Admission: The advent wreath here at the Side Pocket is slightly untraditional.
It should be greenery, really. But I found those cool seed pods and had to use them! The green symbolizes growth and new life, so I pretend that seed pods have the same effect (right?).
Also… the short candles. But that is what I was able to dig up last year, and I got a few sets. It works for us and our modest purposes.
This picture is a year old, but it's fairly accurate to what things look like now.
If you'd like some resources for Advent Wreath prayers, click here.
I think maybe after this year it'll be time to get a different sort of wreath going. Or at least next year maybe I can incorporate greenery along with the pods. We'll see!
I have a prayer intention for you this week, if you'd be so kind: the mother of a friend of mine (and faithful blog reader) recently suffered a brain aneurysm. Would you please take a moment to send up a prayer for Amy's mom and her whole family during this difficult time?
I met Amy several years ago when I was her RA in college. She was one of those residents who made my job a pleasure. Praying for you and your mom, Amy!
This week's links!
- US Citizens: if you had to take a test to determine your citizenship, would you pass? An interesting quiz, with perhaps some inspiration for topics to study in American history and civics.
- Are you concerned that paper is dying in this electronic age? Fear not: we will always have at least one use for it. A humorous watch recommended by Auntie Leila.
- Someone please write a novel or a movie based on this couple's story, because it is incredibly romantic! Wartime bomber hero celebrates 70 years of marriage to wife involved in Dambusters raid.
- Some cute, gnome-themed paper doll cutouts.
- From Apartment Therapy, 5 Completely Free Ways to Make your House a Home. Excepting the idea of opening your windows to let the breezes in, these all seem eminently doable during the holiday season!
Some art-related links:
- Have you heard about this fellow who has replicated the instrument Leonardo da Vinci once thought up, the viola organista? This is another article about him, and you can check out another video here.
- If anyone knows of any job openings in professional flash mobs, please let me know. Because things like this just look like so much fun: a “staged” version of Rembrandt's Guards of the Night.
- What would a conservative approach to art look like? This article contains some helpful thoughts on judging such a question: Illustrating Conservatism with Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Kinkade.
Happy Memorial of St. Ambrose, and mind you: the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception is just around the corner on Monday!
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Kathy@9peas says
We will be praying for Amy's mother, and for Amy!
The pods are actually pretty cool, I had to do a double take to realize THAT was the Advent wreath you were talking about but yep, I like it once my brain registered it, LOL.
Thanks for all the links, now I'm off to check them out! Happy Advent!
Patty says
Ours is a nontraditional Advent Wreath too. I have 3″ pillars in glass (similar idea as yours), on a round silver tray. I was having fits trying to find faux greenery that would work on the tray (flat, not ugly haha) when I happened across silver and white glittery stryrofoam balls. I was totally not thinking “must have greens”, but I did include some pine cones here and there. Hey, there's no advent wreath police, right? I will try for greens next year. I do like this setup, which is a good thing because I ordered four year's worth of candles. Do you know how hard it is to find purple and pink pillar candles in December??? As I was paying for shipping, I went for it.
_Leila says
Patty, as Rosie says, if there IS the advent wreath police, it's us! LOL
And we say, get four candles (not necessarily purple and pink, because, hard to find, often) and decorate them in a pretty, possibly not super Christmas-y way (that is, make them somehow more like your idea of Advent, not Christmas). Light them. Pray. 🙂 Optional: Singing something Advent-y.
Patty says
I usually switch the purple and pink candles for white, starting on Christmas day for the twelve days of Christmas. I wonder if I'll be able to find white pillar candles now. D'oh! Didn't think to get those! haha
Susan (DE) says
Praying for Amy's mom, for Amy, and for the whole family.
Our Advent candles are 4 whites…and a red. HARD (impossible?) to find the purple/pink around here!
Do we ever get to see another picture of your darling baby, or is that too much privacy-risk? I would love to see her as she gets older. This is meant in a humble and polite and slightly beseeching way, NOT in an obnoxious tone. 🙂
Stephanie says
Oh wow that World War II love story was just beautiful! He fell in love with the voice that guided him home and she would listen and pick his voice out over all the radio calls!!!!! Blessings for Amy 's family. I love the spread you always have for bits and pieces, such a treat 🙂 xxoo from the Last Frontier
Mrs. B. says
Prayers for your friend's family, Deirdre – it must be especially hard to have news like that this time of the year, so I'll pray that the holy season will actually bless them even more.
After having to scramble every year to find the right colors for the wreath candles, I treated myself to this: http://www.rootcandleschurch.com/advent/home-adve… – a few sets, too, so, like Rosie, I can pat myself on the back for discovering my thoughtfulness every year 🙂 They are expensive for us, but they are wonderful – they burn slowly and don't even drip! (I have ruined a couple of tablecloths with purple melted wax…) I keep a box of Ikea purple candles as replacements. My “greenery” is a cheap fake wreath from Michaels – I am a little ashamed of it when I read Leila and Rosie hunting the yard for the real stuff (and I have two big holly bushes by the front door!!), but for me it's just so much easier to deal with the fake one…
Ah, don't even mention Kinkade to my husband! It's one of his pet peeves – or maybe bete noire… or both 😉
Dixie says
You should cut two or three pieces of holly and just stick them in the fake wreath! Voila!
tacywb says
Praying for your intention!
Jane says
I'm so glad there are *more* artsy Christians out there who can continue to criticize people who like Thomas Kinkade's artwork as ignorant rubes.
I totally get that he's not one of the The Great Artists. I'm just SO tired of people perpetuating this idea that people like my mother, who LOVES his artwork, are “kitschy” or tacky.
I love the judgment. Totally awesome. Too bad it perpetuates classism.
_Leila says
Jane, are you saying that no one can make distinctions?
And is there a difference between saying the art is tacky and the person who likes it is tacky?
Are you saying that one can NOT make judgements about art? Or that there isn't an interesting point in the article?
Do you think all art expresses truth and beauty equally well? Are there criteria by which one can decide between types of art, if the answer is no?
Jane says
Of course people make distinctions, and educated, dispassionate distinctions are great.
Perhaps you are so dispassionate that if someone referred to your home decor as “tacky”, “shallow”, “artificial”, “sentimental, jingoistic, religious kitsch”, or even “revolting”, you would not see anything personal in that at all.
The conservatism of Andrew Wyeth is a very interesting and important subject– I think Gene Logsdon treated it well in his book “Agriculture, the Mother of All Arts”. Wyeth's art has a lot to say to this culture, and I don't think it needs to be held up against a disparagement of Kinkade's work to effectively make its point.
It is very fashionable among a certain community to mock Kinkade and the people who enjoy his work, mostly because he “sold out” and made a chunk of money. Maybe it was bad for his soul, I make no judgment on that. I think, though, that if his art speaks to something in a simple soul, and that simple soul feels inclined to put a print up on their wall, that to disparage that because Kinkade's art isn't good enough is snobbery.
Christian dialogue about the arts should be careful not to confuse artistic taste with sin. I think it might even be more charitable to allow that a soul that finds beauty and goodness even in art that is not Great, is a soul that is practicing finding the image of God even in smudged and dirty mirrors.
Maybe it all boils down to that I don't accept that the art of Thomas Kinkade is the worst art American culture has produced, that just because something is available at Walmart makes it trashy, and I don't like it when people refer to my mother as vulgar.
DeirdreLMLD says
Jane, it's clear that the article struck a bad chord with you on a personal level. It was not meant to upset anyone!
However, it's not really fair for you to bring this personal element into a debate as though we were insulting your mother; or even as though the author were insulting your mother. No one mentioned your mother! We don't know her! I'm sure she's a lovely person. 🙂
Longenecker is actually make an extremely specific and particular case here: about the presence or absence of the principles of conservatism in the respective bodies of art work. He's not talking about classes or communities who consume either artist's works. In fact, while the author is very hard on the artist himself, he hardly mentions Kinkade's audience (let alone throw epithets at them).
One thing that I object to is saying that this is about snobbery and classism. Longenecker praises Wyeth's work by comparing it to the kitchen sink! He's not using jargon to try to edge the average art viewer out of the discussion, which is usually the tactic of the art snob.
In fact, calling some art good and some bad (or kitsch-y) is not an act of snobbery, in my opinion. Good (or Great) art doesn't need to be and I think shouldn't be difficult to access, necessarily. If you go to a parish church in an old European city, you will find marvelous works of art there that were painted by ordinary people (extraordinary artists) for the benefit of ordinary people to use in their prayer lives. These were not reserved for the elite (although the elite did do a great service by commissioning much of this work); they were and are works that anyone and everyone has access to and can appreciate. Sometimes simple souls are the ones who are best able to discern true and good and beautiful art, like the story of the child on the subway who was the only one to pay attention to the world-reknown violinist posing as a poor busker.
If you react to a criticism of art simply by saying it's snobby, then there's no room to discuss art at all.
That being said, Longenecker doesn't give much substantial criticism of Kinkade's technique itself, and I can see why that might frustrate you.
Jane says
I apologize to you all for my tone and my reaction. When you linked the article above, I assumed that we must have shared some of the context of the article, and I realize now that that is not the case. You ladies seem to be kind and intelligent souls, which is why I was surprised to associate you with the subtext I read in the Longenecker article. Please let me explain.
I've lived all my life in a college town, and our university here has a rather popular art school. I've actually encountered anti-Kinkade arguments several times over the years, and I find them to share several mean-spirited characteristics. First of all (as you noted in your comment, Deirdre), there is little substantial treatment of Kinkade's technique. The bulk of the criticism is aimed at his commercial success, and the slightly religious element to his artwork. The subject matter is deemed as juvenile, or sentimental, or vulgar, and the people who buy his artwork are often referred to as uneducated or lowbrow (or in less polite circles as white trash).
I once invited a college friend and her boyfriend, both art majors, to my house for a weekend. They sat in my mother's living room and proceeded to viciously mock her Kinkade decorations, quoting their art professors ad nauseum. There are too many years in between for me to quote verbatim, but I stand by my assessment of the argument as classist. We agree that there is something to be said about art to which everyone has access to and can appreciate… by that standard, doesn't it make a statement that ordinary people actually wanted Kinkade in their homes? And by extension, criticizing Kinkade with such loaded terms as “bogus” and “stereotypical”, “shallow and jingoistic,” “rightly revolting,” even referring to “Americans’ lack of taste,” doesn't this make a judgment on the people who do like Kinkade's art? Can you honestly say that if someone walked into your house and used those words, that you wouldn't recoil just a little bit?
If you want to bring in the character of the artist into judging his or her work, then you'd have to rewrite the corpus of art criticism and redefine the terms. That might actually be a noble enterprise, but it's not fair to pick and choose which standards to apply to different artists. I believe Wyeth also had a mistress, for example, but since he wasn't a “born-again” Christian, his hypocrisy doesn't matter as much? Longenecker's article just doesn't compare apples and apples.
I'm curious as to what you think is the most important issue in the article. How is Longenecker's article more than a preference for neutral-tone realism over bright pastel landscape?
Carrie says
We will also be praying for Amy's mom, for Amy, and for the whole family. By the way, I love the wreath! It looks really, really pretty.
Carrie, TinaMarieInteriorDesign