"Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming"--Part III

 

The third and fourth stanzas of “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” were translated into English by Harriet Reynolds Krauth in 1875, almost twenty years before Theodore Baker translated the first two. Stanzas three and four may have been composed and added to the hymn by Fridrich Lasyriz some time around 1844, but that isn’t clear. The earliest printed text that has been found ( in the Alta Catholishche Geistliche Kirchengansang published in 1599) had 23 stanzas, but these stanzas may not have been among them.¹

In any event, the first four stanzas would have been included in the carol before Harriet Reynolds Krauth translated any of it, so I’m not sure why she chose what are now stanzas three and four. Maybe they were in a different order at the time. Or maybe she started with stanza 3 because it referenced the familiar story in Luke 2:8-20 rather than Isaiah’s prophesies, which are not as well-known even to many Christians.

Here is Harriet Reynolds Krauth’s translation of stanza 3:

The shepherds heard the story

Proclaimed by angels bright,

How Christ, the Lord of glory

Was born on earth this night.

To Bethlehem they sped

And in the manger found Him,

As angel heralds said.

 

This verse makes it obvious that the song is a Christmas carol talking about the birth of Jesus.

Next week’s post will cover the other stanza translated by Harriet Reynolds Krauth.

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¹This information comes from https://hymnstudiesblog.wordpress.com/2021/04/22/lo-how-a-rose-eer-blooming/.

"Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming"--Part II

 

Like the first, the second stanza of “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” was translated into English by Theodore Baker in 1894. Here is his translation:

Isaiah ‘twas foretold it,

The rose I have in mind;

With Mary we behold it,

The virgin mother kind.

To show God’s love aright,

She bore to men a Savior,

When half spent was the night.

 

Although Isaiah foretold that the Messiah would be born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14), all of his prophesies point to the Messiah himself. The reference to the virgin who bore Him was a sign to identify the Messiah by, not a way to deify His mother.

Still, there is some discussion over whether the rose in the carol originally referred to Mary and was later “Protestantized” to make it refer to Jesus. It is clear to me, however, that the current version does not equate the rose with Mary. The English language has changed over the years, but even so the “it” in line three appears to refer back to the rose. Mary was unlikely to have beheld herself, but she did behold Jesus.

In spite of that controversy, the meaning of the stanza is clear. The Messiah was born of a virgin, and He came as our Savior.

Next week we’ll cover stanza three, which is the one that tells us most clearly that the prophesied Messiah is Jesus.

"Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming"--Part I

 

This Advent season I’m doing a series about one of my favorite traditional Christmas carols, “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.” The fifteenth century German carol tells the Christmas story in an unusual way by comparing Jesus to a rose.¹

The origin of the rose comparison is Biblically unclear. The carol seems to be combining Isaiah 11:1 and Isaiah 35:1.

Isaiah 11:1 clearly refers to the Messiah, who was to come from Jesse’s lineage. Here it is from the King James Version:

And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.

The verses that lead up to Isaiah 35, on the other hand, seem to indicate that Isaiah 35:1 refers to God’s kingdom rather than to the Messiah. Isaiah’s original audience may have assumed they would return from exile to rebuild the worldly Jerusalem. For most Christians today, however, the reference is to the heavenly Jerusalem. With that background to build on, here is Isaiah 35:1 from the King James Version:

"The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose." 

To further complicate matters, the translations can’t even agree on the flower that the passage refers to. The NIV and the ESV translates it as crocus rather than rose, and Martin Luther’s German translation uses lily. According to my internet research, what we usually think of as a crocus comes from the iris family, not the rose family, although there is apparently a shrub called a crocus rose.

The carol was written before the King James Version of the Bible came out, so it didn’t get the rose reference from there. Still, the actual flower is not the point of these passages so, for purposes of these blog posts, I’ll accept the comparison.

The first stanza of “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” was translated from the original German into English by Theodore Baker in 1894. Here are the words:

Lo, how a rose e’er blooming

From tender stem hath sprung!

Of Jesse’s lineage coming,

As men of old have sung.

It came a floweret bright,

Amid the cold of winter,

When half spent was the night.

 

Jesus probably wasn’t born in the winter, since the shepherds were unlikely to be watching their flocks in the fields at that time of year, but Christmas was firmly established in December by the time this carol was written. And even if the carol got the season wrong, the reference to the Messiah is clear, at least to me.

There are some people who believe the rose originally referred to Mary rather than to Jesus. Next week’s post on the second stanza will discuss what it means today.

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¹Although the carol is generally acknowledged to be from the 15^th century, the first printed text appeared in 1599. See https://hymnstudiesblog.wordpress.com/2021/04/22/lo-how-a-rose-eer-blooming/.

Getting Thanksgiving Right

 

This Thanksgiving week, I am reworking a post I originally wrote in 2014 for the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog. The changes are mostly due to the difference in audience, but the historical perspective is the same.

In 2014, I looked for a picture of the first Thanksgiving to include with the post. Unfortunately, the only ones I found that were clearly in the public domain were also historically inaccurate. The image I ended up using, and which accompanies this post as well, is a good example. The clothing and feather are all wrong, and the position of the two groups, with the members of the Wampanoag nation sitting on the ground and the Pilgrims standing, implies that the Pilgrims were the dominant race. Since a white woman is handing out the food, the picture could also imply that the Pilgrims provided the feast and the Native Americans were simply recipients.

That’s wrong.

When I think of the first Thanksgiving, I think of friendly Native Americans bringing their knowledge, skills, and provisions to feed the starving Pilgrims. Squanto and his tribe taught the Pilgrims how to survive, and they would have perished without that help.

That’s one of the reasons I like Thanksgiving. It’s the one time of year when we remember the Native American participants as the generous people they were. That’s a lot better than the frequent stereotype of half-dressed warriors burning homes and scalping white settlers.

Those of us with European ancestry have many reasons to be grateful to Native Americans.

And I am.

Researching the Little Things

 

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been working on a story that takes place at the Grand Canyon. At one point, my protagonist visits the Tusayan ruins at a site that was inhabited by Pueblo Indians centuries ago. This is a very short scene in the book, but even short scenes should be factually correct.

As you can see from the photo I took in 2014, the “rooms” are identified with signs indicating how they were used (e.g., storage, living quarters). Since the signs don’t explain how the archeologists determined those uses, it is only natural for my protagonist to ask how they knew. And if she hadn’t asked, my readers might have wondered why she didn’t.

That’s where my initial research fell short. I have visited archeological sites before and have a general idea of how those determinations are made, and anything too complicated would confuse my middle-grade audience. So a simple description is good enough, and one paragraph was all I needed. Even so, I wasn’t totally confident in my answer, and I believe that even the smallest details should be as accurate as possible.

To check my limited knowledge, I purchased a book that used the excavation of a different Pueblo village to illustrate how archaeologist interpret the past. The book is called Life in the Pueblo: Understanding the Past Through Archaeology, and it gave me the information I needed. In fact, it was interesting enough that I read the entire book even though what I wanted to know came about a third of the way through. (I didn’t notice until I had already purchased it, but the archaeologist who wrote it is named Kathryn Kamp.)

It may seem that I went to a lot of work to ensure the accuracy of a very minor point in my book, and I suppose I did. It was worth it, however, because readers deserve to be able to trust even the smallest details.

So I’ll always research the little things.

Story Ideas That Are Out-of-Sync with Travel

 

In 2014, I dragged Roland along on a trip to Utah and California to do research for my first middle-grade book, Desert Jewels. Since Roland had never seen the Grand Canyon, we took a side trip to visit it. I had no plans to set a story there, so we spent our time at the tourist sites.

Now I wish I could have seen into the future. I am currently working on the first draft of a book that begins in the Oklahoma dust bowl in 1934 but then moves to the Grand Canyon for the rest of the story. The many photos I took as a tourist have been helpful for the setting, but I‘m missing some I would have taken if I had known. In particular, my online research tells me that the school building my main character would have attended is still there (although not in use as a school), but we didn’t visit it.

The limited knowledge I have of the school as it was in 1934 comes from a history page on the school district’s website. Although the page was quite helpful, it didn’t answer all of my questions, such as how many classrooms there were. Given that it was the third location and the second building actually constructed for the purpose, it seems logical that the attendance had outgrown the previous building. The enrollment listed in the article also supports that, with 29 students in 1914 and 250 currently. This makes it likely that there were at least two classrooms.

The website didn’t include contact information for the school or the person who put the history page together, but I did find an email address for the school librarian. Unfortunately, she hasn’t responded to my inquiry, so my conclusion that there must have been more than one classroom is simply an educated guess. An onsite visit would probably have answered the question, but I didn’t know enough to check it out a decade ago.

I also tried searching online for photos of the old school and found one labeled that way. There are two problems, though. First, I have no way of confirming that the caption identifies the correct building. Second, the front-end view isn’t enough to determine how many rooms were inside.

That’s what happens when I can’t foresee what my future novels will be about. It can also work the other way around, however.

Over a year ago I wrote a story about a girl who traveled around the Horn in 1850 on her way to the California gold fields. That manuscript is currently circulating among agents and hasn’t found one yet, but the lack of success may be a good thing.

When I wrote Around the Horn, I relied on journals written by people who had taken that trip in the mid-1800s. They were clearly the best resources, although it would have been nice to have supplemented them by taking the same route myself. I assumed, however, that it was a trip I would never take.

Wrong. Or maybe not, since we never know what the future holds. But after I started circulating the manuscript, Roland and I booked a cruise around the Horn for early 2026. We didn’t plan it as a research trip, and we aren’t stopping in the same ports as my characters did, but I’ll get whatever information I can out of it. Obviously, many things will have changed in 175 years, but much of the landscape will probably be the same.

I don’t really expect that what I see on my own trip around the Horn will change anything in the manuscript, but you never know. That’s why I’ve decided not to make another round of submissions until after I return. In this case, unlike for the book about the Grand Canyon, I may actually have a chance to do the research I didn’t expect.

But it sure would be nice if story ideas always coordinated with my travel plans.

An Hour Gained--Or Is It?

 

I haven’t posted my daylight savings poem for several years, so I thought it was time to do it again.

Spring Forward, Fall Back

Spring forward,

To save an hour of daylight.

Put it in the bank

Until the dark of winter.

Fall back

Into the evening gloom.

Open the vault

To lengthen the days.

Empty the treasure chest

Of sunlight and illusion,

Evening hours borrowed from morning

And then returned.

No hour gained,

No hour lost.

Each day still has twenty-four

To run its course.

Minds are easily deceived,

But you can’t fool Mother Nature.

The Importance of Context Clues

 

Last week I talked about using context clues to understand the foreign language phrases used in one of my current projects. Knowing how to interpret those clues is important when reading a book, but it is also a necessary life skill. That’s why it’s a skill we should all learn.

As noted in my previous post, I had asked several girls to beta read Not the Enemy, which contains a number German words and phrases. When I asked my readers if there were any words and phrases they couldn’t understand even in context, one of the 3^rd graders listed two, and I can find ways to make both of them more obvious. However, when I asked my beta readers what they liked least about how the story was written, that same third grader said, “I just think there were too many German words and I had to use context clues from other lines.” That indicates to me that she understood most of the foreign words and phrases but didn’t like having to use context clues to interpret them.

While I can, and will, attempt to make some of the clues stronger, I don’t intend to eliminate the German words from the book. Hopefully, the “context clues from other lines” will not only help readers understand the German but will also hone their skills at reading context clues in life as well as in fiction.

Interpreting context clues is an important life skill. Let’s look at a simple example. You’ve just met someone new, and the person says “pleased to meet you.” If the statement is accompanied by a warm smile, you believe that the person really is pleased. If the same words are said in a chilly tone or with a twitching eyebrow, they are probably insincere. That may not matter if the person is a casual acquaintance, but it makes a big difference if you are trying to develop a relationship.

I don’t believe in being overly intellectual in my writing. Sometimes simple and straightforward is best.

But there is also a place for context clues.

Translation or Context? Using Foreign Languages in Novels

 

One of my current projects is Not the Enemy, a story about a German American girl living in Illinois during World War I. For various reasons, I gave her a grandmother who refuses to speak English, but that raises a serious issue. Should I include her German dialogue in the story, and, if so, how can I make sure my readers understand it?

For this book, I decided that my protagonist would understand German but be just as stubborn about speaking English as her grandmother is about speaking German. So when Grossmutter says “Bitte bringen Du mir ene Tasse Tee,” Kate answers in English with “One cup of tea coming up.”¹ Although that doesn’t give my readers an exact translation of what Grossmutter said, it does give them the essence.

There are other ways of conveying foreign language dialogue to the reader, of course. At times, I simply use the English and mention that Grossmutter said it in German. This can also be a successful technique.

I have a critique partner who sets her books in Africa. Most of Celeste’s main characters are American or English, and some of the African characters have learned English in school or picked it up from the English-speaking people they associate with. But there are others who only speak African dialects. Although Celeste bases her locations on the real African countries where she worked as a missionary, she has chosen to fictionalize them by giving them different names and languages. Although she limits herself to English, she must clue the reader in that the original words are said in another language. In the series I am critiquing for her now, she has a character who knows enough languages to act as interpreter, so Hannah tells her English-speaking colleagues (and the reader as well) what is being said. Celeste makes it clear, however, that the words are being interpreted. For example, “Raymond told Hannah, ‘Tell the children that we aren’t going to hurt them.’ Nodding, Hannah used the children’s language to repeat what Raymond had said.” (That’s not an actual quote but gives you an idea of how Celeste does it.)

Then there is the use of foreign language phrases without any attempt to translate but yet in a context that makes them flow seamlessly with the story. I just finished reading When We Were Widows by Annette Chavez Macias. Her main characters are Mexican Americans, and the story is sprinkled with Mexican words and phrases. I remember very little of the Spanish I learned in my freshman year of high school, and I have no idea how to translate the phrases used by the characters. Still, there was enough context so that I could get the gist, or at least the tone, of the words. Yes, there were times when I wished I had the translation, but not knowing it didn’t frustrate me or interrupt the story. That’s the trick of writing that way, and it’s not easy to do.

This is not the first time I’ve faced the issue. My first middle-grade book, Desert Jewels, was about a half Japanese American girl living on the west coast during World War II. She spoke English and knew very little Japanese, but to make it realistic, I gave her an aunt and uncle who came from Japan and had never learned English. Unlike Kate’s grandmother in Not the Enemy, however, the aunt and uncle played a very minor role in the book and had children who could translate for my protagonist’s (and my readers’) benefit. Even so, I put some Japanese words and phrases in a glossary at the end of the book.

I wish I had remembered that when I wrote Not the Enemy. Although my beta readers got what they needed from my protagonist’s thoughts and the context clues I included, half of them suggested putting a glossary of German words and phrases at the back of the book. A very good suggestion, and one I should have thought of myself.

The main thing about using foreign languages in novels is to make sure you don’t slow down the story or frustrate your readers. And, of course, it should never be an excuse for showing off. Whether the language is translated or not, its use must be natural to the characters and the situation.

Using foreign languages in a novel should enhance the story. If they frustrate the reader or slow the story down, leave them out.

__________

¹ My German is pretty rusty, so I’m still working on making sure it is correct. If that phrase is wrong, it will be right by the time I finish my final draft.

__________

The 1917 photo at the top of this blog comes from the Chicago Daily News. It shows a group of children standing in front of a sign at Edison Park in Chicago. The sign reads, “DANGER!! TO PRO-GERMANS.—LOYAL AMERICANS WELCOME TO EDISON PARK.” The photo is in the public domain because of its age.

Visiting America's National Parks

 

I just put together a collaborative presentation on national parks for my camera club, and it reminded me how important it is to visit our country’s national wonders.

There are 63 national parks, and Roland and I counted up the number we had visited. We’re not sure we got them all, but we saw at least six with the children and at least ten additional ones by ourselves, either before they were born or after they grew up. While that sounds like a lot, it is only about a quarter of America’s national parks.

I’ve been to a few more because my family traveled all over the country when I was a child, but I don’t remember all of them. There were also some duplicates, such as the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone.

The photo at the head of this post is the well-known Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone National Park. I took it and the following photo from the Mammoth Springs area of the park during my visit there with Roland in 2005.

In 2014, Roland accompanied me on a research trip for Desert Jewels. Roland had never been to the Grand Canyon, and, since we were going to be sort-of in that area, we added it to the itinerary. This photo was taken from the east side of the rim, and that’s the Colorado River at the bottom.

A year ago we drove out to visit Roland’s sister in Arizona. Along the way, we visited two national parks and a national monument. The national parks were both in New Mexico. The next photo is a rock formation inside Carlsbad Caverns, which I call a stone waterfall. The one after that was taken at White Sands National Park and shows a dry lake bed that apparently has a little water in it for one or two months a year but not during September when we were there.

The National Park System includes more than just national parks, however, for a total of 431 locations. We have visited many of the national monuments, battlefields, and other historic sites on the list—some with and some without the children. Although I have limited space here, I am including photos of two of the 86 national monuments. The first is Wupatki National Monument in Arizona, which we visited on our way back from Sue’s house last year. The second is from our 2005 trip to Yellowstone and needs no introduction.

It would have been nice to include some photos of the many national parks, monuments, and battlefields that we visited with the children while they were growing up, but those photos were taken with film. I’m simply too lazy to dig through boxes of prints to find them.

I highly recommend visiting America’s national parks. In fact, any site within the  national park system is well worth seeing. Go to www.nps.gov to find information on particular locations.

If you are a senior (62 or more) or a veteran, you can get a lifetime pass. The senior lifetime pass is $80, but that is well worth the money if you plan on going to several places. Roland and I both purchased senior lifetime passes because we didn’t realize we only needed one. A pass is valid for everyone in the holder’s car when the entrance fee is per car and for a total of four persons when the entrance fee is per person. It does have the customer’s name on it, though, so if two spouses each plan on doing some independent travel, then maybe getting two is worth it.

There is also a free lifetime pass for veterans, which also covers all the occupants of the car or three individuals besides the veteran. If we had realized that, we would have saved even more money. Even so, what we did spend has already been worth it.

Here is a link to the page with information about passes.

Entrance Passes (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)

If you are planning a vacation and don’t know where to go, check out the national park system.

 

Customs Change Over Time

 

I just re-read the first three books in the Cherry Ames series by Helen Wells. For those of you who don’t know, Cherry Ames was part of the craze for series about older teenage girls that started with Nancy Drew. Cherry was a nursing student and then a nurse rather than an amateur detective like Nancy, so most of the series takes place when she was a young adult. Although Cherry did solve some mysteries, they were secondary to her life as a nurse.

When I was a girl, my family occasionally stayed with my Uncle Lester and his family. My cousin Ann was four years older than I was and away in college during my high school years, so I slept in her room several times. One of the things I liked about it was Ann’s collection of Cherry Ames books, which I got to read while I was there.

Ann went to medical school and became a doctor, so many years later I asked her why she read books about a nurse instead of a doctor. If I’m remembering it correctly, Ann said she wanted stories with a medical setting and the Cherry Ames books were the best she could get.

By the time Ann started medical school, it was already the late 1960s and female doctors weren’t as unusual as they had been. Fiction hadn’t caught up with the times, however.

This isn’t a criticism of the Cherry Ames books. Nursing is a noble profession, and society needs nurses as well as doctors. Those first books in the series were consistent with the state of the medical profession when they were written and published in the 1940s. Although there are no female doctors or male nurses in them, there is also no suggestion that those roles are inappropriate and, for all I know, female doctors and male nurses may have appeared later in the series. Furthermore, I believe those books were written the way they should have been. Even though they were not historical fiction when they were written, they were set during World War II and have become historicals simply by occurring in an easily identifiable historical setting.

I strongly believe that historical fiction should reflect the time it is set in. Many of my novels include beliefs and actions that are not popular today. For example, Learning to Surrender has a protagonist who believes in slavery during much of the book until circumstances show her the evils that exist even for slaves with “good” masters.

This doesn’t mean that historicals can’t give a nod to today’s thinking, but it must flow with the story. A good example is Tenmile by Sandra Dallas, which takes place in 1880. The protagonist often helps her doctor father, and people tell her that she would be a good nurse. Nobody except the housekeeper encourages her to become a doctor, although the protagonist’s father seems to be wavering in his opinion when the story ends. The protagonist is still too young to become either a doctor or a nurse, but the reader has learned there is a medical school that takes women, and we are confident that will be the protagonist’s future. The prevailing opinion among the people in the story is consistent with the times, however.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with books that intentionally change history and admit it, and temporarily misleading information is often crucial to a plot during the course of a novel. But if you want readers to come away believing your historical setting is correct, you should make sure it is.

Always respect the reader.

Purpose v. Goal: Story Always Comes First

 

Despite what the dictionary says, purpose and goal are not always the same. This is especially true when writing fiction. Educating my audience is my purpose, but telling a good story is my goal.

I recently purchased a novel from a local author. The story takes place in the region, and the premise sounded good. But when I started reading it, I didn’t get far.

The book begam with a lecture on the social history of the area. I made it through the first chapter and debated whether I should read on. Maybe the author had finished her sermon and was ready to move on to the story. But when I started the second chapter, it was more of the same, so I gave up. The book may have had the perfect plot and told a wonderful story, but I’ll never know.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, though.

I write because I’m addicted to it. I can’t not write. The genre is more of a choice, however. I write middle grade historical novels because I believe it is important for today’s children to know their history. So my purpose is to educate them about their country’s past. But my readers want a story, not a lecture, and if they get bored they will put the book down without learning anything I am trying to teach them. Without a good story, my purpose is lost.

When I wrote Desert Jewels, I wanted to show everything that the Japanese Americans on the West Coast went through during World War II when they were forced to leave their homes and live in internment camps. Unfortunately, that was unrealistic. There were some events and circumstances that I couldn’t weave into the story without bogging it down, so I had to leave them out. I probably still left in a few things I shouldn’t have, but hopefully the story is strong enough that my readers forgive me those slips. And I was able to provide enough of the flavor of those camps to give readers an understanding of what happened there.

By the time I sent Creating Esther to my middle-grade beta readers, I was doing better. However, I still wanted to show everything about how my Ojibwe protagonist lived before she went to a white-run boarding school, and that was unrealistic, too. Fortunately, this time I had the sense to ask my beta readers to point out those passages that sounded like lessons, and they did. The final version either reworked those parts or left them out.

Each beta reader questionnaire since then has asked that same question. I seem to have learned my own lesson, because the answer is usually “none.” When they do point something out, however, I find a way to make it flow with the story. If I can’t, it goes into the trash bin.

Fiction isn’t a textbook or a sermon. If it is written that way, readers will put it down. And they should.

As I said at the beginning of this post, education is my purpose, but telling a good story is my goal.

So if you want your readers to learn something new, put story first.

Traditional and Beautiful

 

John and Christina’s wedding couldn’t have been nicer. Everything was traditional: the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner, the church ceremony, and the reception. Traditional and beautiful.

At Christina’s bridal shower, we played a game where we guessed how Christina had answered some questions about the two of them. One asked who would cry first. Caroline and I both wrote down Christina because, as Caroline put it, “John doesn’t cry.” Christina said John would cry first and, as it turned out, she was right. He chocked up when reading his written vows, but I found out later that wasn’t the first time he had cried. Apparently he had cried while getting dressed and again while meeting Christina when she arrived. It was clear from the goofy look on his face when he watched her come down the aisle that there was no sadness or second thoughts in those tears.

Christina’s niece and nephew were the flower girl and ring bearer, although their role was mostly limited to walking down the aisle and then joining their parents in the front row. Six-year-old Ethan made a respectable ring bearer, but three-year-old Emma is a firecracker. There were a few times when she appeared shy, hiding behind one of her parents or her grandfather, but most of the time she bounced around full of energy. According to her mother, she claimed it was her wedding and wanted to go up on stage. Her father took her out, and the wedding proceeded without that disruption.

They weren’t the only children there. The matron of honor’s husband brought four of their five, and the best man and his wife brought their youngest, who is still being weaned. Calvin spent as much time with other people as with his parents. The next photo shows him with my daughter, Caroline, and her husband, Pete.

The reception was a lot of fun, and the younger members of the crowd really got involved in the dancing. That includes John and Christina. The next photo shows him lifting her in the air during their first dance.

It's the small mishaps that make a wedding memorable, however, and John and Christina had a few. As you can see in the dance photo, her traditional dress had a very wide skirt. As they were coming down the aisle together as husband and wife, they stopped a couple of times to kiss. The second time John bent Christina over, and her skirt brushed against one of the vases of flowers that was lining the aisle. (You can see them in the following photo of the chapel at the Chapel Hill Bible Church.) The vase fell over and the water spilled out, so if John’s very klutzy mother hadn’t noticed it before she got there, there might have been another spectacle besides the wedding.

Christina’s dress may have also played a role in the way they drove away from the church. John got her settled in the back seat before going around to the front and driving away as if he were her chauffer. Those of us who watched them leave speculated that her skirt was too wide to fit in the front seat.

Another mishap occurred when Christina tossed the bouquet. She had a special one for throwing, and the individual flowers separated while the bouquet was in the air. If the flying flowers were caught by two or more girls, will they get married on the same day?

I missed the cake cutting because I was outside taking photos of the car being “decorated” by the best man.

The final photo shows the groom’s parents. Aren’t we a handsome couple? We’ve been married for 45 good years, and we wish the same (actually 50 or more) for John and Christina.

But, of course, the best thing about the wedding is that John and Christina were joined together in the type of holy matrimony created by God, where male and female become one. May Christ be the true head of their family and love the glue that holds them together, as Christ’s love does for His own bride, the Church.

Congratulations, Christina and John.

 

Drinking Starbucks Coffee

 

My son got married this past weekend. I’ve been to busy to blog about it yet, so I decided to be lazy and reprint a blog post from October 27, 2014 discussing the legal aspects of using trademarks in novels. I chose this post in particular since the issue came up at the author’s fair I attended last month.

I will blog about John and Christina’s wedding next week.

Drinking Starbucks Coffee

I drink a lot of coffee, although not usually from Starbucks. But my characters go there. That’s because it is a nationally-recognized name, and I like to use some recognizable brands to give my stories a sense of authenticity.

But I know writers who are scared of using brand names. They think it will violate copyright or trademark laws, or they don’t want to use the ® symbol because it can interrupt the flow of the story.

I don’t worry about any of that.

You can’t copyright names, so copyright law doesn’t apply. You can trademark names, and Starbucks is a registered trademark. However, trademarks have a specific, limited purpose, so the protection the owner gets is much narrower than with copyrights.

Trademarks protect against consumer confusion over the source of a product or service. Consumers use recognizable names and symbols to tell them that they are getting a certain quality or a product with particular characteristics. When you see the Nike swoosh on a pair of shoes, you expect them to last for a while. When a counterfeiter prints the swoosh on shoddy-quality shoes, people are mislead. That harms both the consumer (who is not getting what he or she expected) and Nike (who could lose sales to the counterfeiter and suffer harm to its reputation when the shoes fall apart).

Your characters can drink 7-Up without worrying about trademark infringement. No one is going to go out and buy counterfeit 7-Up based on your novel, nor will readers assume that the makers of 7-Up are connected with your book. You don’t have to call it lemon-lime soda.

A brand name can lose its trademark protection if consumers use it generically for any brand of the same type of product. After people started referring to all tissues as kleenex and to photocopies made on any brand photocopier as xeroxes, the owners of those trademarks spent a lot of money educating consumers on the proper use of the terms. That’s why brand owners would like you to use the © symbol. But you aren’t required to. If you want to help trademark owners protect their property and you think “the real thing” will add authenticity, just capitalize Coke.

So let your characters drink Starbucks’ coffee if they want to. Or 7-Up. Or Coke. (There seems to be a lot of drinking in this post. Maybe I should send my characters to the bathroom more often.)