Vol. 1, No. 11
Exploring trends in all the arts
IN THIS ISSUE
CULINARY ARTS
'Perfect' Christmas Cookies
MUSIC
Recommended Christmas Listening
EDITORIAL
Tired of Christmas?
RESOURCES
CULINARY ARTS
The 'Perfect' Christmas Cookie
Enjoying a child’s cookie creations
Yes, the season of colorful jimmies, sparkling sugars, sugar sprinkles, cinnamon drops, sanding sugar, and sugar dragées, has come upon us once again. Like fairy dust, these culinary treasures will find their way into every crevice, crack, and corner of your kitchen with predictable accuracy. But no Christmas season would be complete without a little mess that even a perfectionist can enjoy. Like chaotic seas of wrapping paper and ribbons on Christmas morning after the vigorous fray of gift opening has come to an end, Christmas cookie baking with grandkids is just one of those times the perfectionist in me must take a back seat to the far more important task of finding the joy in uncensored creativity through the eyes of a child. I discover new things and can answer the important questions, “Exactly how many silver dagrées fit on an angel’s wing and how many different decors can be accommodated on Santa’s suite before being a bit too much? (Answer: All of them – it is never too much.)
Perfectionism has its place, but Christmas cookie baking with kids is not one of them. We forget that we were all kids once, too, and needed that space to test our ideas and find our own sense of appropriateness when it came to style, limits, and boundaries. When we are young we are discovering what is too much, what is too little, what looks good, what doesn’t. We need to learn that in the process of creating, we can make some poor choices. That experience will provide a baseline for seeing improvement down the road as we mature in our creative and aesthetic considerations. After all, we might be born “perfectionists”, but we are not perfected. As perfectionists we are always striving for excellence, but true excellence only comes with growth and maturity.
The biggest problem with perfectionism as an adult is that it makes us hypersensitive to our own and others’ imperfections. This makes it hard to live with ourselves and at times, with others as well. We become easily agitated, and frustrated if we embark on a project for which we are not, at first, particularly adept. All we can see is our falling short of our standard of performance which is established in areas where we are quite proficient.
I remember as a young mother, baking Christmas cookies with my own children. I was aware that ingredients were expensive, that we could not afford to be wasteful, and that the cookies had to look presentable because we would be serving them to people. Yes, I was rather controlling, as my daughter reminded me over the years. It was partly my upbringing as I remember baking with my grandmother, who was mindful of similar issues. Having lived during the Great Depression she had a real motivation for being frugal and precise in order to avoid waste. She was very specific as to how rolling, cutting, and decorating had to be done. Every effort was pursued under an overriding consideration of survival, perhaps at the expense of fun. Joy was limited to the excellence in the product, not necessarily in the pursuit of it. When perfectionism limits our joy of exploration in the creative process, we in a sense, imprison ourselves; we become less likely to pursue a new skill, or explore the arts. If we try to impose this same sense of perfectionism on others, we sentence them to our prison as well. There is no joy in that.
Baking Christmas cookies with my grandchildren reminds me that even perfectionists can rediscover the sheer joy in occasionally removing our aesthetic restrictions so that we can appreciate again, “playing” with the elements of our craft, pushing our boundaries, looking at things with an eye to freshness, and innovation. Christmas cookies that have a thicker layer of sanding sugar than dough, and angels with wings so laden with silver dagrées that they look like armor, were fun in the making. They will still taste great even if a bit sweeter and extra crunchy. What is important is that lessons were learned in the process of having fun and next year’s cookies will be even better!
--Laura Yount
MUSIC
Recommended Christmas Listening
We normally refrain from relying on other sources, but this season abounds with multiple kinds of online and in-person music. If you are like me, it all becomes bewildering. So here is our list of Mere Beauty Christmas Selections. Pull up a chair and join us as we celebrate the first advent of Jesus Christ!
· Classic FM powered by Global Player is the UK’s around the clock music station that powerfully cuts across dividing lines—enjoy classical, jazz, cinema, choral/liturgical, crossover, and more in HD audio all the way to Boxing Day!*
· From Chanukah to New Year’s Minnesota Public Radio plays 24-hour selected repertoire from multiple sources that will delight and brighten your Christmas preparations (it includes EVERY kind of music but always the best of a genre).*
· If iheart radio floats your boat, there is a wide variety, something for all the members of your Christmas ‘family’ from Burl Ives to Nat King Cole and beyond.*
· Christmas Pastorale is the best Christmas Album, in my humble opinion –simple, directly accessible, beautifully played by Newman and Ottman, duo guitarists.*
EDITORIAL
Tired of Christmas?
It happens every year. We are minding our affairs, working, meeting, traveling, and BOOM--
it’s December. It’s not like we didn’t know it was coming, after being bombarded with Santas and trees in the stores the last 3 months. Somehow each year it creeps up quietly like a hungry leopard stalking prey. I wasn’t ready.
Load that into the first days of December along with the Advent calendar with its daily readings (if you’re inclined). Driving through the neighborhood we have the early wreaths, the holly and reindeer—this year a neighbor has a Santa doll clinging to his 2nd story terrace railing. The lights are twinkling LEDs, taunting us to join the shopping frenzy. McChristmas is here, and we need to get moving!
It was only Thanksgiving a few days ago, right? Sitting around the table with the children passing platters, we made small talk, saved room for dessert, walked around the neighborhood. Suddenly it’s Advent at the church, there are choirs singing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” with new colors up front. Where did November go?
How can we miss all the hints? Personally, I blithely ignore the commercials, the accumulating email messages beckoning me to Black Friday’s “once in a lifetime” sales. I ignore incentives to buy the ham early, to stock up on wrapping paper. I chuckle at the neighbors’ blow-up inflatable reindeer and santas. I am a McChristmas dodger.
But for the many who cannot avoid it, McChristmas consumes a major portion of our cultural energy annually. Some delay it until the day or two before. The fully committed might drive to a mall, buy a few gifts, send some cards (mostly e-cards now), or maybe make some cookies drenched with green and red icing. Others, like unwary sheep before a gathering storm, see the clouds, feel the wind, but do nothing.
It is not Ebenezer Scrooge who spoils Christmas--it is Meta, Amazon, and my credit cards.
But then…
In the credo of the mass comes the moment when Jesus is born. The text is plainly laid out. In some of the musical mass settings, it comes loudly, a declaration. In others the announcement et incarnatus est gets an entirely different treatment.
In Bach’s b Minor Mass the text enters softly, gently, even mysteriously: et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine et homo factus est. Translation "and was embodied in flesh, from the Holy Spirit, of the Virgin Mary, and was made a human being".
In the secular world incarnatus est is a trifle, a relic bypassed in a frenzied rush to make Jesus one of several ‘draws’ in our obligatory observance of religious niceties. We get to sing about his birth in some carols, to attend Christmas Eve along with everyone else in a polite pause before THE DAY.
Jesus is who?
Of course, Jesus is ‘the reason for the season’ as some churches insist but belie that sentiment as they decorate trees and plan events around the secular festivities. McChristmas and all its trappings reinforce the triumph of secularity, mediocrity, and greed in our culture.
As we learned (if we attended) in Sunday School, Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Palestine a couple of millennia ago. It’s the birth of Jesus that Christians treasure in their hearts that matters. As C. S. Lewis wrote,
We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. (from “The Weight of Glory” first published in 1949)
Just give up, you say. Those marketing hits will come anyway. We endure the soulless piped-in Mariah Carey ditties surrounding our every move. Many politely avoid manger scenes and carol sings in courtyards of churches. How quaint, really, that modern people can delight in religious niceties. Ours is a secular, post-Christian culture who long ago declawed the lion of Judah. But is there perhaps something missing?
Stop all the music. You see that manger scene in the church’s yard? Take a minute and look into the child’s eyes. You are witnessing a radical act, something that demands a sudden change of mood in Bach’s Mass (above). It is God incarnate, and it is a baby. Few things are more impactful than the face of a tiny infant. As you gaze at the child, you might say it makes sense, if you are the God of the universe, to inhabit a mere child for the sake of the world. It might even influence you, as it has many, to bathe in God’s profound, authentic love.
--Editor
RESOURCES
Newman and Ottmaan’s website*
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (free download)*
The Polar Express –ways to watch*
Tim Keller's Hidden Christmas*
*Mere Beauty receives no income from this endorsement
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A Word from Terry Yount
Executive Creator, Mere Beauty
Mere Beauty exists to encourage contemplation,
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and experience personal renewal.
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