Christmas Storytime: The Snow Queen, Part 3

Happy second day of Christmas, everyone! Tonight, I give you Part 3 of "The Snow Queen." Once again, I didn't practice this reading before I recorded it, so please forgive the lapses, especially regarding the tone of the snowdrops' story.

What do you think of the story so far? What do you think has happened to Kay?

Christmas Storytime: The Snow Queen, Parts 1 and 2

It has been a few years since I read many of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, but I enjoyed “The Little Match Girl” so much that I thought I would share another Andersen story tonight.  “The Snow Queen” is a rather long fairy tale, consisting of seven smaller stories, so this reading includes the first and second stories. Please forgive my pigtails and pajamas; Mama and I were cleaning out the basement all day, and after un-grubbifying myself, it didn’t seem worthwhile to put on normal clothes just for friends and fairy tales. 

Christmas Storytime 3.1: "The Little Match Girl"

For my entire life, home has been a place where stories are read, invented, and shared.  When I was a child, my parents read or told stories to me nearly every night. In college, as I began to write my honors thesis on literary fairy tales, my friends said, “Well, if you’re going to be reading fairy tales all year, you should read them to us.” I agreed, and for most of my senior year, an assortment of friends would gather in my room, and I would read to them from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, The Chronicles of Narnia, and much more.  In graduate school, my academic and professional study of stories proceeded with greater rigor than ever, but I missed having people to sit in a room with me and share stories.  During my Christmas vacation two years ago, I recorded a few of my favorite Christmas stories for friends who were far away. I continued these recordings last year, and this year I am very happy to introduce Christmas Storytime Volume 3 on my blog this year.  The reading is unpracticed, and I can boast of no video editing skills, but I hope the “homespun” quality of this video makes you feel  as though you have joined me in my parents’ living room for a story before bedtime. Tonight’s story is “The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Andersen. Enjoy, and watch for more installments in the coming weeks.

Making it Home: Christmas Letters

Between submitting final grades, working on my prospectus, and hurrying through a mess of other end-of-semester-and-I-am-leaving-town errands, I managed to sustain one of my favorite Christmas traditions: sending Christmas cards.  My powers of verbal formulation are dwindling fast (it is nearly 5 AM and still have things to do before boarding my train home for Christmas in a few hours), but both as a follow up to my recent post on letter-writing and as an introduction to an upcoming series of Christmas posts, I wanted to share a few of my past Christmas letters. You can click the images to make them large enough to read. I hope you enjoy. 

Christmas 2006

Christmas 2007

Christmas 2009

             

(I’m not sure what happened to 2008. Maybe I’ll find the file when I’m not so sleepy). I'll post this year's letter in a few weeks, once I'm sure all the snail-mail recipients have received their copies. Be of good cheer during this last week of Advent. Christmas is coming!

Do you send Christmas cards and/or a Christmas letter? What do you include in your Christmas letters? What kinds of Christmas letters do you most enjoy reading? 

Life Undivided: Home Is Where The Cat Poop Is

For Christmas this year, I am very tempted to give my mother a needlework sampler proclaiming,  in sweetly-stitched letters, “Home Is Where the Cat Poop Is.”  More than a nod to my generation’s fascination with wryly ironic kitsch, this idea is really my mother’s fault. Shortly after beginning this blog, I asked  for a list of things that characterize “home” for her. She said, “Home is the place where, if the cat poops, I have to clean it up.” To be fair, she also offered a number of more cheerful things, but this comment caught my attention, especially since her phone calls have begun to include frequent accounts of feline incontinence.  Our elderly cat, Amelia, has been in our family since I was in the fourth grade, making her a venerable seventeen.  She can still kill mice, chase yarn, bolt across the house, and purr well enough to put any spry kitten to shame, but she has begun to lose her litterbox training. 

When I visited my parents this summer, a considerable amount of my intellectual and emotional energy went toward finding creative solutions to Amelia’s inability (or crochety unwillingness) to use her litterbox. If you are thinking that this is too much information, then you are sharing my own initial response to the cat-poop situation.  When I came back to Indiana, I had just finished a series of harrowing PhD preliminary exams, and I longed for a deep summer’s rest in my childhood home.  I had no interest in playing chambermaid to a cat.

I was quickly reminded, however, that “home” is not the same thing as “escape.”  In fact, ever since finishing high school, homecomings have been complicated. During college, returning to my parents’ home was difficult because I was beginning to build a life for myself elsewhere, and my parents and I had to negotiate the changes my increasing independence entailed.  Coming home as an adult out of college has been unsettling for other reasons.  The cat poop is emblematic of one of the difficult realities of learning what it means to be “at home” with other people: it means surrendering to the needs of others, and recognizing that I have a responsibility to the well-being of the entire household.  As a child, my parents judiciously chose to tell me some things and to refrain from telling me other things. They protected (or tried to protect) me from their worries about finances, jobs, and other grown-up concerns.  Though I had some chores (none of which, I am sorry to say, I performed with much enthusiasm), for the most part I understood home as a place where I could play, study, and rest in peace. As an adult, my role in a home is very different. While I still savor the comforts of the house I grew up, I can no longer avoid hearing about difficult questions or unpleasant jobs. Nor do I wish to.  Much as I hate cleaning up cat poop, I know that when I do, I am at home in that house in ways I could never be if it were only a place to bask and be comforted.  

 It is easy to become sentimental about the idea of home, especially when we feel ourselves displaced from any kind of haven,  but once we are at really at home--whether that means settled in the city where you live, or rooted in a friendship or a church--we begin to realize that there is work to be done--maybe unpleasant, difficult work--and we are the ones who must do it. 

Only love challenges the sentimentality and the disgust that might prevent us from accepting the duties that come with having a home. Love compels us to remain faithful when a friend seems to have given up on a friendship. Love keeps us at the table when the one next to us is grieving, his pain making us wretched and shy. Love binds us to a local church even when it has failed us. Love puts us on committees, keeps us up awake all night tending those who are sick, and helps us give up our time cheerfully.  Love helps me laugh as I help my mother scrub the living room rug. 

Home is where the cat poop is.  Maybe what this means is that home is the place I must pray for an increase of love: love so strong and certain that I no longer hesitate to do the difficult work to make my house clean, secure, beautiful, and welcoming. 

Love teaches me that home does not exist for my sake only. If our apartments, our friendships, our marriages, and our churches exist as outposts of God’s kingdom, they must exist for the sake of that kingdom: in other words, for the sake of delighting in the One who establishes all homes, for the sake of showing love to one another, and for the sake of drawing in those who haven’t yet found their way back.   

 What are some of the hard things you have to do when you are at home in a place, relationship, or church?