Christmas Round-Up

Since I haven't had time to blog much lately, I thought I'd do a round-up of some of my favorite blog posts from Christmases past... the good kind... not the Scrooge kind.

How about a nice big cheesy "Merry Christmas" smile from me to you?

First, always, is the requisite annual watching of Little Joshy, Cousin Audrey, and Maddie Mae telling the Christmas story. If you've never seen it, you'll love it. If you've seen it before, you'll love it all over again.

Last year, I was confused by the wording "The Lord is come" in the song Joy to the World, so I did some research and learned some really cool stuff. Who knew grammar could be so theologically packed?

If you're still looking for some good Christmas music for tonight or tomorrow, check out all of the awesome free (legal!) Christmas music on noisetrade.com. I bet 3/4 of our Christmas music collection has come from there.

You can enjoy watching my advanced English class from the school in Moldova singing Silent Night in English, Romanian, and Russian. I miss them so much.

And lastly, if you want some free last minute photo ornaments, take a look at how I made these festive ones last year.

Merry Christmas and God bless!

Merry Christmas from the Hutchenses!

Here's a picture of our family on Christmas Eve:

 Oh wait... let's try that again:

 Okay.  Maybe this one:

 Definitely not that one.  How about this:

Okay, one last try:

Good enough!  Merry Christmas!

A Christmas in Need of a Savior

I was thinking this morning that I kind of felt guilty for not blogging something meaningful about Christmas yet.  I mean, aren't Christian bloggers supposed to write something grand and spiritual about the celebration of our Lord's birth?

This led me to thinking about how I recently unsubscribed to a popular Christian author's blog.  Not because it's not good.  It's great, actually.  She always has such beautiful, poetic posts that are deep and insightful.  And I know that it's supposed to be inspiring, but when I read it something (the devil?) always makes me feel guilty for not having the same deep, poetic thoughts about God every day.

Have I mentioned that we actually did about 1/3 of the advent devotionals that we'd planned to do this year?  So much for those picturesque visions I'd had of the perfect missionary family gathered around the advent wreath every night.

We also all three have colds right now.  It's hard to meditate on the birth of Christ when you are walking around in a snotty, congested haze and just trying to placate a snotty, hacking toddler with as little energy as possible. (Which yesterday meant that he watched Veggie Tales and Cars all day... one day won't hurt him, right?)

Then, as I was reading and praying this morning, it was like God showed me that this is exactly why Christ was born-- because we're not perfect.

We celebrate Christ's birth not to show God how perfect we are, but because God, in his mercy, sent his Son to be born as a precious little baby and to grow into a perfect man who took on our imperfection and the consequence for it--death.  He died and rose again, proving that he has power even over death.

And now (because God opened my eyes to this truth and I not only believe that it is true, but I also turned from my sin and committed my whole self and life to following him), when God looks at me, he doesn't see my imperfection and sin-- he only sees Christ's perfect life.

THAT is what all of this is about.  It's not about how good of a dinner I can cook, or how faithfully we light the advent wreath, or how many awesome Christmas crafts I can make, or how poetic my blog posts are.  It's about a Savior who was born to redeem us from our imperfection.  And I'll take that Savior over all of the other stuff.

The Nativity Story: A Video from Little Joshie!

Of course, as Christmas approaches, I am once again pleased to re-post this very special retelling of the Christmas story, directed by and starring Little Joshie (aka my husband at age 4.5), and also starring Cousin Audrey and the late Maddie Mae the Boxer:

Free Photo Christmas Ornaments

Living so far away from our families, I try to incorporate pictures of them whenever I can.  One way that I'm doing that this Christmas is by making ornaments with their pictures and names on them.  I'm sure that there are more sophisticated ways of making photo ornaments, but I like to do things the cheap and easy way whenever I can.

That said, let me introduce you to the grandparents:

For the shapes, I used the newly released CoffeeShop Cutouts 4, and for the patterns, I used the paper from the Happiest Season of All Digital Scrapbooking kit, both of which are totally free.  Now I just have to print them, punch holes in the top, string some yarn through them, and hang them on the tree!

Noapte Preasfintita, Tihaya Noch, and Silent Night

The English 3 class at our Bible Institute learned to sing "Silent Night" in English, and they wanted to wish all of you a Merry Christmas by singing it for you in three languages.  Most Moldovans speak both Romanian and Russian, and our students are learning to add English to their language repertoire.

(Apologies to the Russian speakers out there, but I had to write the Russian title phonetically in latin characters because my title font didn't understand the cyrillic characters.)

So I hope you enjoy watching these students singing "Silent Night" in Romanian, then Russian, and finally English (you can click on the link below the video to view it larger on the vimeo website):

Silent Night from Joshua Caleb Hutchens on Vimeo.

Free Christmas Music

I have to admit, this year we broke a very sacred commandment here in this house and started listening to Christmas music before Thanksgiving.  We had downloaded a bunch of awesome, free Christmas songs from Noise Trade and we just couldn't help ourselves.

Have you heard of Noise Trade?  Artists upload their own songs for you to download for free!  Most just offer a few sampler songs, but others offer entire albums.  There are new songs all the time, but some of our favorite Christmas downloads have been from High Street Hymns, So Elated, and Justin McRoberts.  On the home page, the "top downloads" tab right now is almost all Christmas music.  You can listen to full-length samples of every song, and if you decide to download it, all you do is enter your email and zip code and you will immediately receive an email with a download code.

There's really no reason not to go get yourself some new free Christmas tunes... I am actually downloading even more new music right now!

I do have to warn you that you may or may not end up with about 30 versions of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel."  You can either really enjoy that song, or pick and choose your favorites once you've downloaded all of the music you want.

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And if you are in the mood to pay a little bit for some music that is worth every penny, I have a few more recommendations for you:

Andrew Peterson has released a 10th Anniversary edition of his classic Behold the Lamb of God album. You get the original recorded version of each song, and an new live version as well.  We cannot say enough good things about this album.  The album is made to be listened to from beginning to end, tracing the entire Biblical narrative with moving songs like Passover Us, So Long Moses, and Deliver Us.  He has a clever song called Matthew's Begats, which is Jesus's genealogy as told in Matthew, and my personal favorite, Labor of Love, an extremely beautiful telling of Mary's labor.  You can buy it at the link above as a CD or digital download.

Sojourn is a church in Louisville whose members have put together a great album called, Advent Songs.  They also offer free chord sheets on their website for all of the songs.  They only offer these on CD, which you can buy at the link above.  We bought this CD a couple of years ago and have really enjoyed it.  The songs don't sound "Christmasy," so they are a refreshing way to meditate on the advent of Christ.

Lastly, several of the Indelible Grace artists are featured in Your King Has Come, which is available as a CD, entire album download, or you can listen to all of the songs, pick the ones you like, and just download those individually.  If you don't buy any other music this Christmas, at least buy the first track, Come Thou Long Expected Jesus, by Derek Webb and Sandra McCracken.  You will thank me, I promise.

A Christmas Grammar Lesson: The Lord is Come?

In my excitement today over beginning to decorate for Christmas, I realized that it was now time to take down my Give Thanks banner that Jude and I made for Thanksgiving.  I was thinking about making a similar one for Christmas, and thinking about possible things it could say besides just "Merry Christmas," when I thought of using the phrase "The Lord is Come!"

Immediately, my grammar-nerd self wondered why the hymn "Joy to the World" says, "the Lord is come," rather than, "the Lord has come."

After doing some research, I found that Grammar Girl (love her) has already tackled this issue.  She said:

It actually turned out to be a pretty tough question, but I eventually discovered that the phrase the Lord is come uses an archaic form of English that was very common back in 1719 when “Joy to the World” was written by Isaac Watts. A number of references say that this construction uses the word come as an unaccusative intransitive verb (and don't worry: you don't need to remember that because it's a form that's now nearly extinct in the English language).

Okay... so what's an unaccusative intransitive verb?   Two things that GG linked to in her "Further Reading" list at the bottom of the page helped me understand.  Dictionary.die.net said:

The verb to be gives a clearer adjectival significance to the participle as expressing a state or condition of the subject, while the auxiliary have expresses simply the completion of the action signified by the verb (emphasis mine).

Huh?  English, please?   Basically, to say "the Lord is come" puts the emphasis on the state of having come and now being here, as opposed to saying, "the Lord has come," which simply puts the emphasis on the action of coming.  Do you see it?  The Lord didn't just come, he is here!

Whew.  Okay.  Let's take a quick breather before moving on.  How about a cute picture of my sweet little boy last year on his first Christmas:

Perfect.  Now, moving on.

To put this unusual phrasing into even deeper theological waters, the Wikipedia definition of an unaccusative verb says:

In linguistics, an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent; that is, it does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action of the verb.

The first part of that sentence may as well be in Greek to me, but look at the second half of the definition.    To say that "The Lord is come," is not only to emphasize that he is here, as the first definition said, but it also demonstrates that the subject-- the Lord-- did not actively initiate the coming!  And what did Jesus tell us time and time again? "As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me." (John 6:57 ESV, emphasis mine)

So, to summarize, just in case your eyes glazed over with all of the technical grammar mumbo-jumbo:

• To say, "The Lord has come," puts the emphasis on the action of coming, and implies that the Lord is the one who initiated the coming.
• But to say, "The Lord is come," puts the emphasis on the fact that he is now here, and implies that the Lord is not the one who initiated this coming, but that he was sent by the Father.

Wow!  That one little line is a lot more theologically rich than I ever realized!

To Santa or Not To Santa?

This is the question we, and many other young families I know, are asking ourselves this Christmas- should we "do" Santa or not?  There are a lot of solid Christians on both sides of this issue, and it is a personal decision for every family.

I recently found a thought-provoking article by Thabiti Anyabwile explaining why Santa is not a part of his family's Christmas.  You can read it here. I particularly like his response to this common objection:

A fair number of parents have, almost in panic, expressed concern that should there be no Santa Claus their children would not have fun at Christmas...  No doubt Christmas is fun. Even as parents, we get great delight from seeing our children's faces as they rummage through the boxes and gifts. But the implication here is that Christmas without the trappings, Christmas exclusively focused on the birth of the Savior, is boring. The argument implies that there is no anticipation associated with awaiting the celebration of Jesus' incarnation.

He also, in another article, gives some tips for parents who choose not to do Santa on how to equip their children to answer the inevitable question, "What is Santa going to bring you this year?"

One very important point that Thabiti makes for those of us who choose not to do Santa, is that it must ALL be done in a spirit of humility.  How easy would it be to look at other families who do believe in Santa and decide we are more holy than they are?  That is just not true.  I know plenty of wonderful Christians who do Santa with their children.  And I have already noticed in trying to explain why we are choosing not to do Santa, it's VERY difficult to do so without sounding self-righteous.  And honestly, even the most humble attempts will still put some people on the defensive.

To sum up the foundation of why we are not doing Santa, I quote one of Thabiti's Q&A that he gives in the second article:

Q: "What's wrong with believing in Santa?"

Ans: "Others can.  But I think it's better to believe in real things that are wonderful and beautiful, like Jesus."

ETA: I just found a really good video on youtube of John Piper preaching about the story of Santa vs. the Gospel of Jesus.  Watch it here.

Fabric Christmas Ornaments

Here are three different fabric ornament tutorials that I found on Sew, Mama, Sew.

There's an Embroidered Felt Ornament from Sunshine's Creations, a Scrap Fabric Ornament by Melissa on Flickr, and these Mitten Ornaments from disdressed: