Advent-ure! 12.4.22
Seasonal Miz E artistry tops the week's news... also tables & trees
Happy December, with granddaughter Miz E opening this season of many holidays with a weekend visit — kind of a textbook example of advent:
In the spirit of periodic newShrink tradition, this mostly visual Postcard edition features some of Miz E’s seasonal tableau-creations with some comments. The brief News Notebook cites a few major headlines from the week, a look at what’s ahead these next few busy weeks and at early 2023.
Definitions
Looking above at the noted origins and meanings of advent, and the similar adventure, brought some variations and nuance I found interesting. First is the slight different emphasis in meaning with the word advent — which I think many of us associate most with beginning or start. But in the original Latin, advenire, the emphasis is on coming, arriving.
My second surprise here: While in modern English they sound like versions of the same word, adventure has a different Latin root, aventura, “something about to happen.” So where advent is primarily about movement, with adventure the emphasis is on the looking forward to it:
Anticipation
Starting at top-center column in the above illustration, Carly Simon’s 1971 vintage hit song title rather nails variations of today’s theme in a word: Anticipation. And, how I wish it weren’t necessary also to note that the word and the song for many of us immediately evoke… ketchup! Heinz, a phenom that began in 1976. The ad, too, is vintage. So by now it’s impossible to order-up the song without ketchup.
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Advent by the Calendar
Pictured above across the center horizontal row, and at bottom-center, are some current versions of a long favorite holiday season tradition, advent calendars. The bottom-center one is a fairly traditional paper Catholic stained-glass window picture with numbered doors to open for a different daily seasonal image. The two in the center row — which I just bought and began with Miz E — are not our parents’ and grandparents’ idea of advent calendars! And in brilliant marketing, neither is reusable.
The one on the left, by National Geographic, is a real rock and fossil collection that comes with a specimen pouch, magnifying glass and mini cleaning brush. Each day’s surprise is a real rock or fossil to be matched to the illustrated information guide. (It’s very cool, affordable and would be even better if the rocks better matched the pictures!)
The one on the right, also affordable, is one of those many current-era LEGO creations I find mystifying in both a “how do they do that?” — and sometimes also a “why?” way. Here, each day’s door opens to a different miniature LEGO character or accessory like a popcorn cart. All, of course, under an inch and a half in size with multiple teeny pieces to assemble — and building instructions on each tiny door. I kid you not.
The grandmother-Tishie in me had this idea that I would keep one of the calendars, Miz E would take her choice of one home to Asheville, and we would text each other photos of what we had opened each day. What a silly fantasy. Of course upon opening both, she firmly preferred to take both home to do IRL. She’s kindly agreed to send me photos of her finds. I should have known both would appeal. LEGO stuff is a constant passion, plus she’s enjoying her STEAM first grade (that’s a STEM school plus A for Art.)
Speaking of which, here’s a bit of a tour of her holiday-season version of her tableau artistic creations that are ongoing thing for her and me. This month’s tableaux are growing on trees around here.
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The Raw Materials & Supplies…
The Process…
A Few of the Installations…
The chocolate cookie-gingerbread house quickly became our hilarious spoofs of “collapsing showstopper crisis” on Great British Baking Show. It wound up requiring far more hands-on-Tishie than skills available. (Somehow Miz E morphed into a ringer for Paul Hollywood…)
Looking to bottom center yes, that is the permanent and essential double-Labrador dog kennel, now decked in holiday form. (The poor artificial tree on the right really lacked and needed some preliminary re-fluffing before the weekend’s project…)
Meanwhile, on the news front…
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With a lot of attention and hope this week aimed toward Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoff election on Tuesday, to be updated next week, here are just a few other headlines from this past week:
News Notebook
Senate passes bill protecting same-sex and interracial marriages (The Washington Post)
House Democrats pick Hakeem Jeffries as leader; House votes to avert rail strike + updates (WAPO text, video, audio and live updates)
House Republicans don’t vote for majority leader until the new Congress is in session in January. Kevin McCarthy is still working to secure enough votes for the role via promises and favors to the far-right caucus of his party.
Appeals Court Scraps Special Master Review in Trump Documents Case (NYT)
The panel’s decision removed a major obstacle to the Justice Department’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of sensitive government documents.
And finally, thanks to Barbara Barnett for spotting this fun one for the journalistically inclined — from the Poynter Institute:
We asked, you answered: Here are your favorite journalism movies
We've published our own list before, but we wanted to hear from you.
Given the busy season for all of us, some weeks this month will likely have similarly abbreviated Postcard and News Update headline editions. Below are a couple of general topics on which I’m gathering thoughts and material. I would value your sending me any ideas or suggested subjects.
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Coming Soon (Likely Early 2023)
Each of these will probably be an initial themed edition and then a periodic feature when other subjects surface. Both highlight people in the news who are demonstrating particular psychological orientation, maturity, savvy and expression of all kinds.
The first I’m calling something like “the examined life.” Subjects are people, right now several of them men, who have clearly undergone significant psychological work and self-reckoning and are now sharing their experience (and wisdom) in various ways.
The other theme-focus I see as “the best psychologists, who aren’t psychologists… the best therapy, that isn’t therapy.” Here I’m interested in, and increasingly noticing, all of the ways effective healing, soul-expanding, creative growth out of chaos is happening thanks to people who aren’t psychologists, counselors, therapists. Many are journalists, authors of long nonfiction, creators and performers of fiction, theater, film, TV… even advice columnists.
Again, over time I’ll love your ideas and recommendations for subjects for these.
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Meanwhile, Ms. E’s spirit (though unfortunately not her talents) has been infectious. So I’ll leave you today with some seasonal advent and anticipation-themed fare from my own table…
Tishie-Tableau
Even as a youngster I’ve not been a rabid Disney World fan. But the child in the iconic ad captures my state of mind for every adult year of my regular cross-country CA trips for grad school. This has been a similar effect since my teens with travel, even sometimes travel other people hate. As with today’s themes, it does seem to be a combination of both the trip, and the looking forward to it.
At left is what tends to be my pervasive mental musical score this time of year: George Winston’s all-instrumental 1982 December album. The variations here on the classical with Bach, in Joy, and Pachelbel, in Kanon, for me exquisitely echo shimmering winter mornings… all year-around.
The photo at center is my small-sampling from the array of holiday ornaments that hold perennial special-favorite status for a variety of reasons. At top center is a campy-gaudy take on a VW camper (two of which my late dad substituted for his company-provided cars in the latter years of his long corporate career.) Below it there’s Miz E at Christmas 2018. Clustered on the right are from circa early 80’s newspaper-reporter years, from some of my first holiday trees in my own homes as a young single adult. A copper oyster shell with faux pearl illustrates one of my favorite nature-metaphors. At left there’s a cluster including a couple of intact real sand-dollars laced with ribbon. One of my late honorary-aunts once had an entire tree decorated with them many decades ago, in tribute to then newly developing Ocean Isle Beach. I somehow got them long ago, and these two remain. And so on… Many of these aren’t cute or pretty. When Miz E looked first at the table she immediately picked up one from the 80s with an eyeroll and said, “Well, THIS does not look Christmassy!”
At right in the illustration is my favorite (and maybe only known) joke about advent…
And at bottom center:
Finally: While Carly Simon’s is the title-tune for today’s anticipation theme, nothing captures the felt experience for me quite as marvelously as the Red Redding close to Shawshank. Know I have quoted this one pretty recently in other contexts. But here’s the full text again, honoring what for me is a favorite part of the holiday season — which, by the way, does include the Solstice’s return to longer daylight just 17 days away:
I find I’m so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.
I hope I can make it across the border.
I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.
I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.
I hope.
(Film character Red Redding The Shawshank Redemption, 1994.)
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”