Monthly Archives: December 2006

For Auld Lang Syne

Roughly translated it means “times gone by” . My daughter went to a New Years party tonight and before she left I gave her a ziplock bag containing a piece of chocolate, a dollar, and a piece of wood. I had to explain the customs of Hogmanay night (the Scottish New Year) to her.

Years ago my Grandmother gave my father a piece of coal. On New Years Eve she would make him go outside right before midnight and after midnight he could come in carrying a bottle of whiskey and the coal and some coins. We’ve Americanized it some since those years but it is called “first-footing the house”. The first person through the door has to have items that symbolize prosperity, enough to eat, and heat for the home for the next year. Once, an uncle came into my Grandmother’s house before my Grandfather had a chance to “first-foot and he had nothing – that was the year the Great Depression began.

There are several ideas about the meaning of Hogmanay but the one I was taught was Holy Month and it had religious significance though it started way before Christianity came to the Scots. The early celebrations had folks dancing around fires and today they still have torch processions in some Scottish cities. It symbolizes bringing the light to the new year and leaving the darkness in the past. People often go in groups to each other’s houses “first-footing” the home and eating and drinking. Since this was done on foot it was probably a lot safer that our modern American celebrations which tend to end up with someone driving impaired.

A tour guide told me that the Celtic crosses that we see all over Scotland with the circle around the intersection originated with Saint Patrick who was trying to convert the pagans. He used the circle with the cross to impress the pagan sun and moon worshippers with the importance of the Cross.

Our tradition of making New Years resolutions comes from the Hogmanay tradition. The idea was to begin the new year with something good and leave all the bad of the past year behind. Though I don’t think haggis will ever catch on here it’s surprising to learn how many of our traditions come from people I’m proud to claim as ancestors.
The traditional New Years football games can even be traced to Scotland. In Orkney they play a game called the “ba”. At one in the afternoon Christmas day and New Years day a leather ball is thrown by a local official into a crowd of about two hundred folks divided by family loyalty into two groups, “uppies” and “doonies”. At the signal of the church chimes the leather ball is thrown and the two groups fight to move the “ba” up or down the street. I can’t imagine two hundred hungover Scots fighting over a leather ball and wouldn’t want to be in their way! Shop owners have shutters closed and cars, small children, and elderly folks stay well out of the way.

The original Auld lang Syne lyric is from a poem by Robbie Burns that contained more verses and seemed a little sadder to me though with the same general sentiments as the two verses we sing – remembering the past, and drinking a toast with friends.

I have tried and tried and can’t remember if we first-footed the house last year. Our luck wasn’t great this year so I’m making sure. My daughter will first-foot the house. A little history lesson, a tradition passed on, and a wish for my family and friends. May we all have enough next year. God bless and goodnight!

Christmas Connections

Christmas is the only holiday that can elicit such strong emotions from all of us – happy and sad. It brings out the best in folks making us want to help our fellow man. It is wrapped in the sweetness of standing next to my daughter harmonizing on Silent Night, watching little ones all wide eyed (and trying to get them to settle down after too much Christmas sugar cookies). It makes us nostalgic remembering Christmases in our past and missing loved ones who are no longer around the table for Christmas dinner. The unchurched for 364 days a year suddenly feel the urge to light a candle and sing with the congregation, and the churched help with the Christmas children’s program and special music.

Everyone from the checker at Walmart to the to the bagger at Kroger, to the bank teller has said Merry Christmas about a thousand times and come Christmas eve they go home and cook their own goodies and put their feet up and probably congratulate themselves for surviving another holiday season.

Tonight I stood in the congregation of a church I haven’t attended for some time because it is Christmas and we lost a special member not long ago. I heard tonight that another member had passed a few days ago. I felt a need to be there, to connect with people that like my family, I don’t see often but still feel a part of. That is probably the single strongest emotion that Christmas brings to all of us – a need to reconnect. Even the act of giving and receiving gifts is a part of that. For one time in the year it is socially acceptable to show that we see each other and that we mean something to each other. All the daily stuff stops. Even the act of cooking and feeding each other has meaning and special traditional foods bring back memories of times when we were with family and now are with family again even if family is now scattered. If separated by miles we connect through cards and phone calls.

We mark the passing of the years with Christmases. Christmas when the kids were little, Christmas when the grandparents were alive, the Christmas of the ice storm and the Christmas I gave birth to my son. The year Mama was here and we drug her all over town singing carols.

We celebrate the birth of Jesus who became part of the family of man so we could become part of the family of God by connecting with family each year whether they are family by blood or by friendship or just human beings. We were not blessed financially this year but we were certainly blessed through connections. We have people who love us and continually hold us up in their prayers. They continually feed us and give us gifts even though they are not always wrapped in pretty paper and ribbon. I don’t miss the paper.

Leadership

Mr. P’s Blog pointed me towards an article in USNews about leadership. I find the subject fascinating personally because while I have ideas, I don’t have leadership qualities. I am uncomfortable in the spotlight and I lack self-confidence. You would think that realizing you don’t have self-confidence would be a step in rectifying that situation but it doesn’t seem to be true in my case.

What makes someone a leader? It can’t just be self-confidence because there are plenty of folks I have met that were oozing self-confidence but lacked the things that make me want to follow someone – imagination, compassion, creativity, honor.

Of all the leaders listed in the article, the one that I found most interesting wasn’t one person, but a group – the staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

These folks who were dealing with their own personal losses due to hurricane Katrina, who had no cell phones or email to communicate with, came together no matter what their postion before the storm and kayaked, convoyed, walked and did whatever they had to to keep the paper going. They continue to do so while dealing with insurance claims, rebuilding their own homes, family members still scattered around the country and the quote at the end of the story speaks to the heart of it for me.

“Cooperation is teaching employees that they all have leadership roles to play. “Leadership is not necessarily connected to important-sounding titles,” Leadership is not necessarily a function of how smart you are. It is more correlated to impulses of courage and responsibility and accountability.”

Maybe leadership is more about people being placed into situations where their best becomes who they are.  I think leadership is also dependent upon good followers.  People have to be able to discern good leadership and be willing to give their best in whatever their position is.

We complain about our country’s leaders, our community’s leaders, and the leadership in our places of employment but if we are not willing to make the effort to be involved in every part of the process that puts these people in position and then be willing to extend support to keep them there and to keep these entities moving towards the goals that we feel are important then we lose the right to complain if those goals are not reached.

Followers are just as crucial as leaders and they have to be a partnership. I’m okay with not being a leader, but I hope I am a good follower.

Holiday Season Starts and Learning GIMP

I managed to do some Christmas shopping this weekend. The stores were crowded, too warm, and made me remember why I wish I would get an earlier start on my shopping. We went to the Christmas parade and watched the high school bands and Santa. My daughter played in one of the bands and we picked her and her friend up afterwards and took them to ring bells for the Salvation Army. Kinsey was at a debate meet and brought home two medals. I am proud of him and I am so glad that he had the opportunity to do something he enjoys and excels at and got recognition for it. Everyone needs that from time to time. The tree is up and I made a pot full of homemade soup. All in all a nice peaceful weekend. No great excitement but there is something to say for a chance to refuel every now and then.

I ran across some tutorials for GIMP which I have been trying hard to love. I have a lot of experience with PaintShop Pro and found it difficult to make the switch. I found some tutorials that walked you through the creation of a graphic step-by-step. I learn best by doing so those are my preferred kind of tutorial. I have a long way to go before I reach the level of proficiency I need for web graphics but at least I made some progress. The graphic wasn’t anything useful – just a cloth textured background and a circle that appears glassy and raised. Still it allowed me to get familiar with a few tools and it wasn’t totally ugly.

If I hadn’t had the time to refuel I wouldn’t have gotten focused enough to find the appropriate tutorial and complete it. Completing the tutorial gave me some confidence and a little excitement which will motivate me to learn more. GIMP seems to be a powerful piece of software but it lacks the community that has existed in the past for PaintShop Pro. There were groups and literally hundreds of tutorials and plenty of folks willing to share their expertise. There was something for every level from complete beginner to expert. I would like to see more of that sort of thing with GIMP. There is a community of Open Source users but they seem to be limited to people who are fairly comfortable with computers and who have that need to learn new software and the time to do it. I have seen a few books on using GIMP but walk in to any bookstore that carries computer books and you will usually find several choices for PaintShop Pro and PhotoShop and often several for different versions.

What makes one software package attract writers and usergroups while another that is just as good and often cheaper (in the case of GIMP free!) remains in the shadows by comparison? It took me a long time to get started and I know partly because I don’t like change. I wanted GIMP to act like PaintShop Pro and everytime I sat down to work with it I would end up frustrated. It wasn’t the software’s fault – it was my inability a adjust to the difference. What changed was that I found instructions that struck a familiar chord and provided a kind of “rosetta stone” that helped unlock my mental block.

In learning about GIMP I also learned something about my own learning style. Maybe when I understand GIMP a little better I can put that piece of information to good use and create some tutorials of my own.