Elijah's Christmas Program

Last Thursday, Turtle and I were able to attend our son's first Christmas program...well the first program he put together as a teacher. He had 91 fourth-grade students participating; that's a lot of little children. Even stacked neatly on the bleachers of a huge auditorium stage, behaving beautifully without fights and fidgets, they looked like they would be a challenge to teach. The program being Christmas Around the World, the children sang songs in English, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and Japanese. One little boy played drums; another two played guitar (for Silent Night), six little girls played on marimbas, and they all sang. Elijah accompanied on the guitar, piano, accordion, and trumpet(not all at the same time). It was quite enjoyable. I tried to get a picture of all 91 of the students up there, but it had to be rather small, so I took a close up of Elijah and two little boys;it looks like they have a tie-coordinating thing going on. His next program will be in the spring and will feature his third graders. At the end of the year, his fifth graders will have their turn to perform. His job isn't one most people would appreciate having, but I'm sure it means a lot to the children and to their parents. I'm proud of Elijah at times like this.

Names of Christ Tree

Here's a tree created by my sophomores in the Life of Christ class. We are studying mostly from the book of John--all those "I Am" passages--so we decorated a tree with the names of Christ. You have to use your imagination a little, but if you can't figure them out, they are labeled.

Cowlicks

I have a cowlick on my forehead which doesn't mean I've spent a lot of time ranching, but when I tried to find another word for it, the thesaurus went bankrupt. Surely, I thought, there has to be a more professional term, so I googled it, and all I got was this:

cow·lick (kou'lĭk')
n. A projecting tuft of hair on the head that grows in a different direction from the rest of the hair and will not lie flat.

Well, in my case, that definition doesn't quite fit. My cowlick is more of a complete swirl--a whirlpool of hair that would be a problem anywhere, but is particularly annoying when it sits right at the hairline on my forehead.

In vain my mother wrestled with that cowlick: curling, cutting, combing, crying. Nothing helped for long. It was a continual frustration to her. As I got older, I learned to harness the wild swirl, cutting bangs that would shoot over to the side and follow the insistent command of the cowlick, thus taming it by surrender, if there is such a thing.

Thankfully, neither of my daughters inherited the curly Charybdis, but when I saw my granddaughter Mim for the first time at the hospital...I knew that the gene must have slipped through somehow...the swirly, unruly...aw well!

The other day, I was combing Mim's hair.
"Grandma," she said, half explaining; half complaining, "I've got a hole in my hair".

"Sorry,Mimsy," I consoled her, "I know all about that crazy cowlick"

Turtle the Fearless

I know this is a pretty bad video but I wanted you to see something:
Look in the back...to the left of the tree.
See that gray-haired man playing with the young people at our Christmas program?

That's my husband.

He hadn't touched his lips to a trombone for twenty five years, but he borrowed this one to play Silent Night up there with the "once-a-year" youth ensemble.

Why?

Well you see that little girl standing next to him? It's her first year in band. At practice the other night she was in tears--feeling totally incompetent and all alone. So they brought her to pastor for comfort.

There's nothing that gets to Turtle more than a little child who is crying, so he promised that he would find a trombone and play it at the program with her.
I think she looks perfectly self-assured now, and, although he says he completely had to improvise the ending, I couldn't tell it. His great sense of compassion was more important to me than perfection, and I was proud of him.

Our Sunday Scribblings prompt was Brave