A Christmas Card Tradition

 

Roland and I created, addressed, and sent our Christmas cards this past weekend. Actually, I did most of the creating, but Roland had significant input. In fact, our Christmas card tradition sprung from one of his ideas.

On a trip to Greece and Turkey in 2006, we spent some time at the Ephesus Museum in a small town outside of Ephesus. While there, Roland took a photo of a busted up statue of Ceasar Augustus. We were sending out commercial Christmas cards at the time and continued to do so through 2009. By 2010, however, I had started making notecards from some of my photos, and we decided to create our own Christmas cards instead of buying them. Then Roland had the idea of using his photo of Ceasar Augustus with “Ceasar’s Greetings” on the front and Luke 2:1-7 on the inside. That’s the scripture that tells us it was a decree from Ceasar Augustus that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. Here is the front of that card:

From 2011–2014, most of our Christmas cards used nativity scenes found at various places in the Midwest, although 2015 was a Bernardino Luini painting from the Louvre that I took during a brief stop in Paris that year, and 2017 was a stained-glass window from a church in Normandy, which I took during that same trip.

After that, we decided we would try to use religious photos from the trips we had taken during the year. We were mostly successful. We even had a photo from our 2020 trip, which we squeezed in just before the pandemic shut everything down. We were traveling again by the end of 2021, but that trip to Africa produced no appropriate photos, so we had to dig into my photo archives for a photo taken in Florence, Italy in 2018. Last year we were back on track, and this year we had three photos to choose from—one from Melbourne and two from Ireland. We ended up using the one at the top of this post.

Let’s hope that next year yields some equally good choices.

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The photo at the head of this blog is a painting on exhibit at Kilkenny Castle in Kilkenny, Republic of Ireland, and I photographed it while we were there in May. The card next to the painting identified it as “Madonna and Child—Artist: after Carlo Dolci (1616-86).”

Thank God

 

No, I’m not swearing. With Thanksgiving coming up, I decided to take a traditional approach to this week’s blog post and thank God for His many blessings: a loving husband, three wonderful children (including my son-in-law), great friends, good health (for my age), my writing, plenty of activities to keep me busy, a church where I can grow in my knowledge of and relationship with Christ, and, of course, Christ’s death on the cross to save me from my sins.

But most of this post will be taken from Martin Luther’s Small Catechism. Here is his explanation to the Fourth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer.

Give us this day our daily bread.

What does this mean? God certainly gives daily bread to everyone without our prayers, even to all evil people, but we pray in this petition that God would lead us to realize this and to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving.

What is meant by daily bread? Daily bread includes everything that has to do with the support and needs of the body, such as food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, land, animals, money, goods, a devout husband or wife, devout children, devout workers, devout and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, self-control, good reputation, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.

So thank God this week and always.

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The photo shows Martin Luther’s study at Wartburg Castle where he translated the New Testament into German. I took it during a Reformation tour in 2016.

It's a Lie

 

As I wrote last week’s blog post, I was reminded of a post I wrote eleven years ago objecting to telling children that they can be anything they want to be. That November 12, 2012 post is reprinted here.

It’s a Lie

Violin concertos embraced me as I drove back from Indianapolis on Saturday, and my heart soared and ached simultaneously. I longed to be able to play like that.

I love the violin. It is more versatile than any other musical instrument. In Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” the violins trill like birds, roar like thunder, murmur like a gentle breeze, romp like peasants celebrating the harvest, and spit like icy rain.

Few of you know that I used to play violin. I took lessons for three years and played last chair in the college orchestra for one year before I faced the truth: I would never be more than a sixth-rate violinist. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Granted, I didn’t practice as much as I should have, but it was my body that betrayed me.

Physically, there are two characteristics all good violinists possess. One is an “ear” for pitch. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are deaf violinists who can “hear” the pitch in the vibrations that course through their fingertips. But one way or another, a violinist must be able to determine whether he or she is on pitch while tuning and playing the instrument.

If a piano is properly tuned, playing the perfect pitch is as simple as hitting a particular key. Violins aren’t like that. Each string contains a continuum of pitches, and producing the right one requires you to hear it inside your head as you place your fingers.

I was good at that.

The other necessary characteristic is dexterity. Dexterity in the bow arm (which is the right arm for a right-handed person), and dexterity in the fingers that play the notes, which are on the opposite hand than the one you use for writing and other fine-motor skills.

Dexterity I didn’t have and could never develop no matter how motivated I was. If I had set my heart on being a great violinist, my dreams—and my heart—would have shattered.

So I wince whenever I hear someone say, “You can be whatever you want if you try hard enough.”

It’s a lie.

Not everyone can be the smartest kid in the class or the prettiest girl or the best athlete. Many people want to be President of the United States or Miss America or an Olympic gold medalist, but only a few succeed.

I’ll never be a good violinist. But that’s okay, because my talents lie in other directions.

We all have talents. They may not be the ones that make us rich or famous, but everyone is valuable. We need carpenters as much as (okay, more than) we need lawyers.

The secret to success is not in believing that we can be whatever we want to be. That road leads to heartbreak.

The secret to success is discovering our talents and making the most of them.

And that’s no lie.

The Importance of Extra-Curricular Activities

 

Friday night Roland and I went to see The Real Story of Little Red Riding Hood as presented by the students of St. Paul’s Lutheran School. This post isn’t about the show, although I do have to say that my favorite character was the stage manager. (Yes, he was a character, similar to—but very different from—the stage manager in Our Town.)

My children attended St. Paul’s through 8^th Grade, and one of the things I appreciated about it was the variety of extra-curricular activities. We all have talents, but nobody is good at everything, or even at most things. My children take after their mother and are not good at sports. St. Paul’s had basketball and volleyball and soccer teams, so (along with Little League) my children had the opportunity to try out different sports and discover that wasn’t their strength. Caroline did find a place for herself on her high school cross-country team, where she ran in the middle of the pack. Fortunately, she enjoyed it for the running and the camaraderie, not because she expected to be the next Mary Decker.

Then there were the musical opportunities. Caroline sang in the choir and the school musicals, and John played percussion in the band. He gave up band after 8^th grade even though he was decent at it, but Caroline still sings in her church choir and with a select choral group.

They are both successful in their chosen careers—Caroline as a 1^st Grade teacher and John as a computer programmer. And because they learned their limitations, they didn’t dream of being professional athletes or pursing professions they weren’t suited for.

That’s the advantage of attending a school that provides a variety of extra-curricular activates to let children discover what they are good at (and what they enjoy). Unfortunately, it doesn’t work if their parents tell them they can be whatever they want to be.

That’s the subject of next week’s blog post.

Looking Back at Old German Hymnals

 

As I looked at hymnals used during World War I, I was reminded how rusty my German is and how fast language changes.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I am currently working on a story about a German-Lutheran girl living in America during World War I. So when a friend offered to let me look at some old German hymnals that had belonged to her mother, I was thrilled.

I haven’t used my German much since I took two years in college, but I can usually get the sense of a written document with the help of a dictionary and Google’s translation program. For the most part, that was also true when I looked at the title pages of Bobbi’s mother’s books, even though some of the German words seem to have fallen out of use. And even though it took more time to translate pages written in the old German script, I mostly managed to do so without human assistance, as in the case of the one at the top of this post.¹

Then I cane across this one.

I had downloaded two charts showing the old German script and providing the modern-day equivalent for each letter (or two-character grouping such as ch). Unfortunately, it didn’t help much with this particular title page. Trying to match up the letters in the red word at the top with the script on my charts, my best guess was “Pans-Buch.” “Buch” is book, but “pans” made no sense.

Fortunately, I have human resources as well. My daughter minored in German in college and has kept up with it much better than I have. She has even read the German versions of the Harry Potter books.

So I admitted my failure and sent it off to her. Although several words puzzled her, she got the gist of it. Turns out that what I thought was a P was an H and what I thought was an s was a d, so the word translated to “Handbook.”

I’m a pretty self-sufficient person, and I don’t like to ask for help.

But sometimes it’s the only way to get it right.

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¹ The top five lines read, “Church-Songbook for Evangelical Lutheran Congregations unaltered Augsburg Confession.” Presumably it was written for those congregations that followed the unaltered Augsburg Confession, which is a doctrinal statement adopted in Augsburg, Germany in 1530.

A Good Friday Declaration of War

 

In 1917, President Wilson declared war against Germany on Good Friday. That’s fine, I guess, except it caused me extra work to get history right.

I spent a lot of time on the first chapter of my current work in progress, and I was pretty happy with it as a first draft. Then I was going through some old hymnals, thumbed through the Easter hymns, and realized that two of the important historical events underlying my story had taken place the first week of April, when Easter sometimes falls. Sure enough, Easter fell on April 8 in 1917, meaning that the United States’ April 6 declaration of war against Germany fell on Good Friday.

So why was that a problem? The first chapter couldn’t have happened the way I wrote it. I started with the paperboy crying “Extra! Extra! U.S. declares war on Germany.” That would have been okay, except my protagonist and her friends heard the announcement as they left her Lutheran school that afternoon. No parochial school—and few, if any, public schools in those days—would have been open on Good Friday.

The fix has them leaving the Good Friday service at their church. Unfortunately, doing involves quite of bit of reorganization as well as both additions and subtractions. I can, however, use some of the cut material later in the story. So the work I had already done isn’t a complete waste.

I’m just glad I caught my mistake in time.

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The image at the head of this post is a 16^th century painting attributed to Frans Pourbus the Elder. It is in the public domain because of its age.

Paranoia

 

My World War I research found many instances of paranoia, both by and against the German-Americans.

Many Americans with German ancestry, and especially those who were born in Germany, struggled with divided loyalties at the beginning of the Great War. But once the United States entered the war, 99% of them were American first.

Still, not everyone recognized that. One of the most egregious cases of mass paranoia was the lynching of Robert Prager in Collinsville, Illinois on April 5, 1918. The motive for the lynching may have been partly based on his union activities, but that wasn’t the reason given. The lynching party claimed that he was a traitor, and the only evidence of that was his German origin.

Prager’s lynching accelerated the harassment against those with a German background. Prominent men of German descent were tarred and feathered and threatened with lynching. Some were actually strung up but were cut down at the last minute. All things German were banned, including Beethoven’s symphonies, and books written in the language were burned in public bonfires.

The German-American community’s actions showed their own paranoia in reacting to the violence. Churches, businesses, and societies Americanized their names, with St. Paul’s German Lutheran Church becoming St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Verein Vorwaerta changing its name to the New Athens Singing Society, and Dreieinigkeitskirche translating its name to Trinity Church. Most churches dropped their German services even though some of their older members couldn’t understand English, and many parochial schools—which were already teaching most classes in English—stopped using German altogether. German was no longer heard on the streets, either, as neighbors switched to English when holding public conversations.

Those of German descent had some basis for their paranoia, but their persecutors had none. Although there was no evidence of actual disloyalty among the German-American community,  there were plenty of charges. Consider these instances that were reported in the Belleville News-Democrat in the three weeks following the Praeger lynching. One pastor was arrested for obstructing the draft by telling newly enlisted men that it would be easy for them to cross the line at the front and join the German army. Another man was arrested for simply saying that he agreed with statements made by another man who had been arrested for treason. Both men denied the charges. But the worst offense against the First Amendment was the arrest of a woman who called President Wilson a “fat hog.” There was a little more to it than that, but not much. Here is the full article:

Woman Called Wilson Fat Hog; Is Arrested

Mrs. Bertha Smith, 53 years old, of 301-A Locust street, St. Louis, a native of Germany, was arrested yesterday by agents of the Department of Justice. A warrant charging disloyalty will be issued.

“President Wilson looks like a big fat hog,” Mrs. Smith said, according to Mrs. Peter Van Rysel, with whom she roomed. Mrs. Van Rysel, told Federal agents that Mrs. Smith once tore a Red Cross placard from her window and cursed it. Mrs. Smith had expressed a desire, it is charged, to have the American flag that was wrapped around Paul Prager when he was lynched in Collinsville, Ill., that she might tear it up. [Belleville News-Democrat, April 23, 1918 (errors in the original)]

What happened to freedom of speech? Paranoia trampled all over it.

The lesson is simple. Check your facts before you react to what you hear.

Don’t let paranoia win.

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The image at the head of this post is a World War I poster, drawn by Henry Raleigh, which was printed in The Sunday Star on September 29, 1919 and mass-produced as a poster. It is in the public domain because of its age.