This year, our new Christmas books correspond with my current literary projects. Just this month I revealed my Tolkien project, and Tolkien’s magical Letters from Father Christmas, with reproductions of his delightful illustrations and handwritten letters, is just perfect for me to read aloud to the kids!
I haven’t yet posted about my second ongoing literary project, but you might guess it from the second title. Yes, I am also immersing myself in G.K. Chesterton. This simple Advent and Christmas reader will be perfect for my own studies, and I am deliberating whether to read it aloud to the family. It contains 28 Advent readings and 12 readings for the days of Christmas. Each reading includes a short selection written by Chesterton (a poem or quote from an essay or book), a short bible passage, a prayer, and an “Advent Action.”
Have you added any books to your Christmas collection this season? Share in the comments!
My sister Holly and I began this tradition eight years ago. As much as weather allows, we try to spend a couple hours in this particular green space on the day after Thanksgiving. This year the weather forecast showed pouring rain, but it managed to hold out for the afternoon hours while we walked and breathed and played and talked and paid attention to the loveliness.
Everything glittered with clinging raindrops. God decorated for Christmas.
Holly discovered charred blackberries in an area that had apparently burned during late fall. The ground was littered with them. I’ve never seen anything like it!
It was incredibly dark and rainy for our Thanksgiving celebration yesterday, but the weather cleared at just the perfect moment and for just long enough to go on our traditional after-dinner walk. It was still dark and gray and it sprinkled on us a smidge as we were on our way back, but we were thankful to stretch our legs and our lungs in the cool, damp air.
Lola decided to use a Queen Anne’s Lace as an umbrella. I don’t think it worked well. But I am incredibly thankful for this darling love.
Thanksgiving was the usual joyful gathering. We missed Drake, who is in boot camp in Illinois, his girlfriend, Jess, who wasn’t feeling well, and Olive’s son, Ben. But the rest of us (17 in all) feasted as an act of war. And then we took our traditional after-dinner walk. Later we colored (Shannon shared her sophisticated coloring books and jars of colored pencils) and played games while eating pie.
A Thanksgiving celebration of parallelism by Robert Louis Stevenson:
"Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank Thee
for this place in which we dwell; for the love that unites us; for the peace accorded us this day; for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food, and the bright skies, that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth, and our friendly helpers in this foreign isle.
Let peace abound in our small company. Purge out of every heart the lurking grudge. Give usgrace and strengthto forbear and to persevere.
Offenders, give us the grace to accept and to forgive offenders. Forgetful ourselves, help usto bear cheerfully the forgetfulness of others.
Give us
courage and gaiety and the quiet mind.
Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Bless us,
if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be
brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath,
and in all changes of fortune, and, down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.
As the clay to the potter, as the windmill to the wind, as children of their sire,
we beseech of Thee this help and mercy for Christ’s sake."
This past spring, CiRCE Institute hosted a literature bracket (“The Great Novel Knockout”). Out of 62 great works of literature, two remained to compete in the championship round.
Two summers ago, my dear friend and Scholé Sisters facilitator, Mindy Pickens, attended the CiRCE Summer Institute. While there, she took advantage of the time with Andrew Kern to ask a big question. “What should my husband read in answer to the question, ‘What is a man?’” Kern’s answer was Tolkien.
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings show up on almost every “must read” book list, from classical schools to secular reading lists.
And I hadn’t read them.
I knew I needed to pursue Tolkien as my next reading project, and, unbeknownst to me, Mindy had been thinking the same thing. Our Scholé group was just finishing a year of Flannery (after a year of Hamlet), and we were ready to tackle a new author. (If we’re going for variety, I think we’re set.)
J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Stories is a must-read. [Link contains the full text.]
I have The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings movies in the queue. [I think the first Hobbit movie is the only one I’ve watched in its entirety.]
I also took this opportunity to add Letters From Father Christmas by Tolkien to our Christmas book collection. I am looking forward to sharing this one with the kids! I’ll also be re-reading Tolkien’s quirky illustrated tale Mr. Bliss.
Luke and Leif both read through The Hobbit recently and all of the kids have watched and re-watched the movie. (It is one of Lola’s favorites, surprisingly. She is not a sensitive child, for sure.)
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Even though I am just now sharing this new literary project here on the blog, I have already finished The Hobbit and Bilbo’s Journey as well as enjoyed two meetings to discuss them with my Scholé Sisters. I’m well on my way! I’ll share more thoughts about those books specifically in another post.
Until the next post, enjoy this short collection of related articles.
Perhaps the most beautiful facet of this almost biblically-worded passage is its position within the story of Tolkien’s world; it foreshadows that Men will be born into a world already broken and remade, in which pain and comfort, joy and sorrow, and (most importantly) rebellion and reconciliation have all been introduced. Everywhere in the passage we find descriptive thematic elements set against one another, all pointing to a truth vital to Tolkien’s project: life comes from death.
Certainly grace builds on nature, but we need to let nature be nature before we start building. We need to know what natural wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, and friendship are before we can know them as supernatural.
It is not surprising that language should be used in especially complicated ways in Tolkien’s fiction, used not only to present the story but to be an important formative element of its most basic and pervasive mythic pattern. His fascination with language—its nature, its “feel,” its relation to thought, myth, and literature—began early and continued unabated throughout his life.
Like Sam Gamgee, we know we are little things, incapable of moving the gears of the great. We know we are not the world’s saviors, but the companions of the world’s savior. We are, rather, the servants of him who walks a sorrowful road of sacrifice. We remember that it is our master’s job to save the world, our master’s to eradicate evil, to root it out, to burn it in the fires of his Sacred Heart. Because we walk alongside our master, his path is ours, and his death may well be ours as well. But our primary job is to be available to our master, to adopt the same humble attitude of Sam, the servant of him who bore the evil of the world, the little hobbit who “knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden…[that] the one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.”
Middle Earth is described as following Tolkien’s "early life and love affair with Edith Bratt," as well as his service to the British Army during the First World War. The film, to be written by Angus Fletcher, is reportedly based on years of archival research on Tolkien’s life.
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We’ve been singing The Misty Mountains Cold here at our house for weeks now. I even learned to play it on the tin whistle!
I am so glad I took the time to read her deeply. Her biography and the discussions were absolutely essential for me. I never would have understood (to a small degree) her stories without a nudge in the right direction.
O’Connor’s essays allow the reader fascinating insight into the way she viewed the world, writing as an art, reading as a practice, and her own stories. My copy of Mystery and Manners is heavily underlined and marked with notes in the margins. What a pleasure to have a “conversation” with Flannery.
It’s almost impossible to decide which quotes to share with you here, so I’ll eeny-meeny-miny-mo it.
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
The Catholic novelist believes that you destroy your freedom by sin; the modern reader believes, I think, that you gain it in that way.
In my stories a reader will find that the devil accomplishes a good deal of groundwork that seems to be necessary before grace is effective.
Redemption is meaningless unless there is a cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular believe that there is no such cause.
Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than if we have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac.
At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
Christ didn’t redeem us by a direct intellectual act, but became incarnate in human form…
When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
I am embarking on two new literary projects this winter. I’ll share more about them in upcoming posts. Stick around!
I went suit-shopping with the man-child today. [Policy debate, winter formal, Teen Pact, spring protocol—he’ll have several chances to wear it, hopefully before he grows out of it!]
A decade ago I began homeschooling the little boy who is now a hairy six-foot man-child.
A decade ago I had a toddler boy who was a one-man demolition crew with insomnia.
A decade ago I had an infant boy who would not let me set him down—or sleep.
A decade ago we unexpectedly bought our tiny forever house in the country and were getting ready to move and settle in over Christmas.
Almost a decade ago I started a blog in which I shared my delights and visions and suffering.
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Three weeks since my last post, and only a small smattering of posts in two months.
It seems I needed an unplanned sabbatical.
I have a thousand posts started, either in my files or in my imagination.
But I’m having trouble finishing anything. Posts. Books. School work. House work.
My work space is a disaster. My house is a disaster. I’m having trouble summoning any sort of motivation or enthusiasm because it feels so daunting.
Is it the weather and the lack of light? Is it the pushback from kids? Is it the national atmosphere? Is it my inherent laziness?
Is it the decade-ness?
I’m going with all of the above.
But this decade-ness is weighing on me.
I’m struggling with the “visions” because I lack perseverance. I used to love the visions because I could imagine myself doing them, but now the visions come with a heaping dose of reality and they’ve lost the magic.
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In October, Russ was gone on multiple out of state and out of town trips.
He began coaching the swim team at our local YMCA at the end of September. All three boys started swimming with the Y team as well (Levi’s broken foot healed well and he was cleared for swimming), and Russ started swimming with the Masters team. It was so nice to have a long break from swimming before the fall season started, but the new swim schedule messed with our evening routine. I’m thankful for the childcare program at the Y, however, and we’ve used it often for Lola. There is also a student meal program and a center for tweens, which we use a few nights a week when Russ stays late to swim.
Levi is now swimming on the local high school swim team for the winter season. That again has messed with our schedule, but I think it’s a good opportunity for him.
I hosted a few IEW DVD watching sessions for my CC Essentials parents and hosted the last of my Scholé Sisters Flannery O’Connor meetings. We’ve started a new literary project for this school year (hosted by another friend, but facilitated by the same fabulous Mindy who led the Hamlet and Flannery O’Connor projects). I’ll be posting about the new project as soon as I can finish writing it up (but no promises).
I slowly finished a handful of books.
I binge-watched Longmire on Netflix.
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Now I need to go purge a decade-worth of stuff from our house.
