More present wrapping today, as we are meeting family at the farm shop café to swap Christmas presents. We won't open them then and there, but carry them off to put them under our own trees as home.
BB added some more baubles to the tree while I was cooking bubble and squeak and scrambled eggs for supper. The cards are waiting to be strung up round the room in a day or so.
I've written all the ones for the mail, now there are just some friends and neighbours to do for delivering by hand.
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This is the antiphon for tomorrow, Saturday 20th December;
O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Isreal,
qui aperis, et nemo claudit; claudis, et nemo aperit:
veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.
O Key of David and the scepter of the House of Israel,
who opens and no one shuts, who shuts and no one opens.
O come and bring out the captive from the prison-house, him who sits in the in darkness and in the shadow of death.
I must have thrown all the small pieces of tinsel away last year - they do get increasingly tatty as the years go by. So this year I gathered the remaining long strands of silver tinsel, and cut them to length with the kitchen scissors. What a mess! You can see snips of tinsel all over the floor. But according to my mother's instructions the tinsel has to lie along the branches like snow, which means having longer and shorter lengths. Being snow, all the tinsel is silver, although some looks gold in the light.
It has been tipping it down with rain all day, but I wasn't going to go outside to check how the tree looks. Luckily BB had to go out, so he stood and directed me where to put the last few pieces.
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The little birds found the bird feeders yesterday and were making a occasional timid forays back and forth. Today, in spite of the rain and the cold blustery wind they were busy all day, some at the seeds, some at the peanuts. The squirrel hasn't appeared yet, so the nuts are lasting quite well at the moment.
Ang over at Tracing Rainbows posted a video on how to make a wreath by stabbing greenery into a large potato. I spotted a link at the end of the video for discovering more crafts. In particular I fancy having a go at making apple and peanut butter bird feeders.
They seem to be apple slices with the core cut out and a string threaded through. The bottom is smeared with peanut butter on both sides, and then dipped into birdseed. I reckon I can cope with that!
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Antiphon for 19th December
O Root of Jesse,
standing as a sign among the peoples;
It's been a packed morning and afternoon and evening...
The Christmas Tree has moved from the hearth rug to the window, had its branches sorted out and the lights added;
It's always pleasing to find the lights are still working; how things have changed from when I was little and they never worked! My mother, even back in the 1950s, always insisted on white lights, not easily available. I remember her, in the 1970s, going through the bowl of mixed spare bulbs on the counter at Selfridges and swapping out all the coloured lights in the string she had just bought for the white ones. The coloured lights were still in fashion then so it wasn't as reprehensible as it sounds...
We're at this stage now. Every year I'm torn between the calm simplicity of just having lights, or adding tinsel, or having baubles as well, (but only red, silver or gold!) and finally with or without lametta... decisions, decisions....
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I'm pretty much flaked out now. The zoom church that I joined over a year ago had its zoom Christmas Party, followed by zoom Carol Service. That's a long time to be on a zoom!
We are a proper church in a Leicestershire diocese. Most of the congregation live in a group of villages all close to each other, but some of us live further afield; USA, Spain, and South East of England like me.
I wondered how a Christmas party would work on zoom, but it was brilliant. Somehow we all received party bags with snacks, Christmas decorations, frivolities like glo-sticks, and a joke. Great fun. It must have taken quite some organising.
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The Antiphon for Thursday 18th December (tomorrow if you are reading this today...) is
O Adonai (Lord)
Latin:
O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,
qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.
English (Anglican):
O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush,
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.
I like comparing the latin words with the translation which is why I include both.
We've a fair way to go yet. The two green storage bags of decorations are down ready, plus sundry other bags and boxes, condensed from what seemed like hundreds to just four.
Compared to years gone by, when we used to cut the top off the real tree to fit into the corner, this is a tiddly little one, and artificial at that, but so much easier to manage.
I don't know why we never had a problem with the cats, even when they were kittens. Maybe we had already convinced them that 'NO!' was an absolute and non-negotiable command...
We didn't that a problem the first Christmas once our children had grown from babies to toddlers. We just stuck the Christmas tree on a little table inside the playpen, and childproofed the bottom 2-3 feet of the house. Plus the 'look don't touch' rule was already established from visits to shops.
One child was left-handed, and the other right-handed; I don't know whether it was me or BB who had the bright idea of arranging it so they held hands in such a way that the left-handed one used their left hand to hold the other's right hand; 'now, hold hands please, look after each other,' we'd say, and for some reason that was very effective and stopping them from touching everything on the shelves.
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It's been a marathon effort, or so it seems; but 50 cards made it to the post today, and four parcels are wrapped and almost ready to go. The next batch of cards are all to be hand delivered locally later this week, or maybe early next week.
The Notebook and stitching swaps will not make it in time for Christmas, but he, it's always good to have something to brighten up the 'in between' days after Christmas and before New Year.
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The O Antiphons; I blog these almost every Christmas; it's a part of my Advent and I'm always a bit annoyed with myself if I forget the start date which is actually 17th December, or tomorrow.
You can read a fuller description here. There are 7 Antiphons, or short prayers, traditionally used at the evening service using words taken from the Bible. They are thought to originate from Italy in about the 6th Century.
It occurred to me that if I wait to share today's Antiphon until tomorrow, you might not read this until the next day, so here is tomorrow's antiphon today.
The art of doing other slightly useful things that could be perfectly well done later in order to avoid doing the really useful things that need doing now.
But I've nearly run out of slightly useful things to do...
BB has very busy; the corner by the red chair was piled with boxes of papers and photographs retrieved from my father's flat, and the chest under the window equally laden with books and old magazines and - well - stuff! He's carted it all away upstairs somewhere (tra-la-la, I'm not going to look) and replenished the rechargeable batteries in the candles and switched on the lights in the windows.
Another mini-step towards Christmas...
This is very pleasing;
Thomas Tomkins (1572–1656): Voluntary (Musica Britannica no. 24) played by Silas Wollston on the 'St Teilo' 'Tudor' organ. From the CD 'In Chains of Gold - the English pre-Restoration verse anthem, volume 3', recorded in September 2023 and to be released on February 28th 2025 on Signum.
Played on the organ at St Jude on the Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb
I see it takes three people to play this! One to work the bellows, and one to watch the music and operate the stops to change the organ sound (on the other side of the bellows-man), and one to actually play the notes. It's such a tiny keyboard; as well as being only a couple of octaves long I'm sure the keys aren't as big front to back as a modern keyboard.
Back in the 1960s I occasionally played the organ on Sundays at my grandmother's church in a tiny village in Northamptonshire, and once, memorably, for the Australian opera singer Joan Carden. She was interested in Family History and had joined a great gathering of the Carden Families in a small village in Cheshire organised by my father (he was hugely involved in tracing the Carden family tree). She sang the Faure Pie Jesu while I quiveringly accompanied her.
Both times I was playing very elderly and poorly maintained 'tracker action' organs, where the keys were directly connected to the organ pipes by complex systems of levers making them stiff and and difficult and uneven to manage. Quite a challenge to keep going, but thankfully the bellows had been electrified. As long as I didn't use too many stops there was enough air to supply the pipes.
There was another Family Gathering several years later, and once again I played the organ for the celebration service in the Parish Church. This was an all-singing, and probably all-dancing too, given half a chance, fully electric job, with lots of indicator lights and a row of buttons just under the keyboard (called presets) where you could catch them with your thumb to change the sound between verses. I can't remember what the last hymn was, all I remember was that I accidentally flicked one of the presets partway through the final verse; the organ lit up like a Christmas Tree and every stop seemed to have been activated. The sound was tremendous, and I was laughing so much I could hardly concentrate, while at the same time so thankful that this had happened right at the end, and not, say, in a verse like 'And though I walk through death's dark vale'. That would have been so embarrassing. Give me a proper piano every time!
Well, this won't buy the baby a new frock, as they used to say (probably in the Miss Read books). Or, in other words, back to getting on with the Really Useful Things that I should be doing NOW!
