Poetry Friday: Three Kings, One Mama and A Poem

Today is a good day to have a brilliant idea. Its Epiphany and Poetry Friday! Today is the final day of Christmas, which in our house means we celebrate by taking down the holiday decorations, putting the house back to order and moving on....but it also means that I want to take the time to actually mark Epiphany itself as a meaningful day, not just as a day to end the meaning. Three Kings Day is when we remember that the Christ child was not just for Bethlehem but for the far-flung world, he was visited by these kings who came from some mysterious,  far-off, not Jewish land.....summoned by stars and irresistible telegraph messages from the sky. Epiphany is a day when we remember the appearing of this celestial "idea" in the sky, the appearing of Christ to the far nations of the world and the appearing of these kings as guests of The Holy Family.

Its a day to celebrate light, as we remember the star that called for inclusion, and Christ who is named Light of the World. We will light our Advent wreath one last time and we will light luminaries outside our door too. Its a day to celebrate guests and remember the role that these strangers had in the story and the part that warmly welcoming them played as The Holy Family opened their door to them and brought them into their house and life. We will chalk our door tonight with a holy blessing for our home and all who come in and go out in 2017. Chalking the door also echoes back to Passover and the many Jewish parents who marked their doors with a sign of protection on that important night. We will also have an apple gallette with a bean hidden in it....that lucky person getting to wear the crown around the house for the rest of the evening, just for fun. And we'll sing a few more carols around the piano and making sure to hit We Three Kings. I'll read the story of the magi's visit at bedtime as fodder for sweet dreams and we'll be off and running towards our New Year, kissing the holiday season goodbye and looking on towards Lent.

I love the church calendar, the way it pulls me into history, the way it marks our whirling round and round and ties our revolutions into sacred time. I love the reminders to tell these stories to my children, to focus on things like blessing our home and remembering light in our lives. I love the cultural habits that bring gentle little traditions to our life and maybe even a sense of who our people are ancestrally.

Epiphany Song

On this day of eureka,
Bright ideas, lit by starlight
Infuse amongst us like
The fragrant smoke of incense
Let us know clearly.
There is an open door with a
Blessing sifting onto the heads
That enter, like chalk dust
Filtering down in a beam of sun,
Let us love each soul.
We look for the exotic among us,
The sage voices of other lands,
People baring their hearts of gold
Hands fragrant with scents of love.
Let us seek freshness.

The prettiest pastry we ate this year, inspiration for our Epiphany pastry!

Enjoy the collection of other poetry contributions, some original and some inspiration from greats at our host site this week Teacher Dance.

Chinatown Link-Fest

The small city we live in now is hugely Chinese in demographic. There are four giant, full service Chinese grocery stores here, for instance. I have a feeling that Chinese New Year might be a big deal here. We had a little foray into San Francisco this past weekend and fooled around in Chinatown, watching people buying lanterns and food for the festivities and loading up the bottom of the stroller with rambutans and longan. I am not very Chinese in style. I like my Latin culture and my "island time" but I have a hard time with cultures that are particular or rigid or invasively harsh.  I admire their stringency but I am kind of unsettled by their culture of wily, particularity. I look like I'm sick if I wear the orange-red color they are so fond of, I'm terribly fond of being golden tan from outdoor play and I really don't like bean paste desserts. I'd make a lousy Beijing expat. I do love the Chinese medicine culture with their emphasis on observing the body for symptom decoding and clues and their use of herbs and other natural remedies. I also love the lower sugar baked good in their shops. I think the flowers are amazing....the big, lush chrysanthemums and tuberose in fragrant bundles. I have some gigantic white lilies on my dining room table that we brought home with us. Each lily could be a full-sized lady's hat and the whole room is spiraled through by the drifting eddies of fragrance. I like that very much. I'm a little biased. China is a whole universe away and feels philosophically alien to me but I want to appreciate and understand my neighbors and connect to them. China is encroaching in my life. I did a little reading to inspire me. Wanna see what I found? 

Here are my favorites: 

• A photographer, making fashion role models out of Chinatown's elders. (We accidentally wandered past her studio and I peeked in the window and wondered what the exhibit was about as it was closed at the time and I hadn't yet read this article.)
• How Walmart didn't make it in Chinatown. The Chinese are frugal, but protests reigned and it didn't fly. 
• Chinatowns in rural Connecticut. How the World Trade Center attack caused a migration and brought the Chinese out of NYC.
• The largest Chinatown in Mexico is in Mexicali. It includes a large population, and a warren of secret tunnels. Who knew!?!
• One man, eats his way through every restaurant in Chinatown, L.A. He gives you the serious lowdown on where the astounding stuff is and what it was like to do it all.
• Chinatown and public art are intermingled. The Chinese have embraced identity discussion in public spaces and expression of feeling and tradition emblazoned across walls and courtyards.

Poetry Friday: Cookie Season Verse

Happy Poetry Friday everybody! It's been an age since I celebrated, eh? I have been feeling poem-dry and a little intimidated, plus Friday has a way of casting me deep into "who cares anymore!" mode. Heh heh. Ah the weekend, consumer of my motivation.

I am starting to think about New Years Resolutions and all the they entail, the idea of kicking your own butt back into shape and getting back on all the horses that bucked you recently. So, yeah...I'm back poets and poetry lovers. Poetry Friday must not be ditched. I have to be strong and keep at it. Sometimes I will just write crap. This is life. But keeping on and still writing is the the key to ever turning out good stuff. In the next couple of weeks I hope to compile and number all the poetry I've written this year as a result of this project and if that's not motivation, I don't know what is! Hooray for having output!

I am neck-deep in cookie baking right now, dough and flour from floor to ceiling, I swear it! So, it is time to do some cookie poetry. I bake a lot of cookies during the holidays. It is one of the strange projects I have invented for myself which admittedly creates a lot of work but also gives me a huge amount of satisfaction. A thinks I'm insane. I might be insane but I do bake anyway. :) I bake about 20 different varieties every year and every November I sit down and analyze the list from last year and cross out cookies that were just "meh" instead of amazing and add back anything from previous years that is getting a lot of fond remembering and then I go trolling for new recipes to add. This year I decided to make baklava, something I've made and enjoyed before but never at Christmas.... and then a poem came with it.

Baklava in Advent

I  wrote "baklava" down on the cookie list
It sounded strange but delicious to me,
Sandwiched between the gingerbread men
And sugar cookies iced with sprinkles.
I brush butter, sprinkle spiced nuts and
Gently coax the butterfly wing dough
Into softly fluted layers, rich with scent.
I preheat the oven and remember visiting
The sun-baked land of the Christmas Child.
I remember the heavy pressing heat in Galilee,
Arid country shattered and dusty like pastry.
There was a fervent squawking of hawkers
Selling whatnots in the streets of Jerusalem,
Over-laced with honey and spices drifting up
From the tented market stalls below our hotel.
I slide the finished pan into the waves of heat
Squinting to see through the invisible billows.
And upstairs, amid the squawking of my children
I address a Christmas card to my cousin in Israel
And wonder to myself, how much postage
It will require to send our family photo to that
Exotic port, home of honey and warmed spices,
Birth place of my baklava and my God.


Please do realize that I am in no way asserting that Israel is the birthplace of baklava, just that The Middle East is. I am no sort of expert on the origin of foods and this particular one is a source of great contention among peoples of various Cradle of Civilization nations.

Have a poem you want to share, either one you wrote or one you admire that another author created? You can go share too but posting a link in the comments of today's host for Poetry Friday: Robyn Hood. Happy weekend everyone!

Pictoral Easter

Easter was lovely. The weather has been creeping along, painfully towards spring in centimeters but suddenly yesterday the sun was beaming all over the place, flowers opened in flocks and out of nowhere all the lawns were green and every tree seems to show tips of chartreuse. Amazing how the season can change on a dime. I feel like we have come, quite overnight, into spring for good. Boy is it nice to see it! I was so ready it was making me get a charley horse.

It was the perfect weather for a holiday. I had little baskets full of goodies for the boys, and more candy than I think I ever want to hand out again (note to self for next year)....and layers of evil, fancy clothes to trap my little men into wearing. I wish I had a picture of all of us in our Eastery outfits but unfortunately, I didn't get a good shot. The camera sometimes is not on my arm. :)

Our congregation hosted a beautiful Easter service, packed to the brim with eager parishioners, very vibrant with joy over the resurrection and the promise of life and the deep love of God. I love the times when a church service has moments that feel like you get in a stadium as everyone watches "our team" go for the touchdown; that unity and energy. I was also very proud of the boys for keeping all their ties on through the whole service. After the service finished we hustled the kids out to the car and jetted to my aunt's house for a really beyond delicious holiday meal and a little festive egg hunting.

A and I come from two different traditions regarding Easter gifts for children. He maintains that all treats should be hidden and found in the egg hunt along with the eggs that the children dyed. I was raised with the tradition of Easter baskets that were waiting on the breakfast table when we came down in the morning and then a little bit of candy and some plastic eggs that were used for a much less important Easter egg hunt held later in the day. We are still trying to figure out how to meld our two experiences into a pleasant something for our kids without going to over the top that everyone is sick of celebration or either of the two of us has their personal traditions tromped over and thrown out. Tricky business, all this negotiation. What does your family do for Easter treats for little ones?