Seeing stars...

The Christmas chores are extra joyful so the days have been quite long when baking and finishing the presents - decorating the cards, writing poems. Everything is almost ready now for the Christmas to begin.  One more poem left for the present hiden behind the green house..  The rhythm of our day is usually peaceful and now our steps are getting even slowlier, eyes follow a raven flying over the field to the forest and the carring of water to the sauna, hay to the sheep and firewood inside are calming routines.

Some Christmas routines make you jump up in the morning like the advent calenders for the children, we adults share a calender on the kitchen wall. The most popular suprises have been cards like "Today you get to choose the dinner" - we have had fish and chips quite often now...

On Advent Sundays we have sung a special song, one new verse every Sunday. The song tells how a candel is lit, how the Christmas is nearer every week and how the light is growing and we are waiting. And on every Sunday we light one more candel. Now we have all the four candels burning - and together eight verses sang because we sing on the both languages of our family,  in Swedish and Finnish.

And the Christmas holidays of school have begun! This year  the celebration at school was nominated to light and winter because school wanted to arrange it also to non-christian pupils. I missed the gospel and the angels but otherwise the celebration was warm and the pupils had prepared a wonderful program, decorated the festival hall and baked hundreds of ginger-bread cookies themselves.

We even got to see one of the short-films the pupils had made during this autumn at the YoBaNa -project school is attending, a lovely animation film about the sea - I hope they will soon have it at their YouTube-page. Have a look at their other films! We parents have been very proud of them...

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB6731041813CAACD&feature=plcp

What I have enjoyed most during the past days are the stars. Jupiter is very bright here, the star of Bethlehem. Orion is near the horizon on the eastern sky. It is like a puzzle when you find one it is easy to find the next one. When lifting your gaze up from the chores to the stars all the hurry seems useless and all the things undone are forgotten. Let's just breathe... Have a

Merry Christmas!


ps. If you want to find the stars, too: http://www.ursa.fi/taivaalla/tahtikartta/