Church Christmas Card

It's that time of year again - the Church Christmas Card time of year. With Sarah being on staff now she was designated buyer of needed resources. After much work having been done on the foyer of the church we were this year restricted to a much smaller board space (we reassured Dave that we were not going to be stapling to the walls this year...)

It seems that each year we get a little bit more ambitious with our lettering, going from 'Have a heavenly Christmas' the first year to 'We have seen His star in the East and we have come to worship him' last year, to the epic lettering of 5 of our most favourite lines from carols and Christmas songs this year - 'Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given Joyful all ye nations rise, join the triumph of the skies And their hearts believed again for the peace of men Can this tiny light set a world on fire Come, bow down and worship; come let's worship the king'. After borrowing a Big Shot die cutter, cutting out the lettering took most of yesterday evening, but that was only a small part of the job - setting out the words so that they would fit nicely onto the border was a much greater challenge! We had estimated accurately, however, and the words that we had chosen fit comfortably on the available space.

We then carefully fixed garden meshing to the backing by attaching garden wire with staples to the board and then twisting it on to fix it. We made a manger for the middle of the board and attached it in the same way then finally rounded the whole thing off with some wired gold ribbon wound around the whole board. There were moments when I never believed that we would get it finished but Sarah and I are, once again, thoroughly proud of the result!

The Christmas Card

So, the finished card displayed for all to see. I wanted to wait until people had actually seen it up at church before I posted a picture of it, but here it is now!

The Amazing Christmas Card Number 2

A few weeks of creativity culminated in the second amazing giant Christmas card going up at church. Tis late now, and I'm not giving anything away yet, but here's the beginnings of a creation...

A challenge for Mike

At school each class is to make a Christmas display for the hall based on a Christmas song, it is not to be a carol. I was struggling with ideas for this one until Sarah suggested the song 'Christmas Wrapping' covered in recent years by the Spice Girls. I couldn't remember the song but began to plan how we could make wrapping paper for our display and this would fit in nicely with our ICT topic of repeating patterns. Cunning I thought. Until I went on the internet and discovered that Christmas Wrapping is the annoying song that goes 'Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, but I think I'll miss this one this year'... not exactly conducive to putting the words up in a Primary School hall I think you'll agree!! So now I'm on the search for another song about wrapping paper or present... any thoughts at all in the comment box please!!

Shaping the sofa to fit my behind

Ben was up over the weekend, he is off to Thailand this week with friends for Christmas. We had a mini 'UnChristmas', as Sophie called it, on Sunday when we swapped and opened presents. Ben got me the box set of The Vicar of Dibley, a most superb choice I thought! So I have spent much of the day shaping the sofa to fit my behind and have watched much Vicar of Dibley.

Saturday would have been UnChristmas but it was the choral society's Christmas Concert which had me in rehearsals for 3 hours on Saturday afternoon and then the concert in the evening so it was UnChrismas Eve instead. The concert was fabulous, we were singing Rutter's Gloria and were accompanied by Intrada, a brass band from Preston. The brass really made it, with tingle making crescendos and pounding Timps. When we had finished the Gloria with Rutter's resounding finale I could have sung it again straight away, I was very sad to hand my music in at the end of the evening!

Sunday morning saw music group lead the all age service at church. I had been making puppets all week of many many varieties of birds and an angel (I regretted agreeing to make the puppets when I discovered that all of the characters were birds... not easy to draw!).

In the evening I went up to Lancaster for my final visit before Christmas and went with Sarah and Kieron to the 'Guest Service' at church. It was wonderful to see the all age orchestra, and to hear them and I came away feeling very Christmassy. I also saw our angel from Monday in situ complete with lights shining on his wings to create a colourful effect, fabulous!

Angles, Angles all around

No, not my spelling error... I have been teaching the Christmas story and this is a common misspelling in the books I have marked. One child pointed out to me that her neighbour had written angles instead of angels because they'd been learning all about angles in numeracy recently and had been learning the spelling!

On another angel note, Sarah and I have returned to church to make another angel (back by popular demand!!) this time to go up in church for the Christmas services. We had to go out again to buy the resources so we had different materials to make him out of. As a result he looks much different. I can't quite decide which one I prefer.

The board, expertly put together by Dave and then backed in black.

"Look! It's as big as me!"

The finished angel.

Have a heavenly Christmas!

Please excuse a little pride on my behalf in this post today. Yesterday Sarah and I went to St Tees to create a giant Christmas card. The idea being that members of the congregation make a donation to Operation Christmas Child (the chosen charity) and then add to the giant card instead of sending many cards to lots of church members. The money spent goes to a good cause and there are far fewer cards being sent which pleases the environment.

The design

I borrowed inspiration for the design from the illustrations by Tim Jonke in Bob Hartman's book "A Night The Stars Danced For Joy" (which is also an amazing retelling of the Christmas story). The idea was for us to make a large angel, the angel Gabriel, to go in the centre of the display and then have many smaller angels for people to write their greetings on and then add to the display to create a 'heavenly host'.

The display board in the church is only quite small so we extended the display with the backing paper and then with the border. It took us an hour and a half just to put up the backing paper!! Having bought many different types of sparkly gold and silver paper and material we went to church yesterday to put it all together. We used an overhead of the initial angel design to project onto the board and then used that to draw around the various parts of the angel.
We then assembled all the parts of the angel on the floor so that we could work out where all of the different sections were going to fit together and in which order we would need to staple them to the board.Finally we attached the angel to the display. We added some schiffon type transparent gold material for the body tied together with ribbon to give it a 3D effect and added the greeting 'Have a heavenly Christmas' to complete the card. I think it is fabulous!!

Christmas shopping

Today was a day of much wandering around town. I'm not a big fan of shopping (understatement), but decided that as I am regularly unoccupied at present I might as well use my time productively and begin my Christmas shopping, normally a task reserved for the few days of panic before Christmas day. Buying earlier does have its drawbacks though - without the fear element I am more inclined to wander aimlessly without a notion of what to buy. I did make significant inroads however so came home satisfied.

I don't like the aspect of Christmas shopping whereby you have to buy something for everyone on your list... by that I mean that I don't always find something that I think someone will really love and so inevitably buy something, anything, just so that I have given them something on Christmas day. This kind of gift giving seems so wasteful. I am a big fan of alternative gifts from charities, such as a set of school books for a school child in Uganda etc. My sister bought me something similar for my birthday this year. Still, it's all very well to be bought these things, and I am sure there are people I could buy them for myself, but for most people on my gift list an alternative gift would be inappropriate. I think the whole point of giving is to find something that that person would appreciate, something personal. Buying an alternative gift for someone who would not appreciate it would be like buying a dvd that I wanted to watch and giving it to my dad... we have very different tastes in film!