (the rest of us)
• Watching football (C, J and sometimes the rest of us)
• Choosing books from our amazon.com Christmas gift certificates! Thanks, R and J, B and D.
• Reading (esp. B—I took one day “off” in order to read though I was distracted by other things)
• Cheering at the COW basketball tournament (C, B, K)

Jenny and Ellen leave Saturday morning for homes in the east, stopping in Pittsburgh for their friend C’s New Year’s Eve party. Karen and I head for G.R. on Tuesday so that she can begin work on Wednesday. Chuck will stay here to attend an Academic Standards Committee meeting—and paint.

Christmas Eve traditions, still being tweaked

We're a great tradition family. Last night when we had two young families (six kids under six) along with our pastor and wife and J, our IV staff member/honorary daughter, Jenny said she could say the reading for the advent calendar symbol by heart, having read or heard it so often. Here are our Christmas Eve traditions, though they are not ossified.

1) Listening to "The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols" from King's College, Cambridge while we make sweet rolls for Christmas morning breakfast. (In 2003, when we had E from Bosnia with us prior to her and Ellen's trip to Urbana, we did the semi-homemade kind...just wasn't enough time or energy). Making the sweet rolls is a Hampton family tradition. In our house we only do it for Christmas and Easter.

2) Ringing the Salvation Army bells outside a store in Wooster's busiest strip mall. This year we decided (because # 3 creates a time crunch) to do it today, one day early. K is the best coin attractor with her cheery "Merry Christmas, sir (or madam or cute kids)." However, she doesn't have much stamina for the work, especially when there are toys to check out in Wal-Mart. We saw many people we know, and I had an interesting exchange with an older man who told me he'd put some money in if I stopped ringing those d- bells cause they made him tone deaf...hard for an old-time banjo picker!

3) This probably isn't yet ready to be called a tradition because it will only be for the second time. We are having four international students stranded here on campus over for a light supper, Christmas Eve service, and then back for dessert and games. We did this two years ago when E was here...with 3 young men from Pakistan. I'll never forget them poking each other and under their breath wondering if they celebrated Mohammad's birthday too :) Because they also wished for presents (which I hadn't prepared), for the 3 (other) young men from Pakistan and one gal from Zimbabwe coming this year, I have filled four stockings with little token gifts. This is special enough to want to continue as long as there are i-students in our lives.

4) Christmas Eve service. Always very simple with scripture readings, music and candles. We often contribute something musical, and doing so as a family with Karen always comes off well but also with a huge psychic pricetag, so I am not upset that we were not asked this year. E couldn't find her recorder, in any case, in time to bring it home. She and J play a beautiful version of "Silent Night" and of "I Wonder as I Wander" on piano and recorder. Maybe we could do these at home with a plastic recorder?

5) Lighting the Advent log candles and pulling out the next to last symbol from the Advent calendar. Both of these are long standing traditions, our log--with one candle for every day of Advent--being an extension of the simple styrofoam/small red candles of the Settergren childhood. I have wondered aloud this year whether we will continue the log after we retire or whether we will replace it with four fat candles and a wreath, still lighting something every day. Chuck drilled the holes in the log with the physics department shop equipment so long ago he can't remember, and with K's vigorous late-month blowing, I usually am getting candle wax off the piano still in July.

6) I promised K that I would read her "Awful, Awful, Abigail," tomorrow night before she goes to bed, that great kids' retelling of the Christmas story. It's been some years since I have done that. Also resurrected last night was E's wonderful reading (with full sound effects by K) of Katherine Paterson's "Woodrow Kennington Works Practically a Miracle," an old favorite of ours. We introduced it to J, who laughed and sighed at all the right places. Perhaps it's not well known, but for us it is a Christmas classic (from "Angels and Other Strangers.") C was reminiscing about other favorites from that collection.

These are our traditions. What are yours? Enjoy them as we celebrate Jesus' birthday and gifts and challenges.

More on Christmas Music, and Worship Music in general

In the pause between getting K home from Michigan and some of the entertaining tomorrow and Saturday, I want to reply to Tom, (Dad), John and Bruce. Perhaps not reply but consider further....and to give thanks for CDs and our local NPR/Classical music station (WKSU, one of the best in the country I claim unapologetically), which this week is playing all Christmas all day (9 a.m. to 3 p.m) under the tutelage of Mark Pennell, a terrific announcer/teacher/believer. Count on Tom to go to the heart of the matter to pinpoint consumerism and idolatry. We miss regular interaction with you, Tom! Something you said several years ago at a regional staff conference, however, complicates matters a bit, making me wonder what role class plays in the whole matter and what role being missionaries does.

Class first. Dad scoffs at not just CCM—I doubt he even knows about that genre though it was that one represented on the Christian radio station—but some of the praise choruses we sing in our services. At the same time he is a country music fan who loves to dance to line-dance music and play his harmonica to computer generated songs. Just a couple of weeks ago, a dear man in our church had “special music” in which he not only sang but also surprised us all when he pulled a harmonica out of his pocket and played some. Suffice it to say that such “special music” would never happen in Calvin CRC. Yet it cheered the hearts of many in our church, which is full of farmers and factory workers and the unschooled and unemployed. R. was offering this music to God as worship and to the congregation as a gift. Even some of our best performing musicians have no musical education and learn what they sing by ear, not by reading music. Our worship leaders work hard to chose only the best of the choruses as well as the best of the hymns (I don’t know that we always succeed, but we always try). Many of the church’s grumps about praise music love the worst of the hymns, the ones they sang when they were teens or young adults. They stand or sit there and scowl during the musical portion of worship—and we do blended worship—killing the spirit of worship for many who are trying. I have observed over these ten years of this kind of worship that many of the new things are very dated—popular for a while and then I (at least) tire of them easily. A sign, I think, that they are not among “the best.” But some have survived.

Missionary: Tom, you said several years ago, that while you don’t enjoy much of the music sung by the students these days, you are a missionary to those students and thus you (what’s the right verb? Make use of? Employ? Sing?) them. One of the reasons we don’t stick to the old CMA hymn book is that we are trying not to be a dying church, catering to the over 70 set in every regard, the people who are resisting every kind of change that makes us a place welcoming to the young (who have left in droves), to the people who haven’t just grown up in the CMA, to the students at the college, to….anyone who is not “us.” Their scowls don’t help. If God is the God of all cultures, and all cultures have both good and bad in them, then surely there is good represented among those cultures’ music that can be given as offerings back to him and as means to reach out to those cultures. Cf. Acts 17 in this regard. It takes discernment among the body to sift out the consumerist and idolatrous and to employ the good (if not best), but surely that is a task those of us who have a musical education, who have an understanding of culture and missions must take on. What we prefer to listen to in our homes may not be what we always sing or play at church or on campus.

Prayers needed

Join David Koyzis in his prayers for the Iraqi election today.

Curmudgeon??

What's up with me? Am I turning into an old curmudgeon like the ones who so exasperate me (at church)?? Twice in one week now I am turning my nose up at the contemporary cultural offerings available all around. First flowers (Jenny saw even worse ones, electric blue with glitter, at her grocery store in Washington PA!!), and now music. Riding around doing errands this morning, "Car Talk" ended and since I never have enjoyed "What Do You Know?" I turned to the Cleveland Christian station playing Christmas music. But it was all in ccm style with throbbing drums and unfocused voices. Yuck. (My father would say, "I told you so. This is what you get when you dabble in contemporary praise style worship.") It was a relief to get home and put on my Michaela Petrie and Chanticleer Christmas CDs. And less you think we are too elitist here, we are looking forward to a great basketball game tonight, Wooster (ranked second in the D3hoops poll) versus our arch-rival, Wittenburg, ranked 3rd in the same poll. Go Woo.

As as Wise Mother-in-law Often Repeated,

"'To each his own,'" said the woman as she kissed the cow." Post-modern though she was not, she sure knew about diversity. I have a feeling, though, that she would agree with me that those people who have snatched up the lilac poinsettias from my grocery store, thinking they are wonderful!!, are the diverse ones. When I went racing through today, none were left, and when I asked, the nice grocery store man said that people have bought them and asked for more. Sigh. What is this world coming to? As long as I can have my red ones....

Not all change is evolution....

When I raced into the grocery store late Friday afternoon, almost immediately I came screeching to a halt because there among the pointsettias begging to be purchased were several with lilac (lavendar??) leaves. Now I love purple flowers, but lilac pointsettias? How dreadful is that? I reached over to touch them, figuring certainly they must be fake. But no. And then in the mail yesterday came a brochure from one of my favorite greenhouses saying that these days you can get p. in any color of the rainbow you'd like (unless you're a traditionalist who wants red or white or some combination)--to match your favorite team's colors, for example. (Brown and orange in northern Ohio?) I'd say this is not a sign of progress. Bah humbug!

I will be confronting the lilac pointsettias several more times this week as I will undoubtedly be at my favorite grocery store more than once...I provide an at-home breakfast buffet for my FYS for their last class of the semester (Thursday) and we have traditionally hosted the WCF caroling party at our house on Friday, after the last day of classes. Much baking awaits for fthe two groups of hungry student: fifteen Thursday and between 30 and 60 (who knows??) Friday, but I have to get the supplies....The next few times I go to the store, however, I will sail right on by the lilac flowers, list in hand and concentrating on important traditions.

A stark choice

If you were asked to chose between these two definitions of freedom (one that philosophers call negative freedom and one they call positive), which would you chose?

Bertrand Russell: Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires."

Lord Acton: ...freedom is "not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do as we ought."

I can tell you which my students chose overwhelmingly, or perhaps I don't have to. You can easily guess. But we had one of our better classes of the semester (not all have been like the one in which "education happened today, " sigh) as they defended their choices. I also asked them which of our prison authors they would chose as a cellmate if they happened to be imprisoned themselves. The most creative?? (thoughtless?) choice was Socrates because he had the opportunity to escape. They did find it interesting that none of them chose to live with prisoners who were proponents of negative freedom....

I'm waiting for your replies.