It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Hanukkah!

Just kidding!

Not that it doesn’t look like Hanukkah or anything.

But Christmas—CHRISTMAS!—is in two short weeks!

You always know it’s getting to be the holidays when stores start playing Christmas music all the time. What I don’t entirely understand is, why don’t they play GOOD Christmas music? They always seem to pick the most horrible carols, sung by the most awful singers of all time. I can sing better than some of these people.

So, to go along with last year’s favorite Christmas Carols post, this one is about least favorites.

Yesterday I was in Shoprite (I do not reccommend going to Shoprite on Tuesday because that is apparently Large Quantities of Elderly People Run Over Your Toes With Their Shopping Carts Day) and they were playing an average bad Christmas album, when “Deck The Halls” came on. Deck The Halls, as I have always understood it, is a fairly peppy tune, which is meant to be sung as follows: “Deck the halls with boughs of holly, falalalalaaalalala” etc. If you are like me and have speed issues, you may wish to sing it like this: “Deckthehallswithboughsofholly, falalalalalaaaalalalala”. Either of these renditions is perfectly acceptable.
The man on the intercom, however, was not singing it like that. He wasn’t even singing it slowly. He was singing at approximately 32bpm, which is as slow as my metronome will even GO. As far as I can tell, this is a man who was out late at a holiday party and had a LOT of eggnog before he decided to make this recording. See actual rendition:
Deck…the…halls…with…boughs…of….hollllyyyy….
fa…la…la…la…laaaaaaaaaaa…la…la….la….la…..

PLUS he sang it in a nasal voice.

So why won’t stores play decent Christmas music?

These are the main songs I heard while out shopping:

-All We Are Saying is Give Peace a Chance
-Jingle Bells
-Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer
-Baby It’s Cold Outside
-Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
-Frosty the Snowman
-Carol of the Bells
-We Wish You a Merry Christmas

I don’t really even like most of these songs. Especially not Give Peace a Chance.

So, do any of you have a Christmas song that you just can’t stand?

And, Happy Holidays!

That was a joke, but last Sunday at the band concert our director (Yes, this is the cosmos man) said, quote, “Our last tune is We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and we do hope that you have a happy holidays, no matter what you believe.” And he was dead serious.

Church

There were 6 baptisms plus new members on Sunday!!! Which means, we got cake!!!

And then I got a little bit bored and started imitating Pastor Dave. I feel confident doing this usually because we sit in the back, which means only the peanut gallery people can see me. I did not think that someone would catch me on camera.

   

This the the tiny person behind me, who was also named Olivia. During the sermon she started screaming, “Olivia pick her nose!” which was a little bit disconcerting.

This is the small person who sat in front of us. He managed to accomplish a number of cool feats such as opening a package of M&Ms, which exploded and rolled all over. He then crawled around underneath the pews to get them.

I am maybe not such a good influence on these children.

Also, the Red Sox are losing. Badly.

Also, I have to do the PSATs on Saturday.

Grr.

Welcome to Brady, Jenna, Christina, Jamie, Logan, Cheyanne, Stella, Bryan, Leslie, Nancy, Chris and Molly!

The Taize Experience, as done by MUMC

Actually, I doubt anything could really be the Taize experience except…well, the Taize experience. But we tried!

There is actually a Facebook group called the Taize We Sing Till Our Throats Hurt Appreciation Society, and I’ll copy a bit from their page: For all those who have been to or heard of the wonder that is Taize. Especially for those who have experienced: eating only with a spoon, sweaty Germans singing out of key, camping in hailstones, stealing a red bowl for good luck, crying on a complete stranger’s shoulder, sunburn, singing random songs behind Oyak, eating hundreds of Ritz (with us it was pretzels and nutella), falling asleep in the church and waking up with a stiff neck, and finally…for all those who go to Taize services at home and find it just isn’t the same.

This whole paragraph is stunningly true.

But it actually went quite well, not the same, but pretty good! It’s now going to be a monthly thing, each second Saturday, if any of you are interested in coming sometime.

Thank you to my family…especially my mom, who figured how to use orange fabric in the sanctuary without it looking tacky and my dad who read the prayer…Pastor Dave who was so very patient…Jeff for playing the organ especially on such short notice…Jonathon for reading the psalm on the spur of the moment…and everybody who came and sang with us. I love you all!

A couple photos:

Candles in front of the William Angle Window

The sanctuary!!! Notice please my dad’s back/elbows, Mr. Fornoff’s back, the pentecost banner that has been up for several months now, and the artful Taize decorations.

I really like this one–cross, fabric, candles, and In Remembrance of Me.

Coming Tomorrow: Mom Does the Facebook Face!

In resurrectione tua Christe, caeli et terra laetentur…in resurrectione tua Christe, caeli et terra lae tentur!

Christmas is coming…

The goose is getting fat

Please to put a penny in the old straw hat

If you have no penny a ha’penny will do

If you have no ha’penny then God bless you.

 

I am pleased to announce that the holiday season has officially begun! We recieved our first Christmas catalog last week! (order now before it’s too late?)

Congratulations to LTD Commodities for having a strange sense of timing!

I am pschying myself up by finishing Week 2 of my school year and listening to the Chieftains, a cool Irish folk group that put out a Christmas CD.

Hark the herald angels sing….

Worship at Taize.

“It’s special. It’s the worship of the future, and the worship of the past. You’ll love it.” Everyone said that to me, as I prepared to go. But WHAT makes it special? I don’t think you can really understand it until you’ve been there–I did a lot of research on it before I went, and the first service was still completely different from what I had envisioned.

BUT, I’ll do my best to explain, and I am planning a service in that style, so you all have to come! It will be very different from regular worship, and hopefully it’ll capture some of the spirit of Taize.

For one thing, there is no sermon. This is nice. Rather, there is a period of about 10 minutes in the middle of the service where there’s total silence. 3000 people, even the babies and the obnoxious teenagers, were COMPLETELY TOTALLY silent for ten whole minutes. Which doesn’t sound like that much, I know, but on Sunday night it felt like forever, and by Sunday morning you wanted it to last longer.

Everyone faces in the same direction, although the brothers were separated from us by a tacky hedge-thing.

The whole deal focuses mostly on Gregorian-style chanting, in all different languages. On your way in you picked up a songbook with the music and the words, and below the song it had translations so you knew what you were saying. I prefer the non-English chants, personally, especially the Latin.  Music was a big part of my Taize experience.

The bells rang for several minutes before the service began, which I plan to do and if you want to help ring let me know. They were real bells too, not electronic ones.

There was a bible lesson, first in English and then in french. The psalms were sung in French, beautifully, by one of the brothers. All of the ones who sang had absolutely gorgeous voices. Then the Sunday after I got back our congregation tried to sing a psalm and it was awful and all I could think was, “In Taize they’re singing this beautifully in French”.

And then I came to my senses and remembered the time difference and instead thought, “In Taize they’re singing Country Roads Take Me Home for the 28th time.”.

This is a short clip of a Taize chant, actually recorded at the European meeting someplace in Germany rather than at Taize itself, but still nice. For more just search youtube for Taize.

 

Olivia’s Taize Style Service: Saturday, September 13th, at 6pm in the sanctuary. Everyone is welcome. Everyone. Old friends, new lovers…and the disabled! Especially if you have a nice voice and can read sheet music.

Open hearts, open minds, open doors. (at least, they will be open when Pastor Dave finds the key. Until then the doors are closed. We apologize for the inconvenience.)

Brother Tim

I know that it would make much more sense if I were to blog about Taize in sequential order, but I don’t feel like it. And isn’t it great to know that you don’t have to do something just cause you don’ t feel like it? If only more of life (thinking of a&p in particular here….) was like blogging.

Every morning at Taize we would have bible study, and then we would break off into international small groups to go more in-depth on the bible study. The bible study for the fifteen and sixteen year olds was led by a monk called Brother Tim, who was really, really nice.

This here is Brother Tim, explaining a bible story in the rain. You can’t see me even when the photo is big, but I was sitting next to the guy in the hat and the bright orange shirt. If you’ve ever seen the Andy Griffith show, you might remember that one episode where Andy and Barney keep describing people as “nice”? Well, Brother Tim was nice. Someone actually said that he “radiates niceness”, which he does. Once we were chattering away in our tent and one of the chaperones came in, and all she heard of the conversation was “Brother Tim”. She said, “hey, you guys aren’t being nasty about Brother Tim, are you? Cause he is so nice.” And everyone went, “No! We love  Brother Tim!!!”. Just to give you an idea of what a nice monk this guy was.

And now every time someone puts a  photo of brother Tim on facebook, the rest of us have to comment and go, “Ohhh, BROTHER TIM!” or “Brother Tim rocks” or other various supportive messages.

Here we have a variety of photos of Brother Tim:

Day one: he teaches us Taize-style dance moves: “Can you do the funky chicken??”

Day Two: He explains why it is in fact very fitting that we are learning dance moves at a monastery, because in Isaiah there is a story about followers of Jesus that do many popular dance moves, and “the brothers we try to emulate that in our own lives.”

 

Day Three: Umm, dancing? What’s dancing?

NOTE: ALL PHOTO CAPTIONS ARE LIES.

Goodbye!

I leave for Taize tomorrow morning, so I just wanted to take this opportunity to let everyone know I won’t be posting (actually, I have a few things on the AutoPoster but I’m not sure I did it right) for the next 10 days or so, although I promise to post lots and lots of pictures when I come back! Seeing photos of other people’s trips can get rather boring though, can’t it? I have been thinking of different sorts of trips lately:

• Mission trips, where you go to help others and usually become very very dirty in the process
• Pilgrimages, such as to Taize, where you look for God in yourself
• Vacations, which are usually fun fun fun, but not always
• Trips. I think everyone knows what I mean when I say, “trips”.

We often go on trips to the Midwest, where there is a lot of empty land. We’ve seen the great sights of America, such as Mount Rushmore, which consists of the heads of dead people carved in stone; EVERY DARN ONE  of the Laura Ingalls Wilder historical monuments, including the dugout on the Banks of Plum Creek, which interestingly enough has quite a bit of marijuana growing near it; or the Geographical Center of the 48 Contiguous States, which is in the middle of nowhere Kansas and is extremely windy. It does have a cute chapel though. Also, the Land of Oz theme/adventure park, which if I remember correctly is in Garden City Kansas, and is made up of a) a yellow brick road, b) a swingset, c) an old train, for some reason, and d) a mysterious red barn with pictures of the flying monkeys that is never open.

Other people may go on trips to the Scottish highlands, where they can meet braepeople and watch men in skirts singing songs containing words like “brankie”, while eating haggis; or they may go to the Milford Highlands, where they can stay at the Scottish Inn, and, during select weekends such as Milford Music Festival weekend, experience the charming quaintness of Milford by getting stuck in traffic made up of 1400 people from New Jersey, shop, and listen to music, much of it provided by people not yet out of high school. (I just had to find a way to work the Milford Highlands in there cause I find it highly ironic.)

Anyway. Goodbye for now, I love you all, pray for me, see you in August!

Au Revoir!

The Obama Excuse

This is why I will not be in church tomorrow.

La la la

This is our hymnal.

This is our hymnal opened to Official United Methodist Hymn Number 384, Love Divine All Loves Excelling. Hymnals can actually be really interesting, and I would urge you to check yours out the next time the sermon goes long. (Olivia’s Handy Hint: Write a meaningful sentence from the sermon on your hand before you start, then when someone asks you what you thought you can pretend you were listening.)

When I was little and I would get bored during church, I used to memorize the numbers of hymns. I still know quite a few of them. For example, How Great Thou Art is Official United Methodist Hymn Number 77. Our choral amen that we had to sing once a month for three years is 898, and I will never forget that number. Nor will I ever forget the silent wishing I had that we could sing another amen, any amen, except 898. But we always did.

I have a weird knack for memorizing things. For example, I know all the words to not only Battle Hymn of the Republic, but also The MTA Song, Lord of the Dance and The Braes of Killiecrankie, without even consciously trying to remember them.

In fact, sometimes I wish I didn’t know them, such as when I’m doing actual work and “now tell me a story bout a man named Charlie” starts going through my head. Or if I’m trying to do a chemistry test and it’s Killiecrankie. And it’s always some meaningless distracting part of the song. I mean, who is King Willie? Or McKay, for that matter? And what the #$%&* is a “loff”? Speaking of which, does anyone actually know what “brankie-o” is? Maybe the Scottish made it up. (“I know! We’ll put in random syllables and tell everyone it’s ‘Scots’, and then those unfortunate Americans will really look like idiots!” “Great idea! Let’s start with ‘loff’!”) But back to the original purpose of this post.

In the front of the hymnal there are “Official United Methodist Directions For Singing”. I discovered these when I was ten and I still love them.

 For example, number 2: Sing these tunes exactly as they are printed here, without altering or mending them at all; and if you have learned to sing them otherwise, unlearn it as soon as you can. Real adaptable, those early Methodists!

Or number 5: Do not bawl.

There are some songs I really like that we rarely sing, such as Amazing Grace, the Old Rugged Cross, and Softly and Tenderly, and then there are some songs that I don’t really like that we sing often, such as spirituals and songs in Spanish. Often, when we sing He Never Said a Mumbalin Word, musicians from as far away as Omaha come to laugh at us. Sometimes, we, the white people with no sense of rhythm whatsoever, even clap. Did you know that it is possible for seventy-eight people to clap to the same tune, and never once either clap at the same time or hit the beat? Trust me.

Some of them we NEVER sing, probably because they are downright morbid. For example, There is a Fountain Filled with Blood, number 622. This one involves a lot of blood. A LOT of blood. A couple of the songs give you an excuse to say the word “ass” in church, even.

I was in youth choir for three years, and I don’t remember most of our anthems, but one that particularly sticks out in my mind was Rocka My Soul. This one I remember especially because we were made up of six kids between the ages of 7 and 11 and every time we came to the word “bosom” someone would start laughing uncontrollably. I feel so sorry for Mr. Fornoff now.

 

Coming Tomorrow: ORCHESTRA PREVIEW! Otherwise titled, “A Study in Mediocrity”.

 

Confirmation

Ben was confirmed this morning.

This is Ben and His Sponsor with the Other Confirmands and Their Sponsors. Mom got him a new tie yesterday in honor of the occasion. Red for Pentecost. We also got a navy and green striped one with little Scottie dogs on it. It’s very “Andy Bernard”.

This is the actual Confirmation Blessing, or whatever they call it. It looks a little like they are forcing his face down while everyone else watches in horror but that is not actually what was happening. As far as we know.

This is Ben and his sponsor under a tree with fluffy hair.

Ben and Mr. Fornoff have fluffy hair, I mean, not the tree.

In this one they look a little happier. By this point Ben had ditched the tie, and given it to dad, who made me hold it. When parents or soldiers do this sort of thing it is referred to as “delegating”. When I do it apparently it’s referred to as “bossiness”.

This is LOOKS like the exact same picture I just showed you twice, BUT IT IS NOT. In the first one, they had fluffy hair. In the second one, they had fluffy hair and they were smiling bigger. In this one, they have fluffy hair and they look happy and slightly puzzled at the same time, as if they had temporary amnesia.

Subtle differences.

Happy Pentecost!