Christingles

One of the Christmas traditions they have here in Britain is making Christingles!  The Children's Society first introduced christingles to The Church of England in 1968 and from then on it was one of the most popular traditions for families and church communities in Britain.

It is supposed to symbolise the Christian Faith.  Here is what all of the things that make up the Christingle symbolize:

The orange - represents the world

The red ribbon - symbolizes the love and blood of Christ

The dried fruits and sweets - symbols of god's creation

The lit candle - symbolizes Jesus, the light of the world

One of the fun things about Christingles is that you can supposedly eat it when you're done. =)  If you want to try to make a christingle it's actually pretty easy!  Here are directions to make the christingles:

1. Take an orange and fasten a piece of red tape or ribbon around the middle.
2. Cut a small cross in the top of the orange and lay a square of silver foil (75 mm/3" square) over it.
3. Place a wax candle on top of the foil and wedge it firmly into the orange (the foil catches the hot wax).
4. Load four tooth picks with raisins, marshmallows, or pretty much whatever you want and insert them around the base of the candle.

So now that you know how to make Christingles, maybe next Christmas you can bring an English tradition into your home. =)

Our Muslim Friends

This past week we had the good fortune of being invited by our Muslim friends to their community centre for dinner.  When we arrived at the centre there were about ten students ranging in age from sixteen to midd twenties who had come to eat dinner with us.  They were students of the Imam, or what we would call the paster, who volunteer at the centre.  They have many programs at the centre such as a nursery school, sport clubs, radio station, a youth centre where kinds can hang out, a study centre where kinds can study the quran, and they also publish a magazine.  The students were all very nice and we had a good time visiting with them.

Before dinner we were invited to come and watch one of their prayers.  It was very interesting.

Prayers

They have to go through the cycle of kneeling to the ground for prayer five time and they pray five different times each day.  They explained the reason they kneel to the ground during prayer is because it symbolizes that before god we are like dust.  During the prayer time women will usually be in the very back row praying or they will pray in a different room.  When I was there, there was only one women there and she was in the back row.

After the prayer we all went into the other room to eat.  The meal was very good!  The Imam's wife had prepared the meal and it was called chicken korma.  Here is a picture of kind of what it looked like:

I did not bring my camera to the meal because I wasn't sure if it would be rude or not so I did not take this picture.

During the meal we all had a lot of time to talk and learn about each other.  The Muslim students wanted to learn about us as much as we wanted to learn about them.  We found out that our religion and their religion are more similar then they are different.  We also found out we had a lot more in than we had differences.  I wish that more events like this were happening all over the world so that we could eliminate a lot of the negative thinking about Muslims and we could eliminate any negative thoughts they may have about Christians.  I think this dinner was a good start and I also think I will have to get the recipe for this delicious meal.

Bonfire Night

Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603.  Under her rule, English Catholics had been persecuted because Elizabeth was a protestant.  The Catholics hoped that the next in line for the throne, James I, would be more accepting of their religion because he had a Catholic mother.  Unfortunately for the Catholics, James turned out to be even less tolerant of the Catholics than Elizabeth.   This led to a group of 13 young men getting together to discus what they were going to do about it.  

They finally decided that violence was the only way.  Their plan was to get a bunch of gun powder and put in in the cellar of the Parliament and blow Parliament up.  By doing this they would kill the king, maybe the Prince of Wales, and the Members of Parliament who were making life difficult for the Catholics.  Today we would call this group of men terrorists or extremists because they chose violence as the solution to their problem.

As the group worked on the plot it became clear that innocent people would get killed in the attack including some people who even fought for more rights of Catholics.  Some of the people in the group started to have second thoughts.  One of them even sent a letter to one of his friends in Parliament telling him to stay away from Parliament on November 5th.  This letter reached the King and the King's forces made plans to stop the group from blowing up the Parliament.  Guy Fawkes, who was in the cellar with the gun powder when the king's men arrived, was caught and tortured.  He was then executed along with the other members of the plot.

To celebrate the foiled gun powder plot, every 5th of November people get together and light a bonfire and set off fireworks!  The bonfire will usually have an effigy of Guy Fawkes in the middle of the fire symbolizing the burning of Guy Fawkes and the other members of the gun powder plot on the stake.

I actually got invited to one of these bonfires!  It was really fun!  Here are some pictures.

You may not be able to see this very well but if you look closely, you can see the little effigies we put in the fire.

During the bonfire we all got some sparklers and played with them.  It was the second time I have ever played with sparklers!  It scared me when it almost got to the end because I didn't know what I was supposed to do. =)

After the bonfire we went up into the bell tower at the church to watch the fireworks!  This is a picture of us on the bell tower.  We could see tons of fireworks from up there!

This is a picture of me climbing up to the top of the bell tower.  We had to crawl up a lot of ladders and under a lot of bells.

These are some of the fireworks we saw!

The fireworks went on for weeks after that!