What Might Happen When You Teach a Week of VBS

You become adept at juggling your summer schedule. When you3@home are at your nephew's wedding in Tennessee and the relatives are standing around afterward, comparing heading-back-home times, or the locals are asking how long you're sticking around, you overhear your husband explaining more than once that you're starting for home already the next morning and doing the trip all in one shot because his wife and daughter need to be home for teaching VBS on Monday morning.

The main VBS teacher that you are assisting in the Preschool Class has asked you to look after the crafts aspect of the daily lesson, and you consent because it is something you love, and not because you have all the time in the world these weeks to gather ideas and materials. So you snatch the moments that you can, for preparing five different crafts that coincide with the five Bible stories that the main teacher has selected from the ten-lesson book. This means that, while you ride in the van on the route to Tennessee, you cut out Days of Creation strips (to eventually feed through slots on paper plates like a film strip) and divide sheets of animal and flower stickers into smaller sections for kindergarteners to select with (hopefully) less reason to fight over.

You develop a special interest in Pinterest, and gratefully harvest from idea fields in which you have neither planted nor watered.

Sheets of construction paper, scissors, glue stick, markers, templates, cardstock, yarn, staples, craft demos, to-do lists, foamies (yeah, I didn't know that's what thin, rubbery sheets of craft foam are called, either), paper scraps, and metal paper fasteners accumulate on your dining toom table. You won't be able to see the entire wood of the tabletop for at least a week.

One day on the way home from Bible School you remember how barren of lunch items your fridge is becoming and you decide to swing in at Arby's for a beef-n-cheddar copout (otherwise known as combo) for yourself and one for your co-teacher daughter, who is as pleased with the decision as you are.

While traveling to and from the church, you play silly games that your five-year-old grandson instigates. "Let's tell jokes," he'll say. He'll opt to be the joker, so he can ask either his auntie or you a strange question, fully expecting a crazy response in return. Whoever answers correctly (according to him) gets to be the joker next. "Grandma," he might say, "What did the dump truck use to get rid of its load?" You guess something off the wall like "Curtains!" and he'll tell you whether you're right or wrong, or if your guess is close. (you'll probably be wrong; curtains are too far removed from pancake turners to count...forks would have been closer) The grandson's answers could end up being as entertaining as his joke questions. (Like the time he answered his auntie's question "Why did the farmer plant eggs in his field?" with "Because his chickens couldn't plant them!")

During snack time at Bible School, you look around the circle of preschoolers licking melty popsicles and you do the grandma thing of providing wet wipes and hope that no one catches on that the real reason you vounteer for Clean-up Duty is not having to participate in any recess activities. In other words, you don't need to creak your knobby knees up and down in Duck, Duck, Goose, sneak and dart around the building in Peek Around the Corner, or outrace runners in a dizzying circle of preschoolers in Too Late For Supper.

Watching the children experiencing VBS reminds you of your own student days at Summer Bible School. Lining up in rows according to age and grade outside the front doors of a little white church tucked among the pines and birches of Northwoods Beach. Filing inside (bare feet across the scratchy entry mat) while singing "Come to Bible School" and sitting on the wooden benches of the auditorium for assembly, hoping the leader has something in a brown paper bag he's going to use for an illustration. Listening with anticipation to the superintendent's announcement of the attendance number and offering amount and getting so excited when it's higher than the day before. Adoring your teacher, especially the one who remembered you and your twin's birthday that week and brought in a homemade treat to celebrate, each student in the class receiving a large cookie with his/her name written on top in blue frosting. Fifty children belting out favorite songs and memory verses during whole-school practice for the program given to parents and friends on the last Friday night of Bible School. 

You notice that the various personalities exhibited by the youngsters in craft class are not all that different from those you might find in a group of adults, really. There's the kindergartener who amasses ridges of glue on the page but then begs to go wash her hands because she can't stand the excess stickiness on her fingers. And the precise chap who takes longer than all the rest to write his name because he's putting curlicues on the tails of his initials. There's also the one who can multi-task already at five years old - humming a tune while coloring his baby basket for Moses a startling blue. (Do you know what song that is? he stops the humming to ask his teacher, and supplies the answer when she doesn't know: "What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor?")

During assembly, you get a certain lump in your throat at hearing a chorus of young voices earnestly singing "I am a Christian and my name is Pilgrim; I'm on a journey but I'm not alone..." and reciting the week's memory verse, "He looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." (Hebrews 11:10) That certain feeling, probably brought on by wonder overload, comes also when you see a student allowing another classmate to go first or sharing a coveted marker, or when you watch staff members going out of their way to entertain a student with special needs. 

Throughout the whole week of VBS, you get reminders, both large and small, of how truly awesome our God is. 

What are your memories of attending (or teaching) VBS?

  

Christmas Casserole of Memories

Reflection is an important exercise in the slowing down theme. In the last few days I have thought back to some Christmas impressions and memories from my childhood. 

One thing I remember is Christmas candy. At Christmas time, Mom liked to buy a tin of Fanny Farmer candy to share around. It could take me a long time to decide on the one or two pieces I was allowed to pick during my turn. Such an array of colors, shapes, textures, and flavors to choose from! Would it be a hard, narrow bone-shaped one with a filling of soft sweet marrow? A big section of multi-colored bands ribboned into perfect interlocking waves? Or a tiny pink pillow of fruity tang? Maybe a striped minty oval? I'd hope it wouldn't cut my tongue in its sharp grooves if I wasn't careful enough in my sucking it down from big to little!

I asked my brother recently if he remembered The Choosing from the candy tin. Oh yes, he did remember reaching into that "casserole" of candy. 

Mom also liked making her own Christmas candy and cookies. It was the one time of year when she (or we) used her cookie press and made many tiny shortbreads in the form of trees, camels, stars, and hearts. Sometimes the dough was colored, and sometimes the plain cookies got colored with sugar or sprinkles on top. Some years she made raisin-filled cookies, which were two rolled out cookie dough layers baked together with a raisin mixture between. The top cookie often had a cut-out "window" in it that allowed the dark filling to show through nicely. We thought it was great stuff to be allowed putting the raisins through the hand-cranked meat grinder for the filling.  

Mom was often into a new hobby or craft around Christmas time. I remember her plastic canvas poinsettias, fine crocheted and starched snowflakes, and latch art creations. She'd love to learn a new art, talk about it to anyone she met, teach her daughters to do it, and/or gift it to someone. The photo at the beginning of this post depicts such a case. That particular Christmas, she enthusiastically roped us girls into making baskets out of fabric-covered ice cream buckets. My dad and brothers pretended the finished products were more like upside-down frilly pioneer bonnets! 

I also have fond memories of Christmas caroling. We'd meet at the church, having bundled up really well against the frigid Wisconsin cold of a December night. After getting put into groups for caroling in certain places like Northwoods Beach, or Stone Lake or Peninsula Road, our designated group would pile into warmed-up vehicles and head out for our first stop. We'd traipse through a snowy yard and crowd up to the house beside an cracked-open window or door and begin singing to the elderly people inside. After a few carols, we'd wind up with We Wish You a Blessed Christmas, including "Good tidings we bring to you and your king..." (well, for all we knew, their kin actually was royalty) and the people would give us their teary-eyed gratitude and sometimes a package of chocolates. At the end of caroling, when our toes and fingers were past feeling and our hearts were full feeling, we went back to the church or some church family's house and had hot chocolate and other goodies.

Christmas programs at school were always a big deal, too. We might have tried keeping our special singing or speaking parts a secret from Mom and Dad, but I'm sure they ended up finding out much of what was ahead during our times of "going through the whole program" at home. After the program proper was over, the parents would come down to the school room in the church basement and view the art work we students had done on the chalkboards, and sometimes there was a gift exchange among the students and sometimes a pinata, and always there were bags of treats passed out to the children - oranges, candies, nuts and popcorn balls. Always it was one noisy, exciting affair. 

I also remember getting sick around Christmas time. I think two Christmases in a row, I missed out on the fun program night because I had strep throat. One of those times, my twin was sick too, so I guess we could at least stay home and commiserate together. 

In our family, we always got some sort of gift for Christmas. In the lean years, it was one item that we children were supposed to share, such as a sled. Often our gifts were books or crafts, something to occupy our minds and hands. Later on, as we children got older, we started doing a gift exchange among family members. I think back then there was more emphasis put on homemade gifts than what there is now. It was tradition for us to have the Christmas story before the opening of gifts. Dad would read the account from Matthew or Luke. In my mind, the Christmas story never took so long to get through as then.

I'm curious - what are some memories in your Christmas casserole?

Last Post's Childhood Memories

Last year, my blog posts all had two features in common. At the end of each post, I included a section called "This Post's Quotable" and one named "This Post's Childhood Memory." My most recent blog post, the only one I have done so far this year, did not include those features. That was on purpose - I don't plan to add them to the posts I do in 2020. They were fun and good in serving their purpose while they were here, but now they are there, and there they will remain - lounging or romping about, as the case may be, in back issues.

In farewell to those features, this post will be a small collection of childhood memories, some from me and a few from some of my sibs, as well as from an author I discovered recently.

~ Me: I remember wearing plastic bread bags on my stockinged (or tightsed, or snowpantsed) feet inside my winter boots, to help keep my feet dry while I played or worked outside in deep snow. I'd turn the bags inside-out so I wouldn't get bread crumbs on my socks. The bags helped provide a waterproof barrier against melting snow inside my boots, at least until the bags got holes in them...

~ Troy: I remember learning some reading skills before school at the urging of you and Anni, perhaps you more than her. My memory is of struggling with the short e sound and getting it confused with the short a sound.  I think you were patient. (Thanks for that strong vote of confidence, there, Bro.)

~ Faye: During the time leading up to one of my childhood birthdays, I told Mom that I wasn’t going to sit on her lap anymore whenever I turned whatever age it was (seven I believe), thinking I was too old/big.  When the birthday arrived, I received a book as a present.  Mom told me she’d read this book to me if I sat on her lap.  I didn’t remember my earlier declaration and agreed to the deal.  Mom did remember however, and enjoyed the fun of luring me onto her lap in spite of me trying to grow up. And now I enjoy the memory of the love and humor. 

~ Me: Many times, in reading Full Moon, Half a Heart (one of the children's books I mentioned in my previous blog post), I was transported right back to my childhood days because of the author's superb description of life in Wisconsin. One of those times was when the main character in the book was introduced to the dairy barn. When I read that part, I recalled with startling clarity all the sights, sounds, and smells of "going to the barn" when I was at my school friends Monica and Michele's place or staying with my cousins on the Kauffman side. I'm going to steal author Vila Gingerich's words here, because I can't think of a better way to describe my childhood memories of that scene:
"We stood in a sort of entry, the walls made of whitewashed concrete...a room bedecked with cobwebs and dust. In it stood a wheelbarrow, loaded with what looked like dark green sawdust...more sounds came from ahead, where a doorway wide enough to drive a small car through led into the main part of the barn. A rhythmic sucking sound echoed through the building. Scooping and banging rang out now and then. Beneath it all ran strangely muffled noises, as though a giant animal shuffled its feet and munched on lettuce...rows of cows filled the barn. Shiny pipes ran above their heads, and milking machines chuff-chuffed a rhythm...cows munched hay, their jaws moving steadily, feet shifting and stomping away flies..."

~ Annette (aka Anni): Mom occasionally purchased Chef Boy-ar-dee pizza kits, likely when they were sale items at Co-op or Simmon’s grocery store. It was great fun to help her make pizza out of a box for supper. We dumped the bag of dough mix into a stainless steel mixing bowl, added water, and stirred till the wad of pizza dough chased the fork in circles. After the dough was patted and coaxed out to the corners of a cookie sheet, we opened the small green tin can of tomato sauce with a manual can-opener—carefully!—and spread an ultra-thin layer of sauce on the dough. Next we snipped open the tiny packet of herbs, smelling predominantly of oregano, to sprinkle over the sauce. Mom had a skillet of fried hamburger waiting on the stove, perfect for snitching a mouthful of salty oniony goodness before scattering the meat chunks over the pizza. The last little packet contained parmesan cheese to sparsely coat the meat layer, and finally the pizza was ready to slide into the oven to bake just in time for a special supper.

~ Me: This past weekend, we visited Kayleen and Carlin in their home in Guys Mills, PA. One of the many fun things we did with them was to hike through a snowy forest in the Erie Wildlife Refuge. When I saw a "crop" of tiny little evergreens poking through the melty snow ground cover, I was immediately taken back to the woods at the Peninsula Rd White House where we lived for much of my growing up years. The woods had many fascinating features, such as the Princess Pines that popped up their petite selves in pretty patches on the forest floor.  

Perhaps reading these memories has stirred up some childhood memories of your own. Feel free to add them to this collection by including them in the comments section.