Advent, My Way #20

–designed and created by Pat Rooney; do not use without permission!

Sometimes, a Christmas card is more than a simple greeting at the holiday.

Sometimes, for the maker of the card and for those who receive it, the Christmas card has a larger message of hope and healing.

This year, 2016, has been difficult for America and for Americans, especially the last couple of months. Although we are finding ways to move on, we are very aware that there is much work to be done, to rebuild trust and a sense of hope for the future, given our current reality.

Like many of us, our friend Pat Rooney was dismayed at the tone and the tactics of the recent presidential election. Pat is an artist and retired art teacher, and she used her skills to create a Christmas card that addresses her hope that we are on a path to healing, as a country composed of people who are pretty darn divided right now.

For her card, Pat combined the Buddhist practice of creating a healing mandala with Christian images of the Nativity, and added a little bit of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, from Ecclesiastes 3:3, to create a card that transcends a specific religious holiday and speaks to a shared desire to move forward, to heal, to hope.

The design is specifically inspired by Buddhist sand sculptures, those designed to be meticulously created and then washed away in water. According to Buddhist scripture, “sand mandalas transmit positive energies to the environment and to the people who view them,” and are designed to promote healing.

The interior of Pat’s card, expresses this message:

The Tibetan sand mandala is an art form constructed as a vehicle to generate compassion, realize the impermanence of reality and a social/cosmic healing of the environment.

The card serves to remind us that, no matter what religion we adhere to, or to none at all, we share a lot. We all desire security and peace of mind, we recognize impermanence and know that change is inevitable, we seek ways to stay positive, to adapt to changes, and to work with other members of our communities to find common ground and, simply, to like each other again.

It’s a time when we must make a conscious decision to choose healing.

The United States is not the only place, right now, where there’s uncertainty and discord. For many, the Christmas season of 2016 finds them in terrifying, sad, dire straits.

Wherever you live, whatever your religious beliefs, whatever wounds you might seek to heal, whether your own or your community’s or the world’s, Pat and I are sending you her mandala, as a sign of hope.

Advent, My Way #19

Christmas cards—yea or nay?

Christmas cards have never been part of my holiday regimen, not even in my Martha-Stewart-wannabe stage. I don’t make ’em, I don’t send ’em, and, predictably, I don’t get many.

I’m not even sure this is a tradition beyond the United States—for those of you in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Great Britain and other assorted locales—is the sending of cards, specifically for Christmas, a holiday practice?

There are so many variations on the theme of holiday cards and they seem to change and come in and out of fashion.

Plain cards, fancy cards, handmade cards.

Cards that include long missives about a family’s accomplishments and adventures for the year that is waning.

Cards that are little more than a photo of adorable families/children/pets dressed up in holiday finery.

I imagine Christmas card sending has dropped off in the Facebook era—we keep up with even far-flung friends so much more frequently and easily now that the holiday card may have become largely obsolete.

In spite of my disinterest in the whole “Holiday Greetings” endeavor, I love this little collection of Christmas postcards that were sent to my grandfather, “Master Willie Wright,” when he was a boy in the early 1920s. They come from as far as North Carolina and Niagara Falls to a little boy in Saranac.

I don’t know if all children received so many cards or if this was just something he loved especially. He wasn’t a sentimental man but these cards were kept and saved for his whole life.

Given the condition these cards are in, I believe he did play with them!

They please me in their vintage look and style, the few words on the back done in that lovely old penmanship.

They are a collection of pretty snowy scenes, with lots of red and white and pine and poinsettias. The messages focus on happiness and good cheer, much as today’s cards do.

I am surprised, though, that they are not at all religious in tone—not one of them features a nativity scene or mentions the “reason for the season.”

I wonder if, in another 100 years, there will exist a collection of Christmas cards from the early 21^st century. If we’ve traded the sending of cards for the evanescent greetings of social media, what gets tucked away and saved?

Where do Christmas cards fit in your holiday? Do you send them? Do you keep the ones you receive? Or is this all a thing of our past?

Loving Christmas at Home

Here’s to a perfect day of enjoying memories of Christmases past and of making new memories!