Published on Dec 26, 2016

Cindy (Hiestand) Krebaum's 2016 Christmas Dinner featured Michael Kleinerman playing her grandfather Donald Innis violin.

Nancy

In this video, her Mother, Nancy Innis Hiestand tells of how her father learned to play the violine and went on to playing in silent movies, Chautauqua, and a slow boat to China.

 

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the yuletide gay
Next year all our troubles will be miles away

Once again as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Will be near to us once more

Someday soon we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

At the Day in the Village of Oak Park in 1985, when I was pastor at River Forest United Methodist Church, our United Methodist United Cluster of Oak Park and River Forest Churches had bell ringing and a young adult street theater.  This video mainly shows the bell ringing by First United Methodist Church and Euclid Churches, and part of the Young Adult Focus Group Street Theater. I'm the guy in the red tea shirt with the loud speaker, and I see there daughter Amy, and son John with Claudia.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OVpatzW7O8

This morning I heard a good sermon - and since have pondered thoughts about the messiness of shepherds, stables but divinity shines within - and also the paradox that John August Swanson pictured as beautifull but paradox expressing the messy events through which simultaneously let grace get through. 


What crossed my mind was how I've seen xrays of the picture painted on the underlying layer beneath the overlying masterpiece, and the computer generated living face on top of a skeleton's skull.  Can these bones live?

All of which got me thinking about underlying a picture of dirty shepherds, or stable, or baby refugees as would now be in Syria.  I  experimented with the Swanson drawings and some photos  off the internet.  I was shook up with  thought which came during church - of seeing the divinity in the faces we have seen so much in the Aleppo news.

In this process of experimenting these few hours, I almost stopped because the photos were so painful, so sad, so un-nerving.  But here it is.