ED MARCELLE [Lead/Teaching Pastor]

#1
Conor Oberst - Conor Oberst
whole album.  i have listened to it again and again.  it is on my iphone, in my car and on my laptop.  gifted writer.  

#2
State Radio - Year of the Crow

#2.5
After being absorbed with Donavon Frankenreiter’s Recycled Recipes last year, i got turned on to others of the same mellow blues/folk/surf hybrid genre.  i especially overplay Beautiful Girls Learn Yourself (2004).  Loved it musically and lyrically.  

#3

As of later i have been listening to the 2008 release, Jakob Dylan’s  Seeing Things.  I like to put on Something Good This Way Comes to help me focus on the good and simple things.

MATTHEW MILLER [Community Extensions Pastor]

I liked a lot of music that came out in 2008 but did not find anything new to really obsess over.  My favorites ….

#1
JJ Grey and Mofro - Orange Blossom
Muscle Shoals is alive and well in the music of JJ Grey.  Most frequently listened to of 08.

#2
The Hold Steady - Stay Positive
Mix bar band, garage band and punk band and you have it.  Very satisfying, makes me smile every time.
 

#3
The Avett Brothers - The Second Gleam
Who am I not to be predictable?  My favorite band for last two years.

*Honorable Mention
The Low Anthem - Oh My God, Charlie Darwin

PHIL TAYLOR [Executive Pastor]

#1
NPR - Business Story of the Day
NPR podcasts just never get old.

#2
Elevator Music - Live from Victory Fellowship
It’s actually Mute Math, plus a couple other people from their church. Ask Scott about it, he probably knows the whole story. To my untrained ear, it sounds like what Sting would sound like if he made a worship album . . . and invited Bob Marley to fill in on a couple songs.

#3
Avett Brothers - Emotionalism
Matthew Miller has corrupted me with his hick rock obsession–my kids really like this CD as well.

*My advance prediction for 2009 favorite CD will be U2’s new album set to release in March. 

SCOTT WOMER [Worship Arts Pastor, worship leader - Slane Hill]

There were some great musical moments for me this year, including The Black Keys, Coldplay, David Crowder Band, Death Cab For Cutie, The Duhks, Flight Of The Conchords, The Glorious Unseen, Hammock, Emmylou Harris, Kaki King, Daniel Lanois, Matisyahu, Mute Math, My Brightest Diamond, My Morning Jacket, Yael Naim, The Raconteurs, She & Him, Sigur Ros, Son Lux, TV On The Radio, Keith Urban, Vampire Weekend, and Abigal Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet, but according to the rules (who made up these rules anyway?) I can only pick three. So here are the most played for 2008:

#1
Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
Bon Iver (aka. Justin Vernon) isolated himself in his father’s hunting cabin in Wisconsin and returned to civilization four months later having written and recorded this masterpiece. His slightly altered acoustic guitar and percussion tracks, along with his soothing falsetto, layered harmonies, and haunting melodies, create the perfect backdrop for a winter in upstate NY.

#2 
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
This bearded Seattle-based folk-rock band writes and performs harmony-driven songs with great melodies and a little shaped-note singing as well.

#3
Alison Krauss & Robert Plant - Raising Sand 
a. Two amazing singers
b. Producer - T-Bone Burnett
c. Guitarist - Marc Ribot
d. Drummer - Jay Bellerose 
e. Great songs
Need I say more? 

ROB KEPARUTIS [worship leader - Last Night Camping]

#1
Into The Wild - Soundtrack
Eddie Vedder is better than ever.

#2
Coldplay - Viva la Vida
How can you go wrong with some new Coldplay.

#3
Once - Soundtrack
Can’t get enough of this album. 

PATTY WOMER [worship leader - Wayfaring Stranger]

#1
Keith Urban - Love, Pain and the Whole Crazy Thing
I actually like country…who knew?!!?

#2
Over the Rhine - Trumpet Child
I just love it - the instrumentation, the vocal phrasing, the lyrical content…an amazing work of art!

#3
Yael Naim - Yael Naim
There’s nothing like trying to sing along when you don’t know Hebrew or French. I’ve made up a lot of interesting words…

DAMIAN BELTSMITH [worship leader - band forthcoming]

#1
Jon Foreman - Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer E.P.’s

 

#2
Phil Wickham - singalong

 

#3
Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends

 

*a note on the above:

Mute Math’s new record, which is due to release in the spring of 2009, would’ve made it’s way onto the list if it had been released in 2008. I almost just want to put in the second or third spot, simply from the previews of the upcoming record I have heard and the fact that I can listen to their first record an endless number of times. 

 

Traditions…traditions…

This is surely one you who are newly married or about to get married should discuss.  After all you may be trying to merge two very different family traditions as you seek to forge your new ones.  It is quite a process, mixing memories, preserving some, and creating something new.  One that is like nothing else.

I am not sure always why I kill some traditions and keep others.  I think it comes to what I liked, building a family tradition I would enjoy.  I could not just tribute my family traditions.  I did not like all of them.  It was the family tradition of my father’s family to have the aunt’s over cutting squid and eel to fry, serve in sauce and eat.  I knew squid and eel would not carry on. 

We always had stockings opened first.  That was kept.  It evolved though.  Where the stockings of my youth were filled with small crap that was not worth wrapping that my father and mother bought, these stockings are full of gifts given members of the family.  Sometimes a pin, sometimes a poem- the stockings are deposits for things that made us think of you.

The tree was always delivered by an office employee.  We would decorate it.  My mother took charge.  My father listened to Nat King Cole croon his favorite Christmas songs.  We would wrap and unwrap ornaments.  My dad sat and listened to nothing but Nat King Cole.  He watched on as the tree was lit.  It was grand.

I however, was ready to go plastic tree.  Just too much and besides, played right, I could pass it off as environmentally credible.  I could go “no tree” and make environmentalists happy in saving the tree and fundamentalists happy with doing away with a non-Christian tradition all at the same time.  But my wife has found us a tree farm that is sought so much by the heart’s of the kids, I met refusal, sheer promise of insubordination if I suggested another farm.  The confrontation as to “how could I?” almost had a touch of inquisition from Isaiah.  I recanted and we have a great tree and had a great tree getting experience.  (If not for that trip , I would not have had a grandmother asking me to smell Christmas tree stumps since her grandkids demanded a Balsam Fir and there were none.  I told her which smelled “better.”  My family decorates the tree.)  I used to put on music, now Abby does.  I used to string the lights, now Zay does.  Diane hands out ornaments.  She is the only one who seems to know their stories.  Everyone wants to have the donkey.  I assemble eggnog for others.  Though I despise the stuff myself, making has given it meaning for me.  That has become our tree tradition.

After a Christmas Eve service that can drive Daddy to distraction, we will breathe a sigh. We will light a fire with organic, longer burning, environmentally sustainable reclaimed sawdust logs, and watch Scrooge (1951).  People will head to bed.  Diane and I will wrap presents until near dawn while watching a looping sequence of A Christmas Story on television.  This tradition needs to be destroyed.  We should wrap in March.

Christmas morning we will put our final piece on the advent calendar.  That was an element Diane brought in unilaterally.  We never had an advent calendar.  It is subtle, small, full of meaning in little things.  We had a giant plastic nativity scene in our lawn.  The advent calendar has small icons placed on a board or on a shelf, one for each day of December.  A different verse and devotional thought is read with each one.   It has become part of our Christmas.  Diane and I will drink caffeine beverages and mutually apologize for being crabby  4 a.m. Christmas morning when we couldn’t find the tape.  The kids will tear into presents handed out by Dad (we took that tradition from Doc Marcelle).  There are often tears at a few of the gifts.  Once…well, I did promise not to tell that story.  Diane will cook.  The kids will be occupied with new things.  Relatives will drop in and there will be a family Christmas dinner.  I will watch it happen with my Christmas music on and my thoughts in my head and it will be a complex mix of sacred and human, and I will be blessed with every good and perfect gift that comes from the Father in heaven, mourn the gifts that we sinners miss, and remember those who made Christmas before me.

Merry Christmas, may you have full joy in creating and maintaining traditions.

I am Ed Marcelle and I approve this Christmas blog.

The image below ran as a large ad in the Metroland last thursday (12.18.08). 

From the beginning of our marriage, Frieda and I wanted to build our own holidays.  We stopped “going home for Christmas”.  Christmas now is at our house and our families rotate through. We also had to make some changes. The extension of the post card Christmas’s my Mom grew up with, a Miller family Christmas was always a pretty spectacular affair with the materialism well out of hand.  My Mom, who could give Martha Stewart a Christmas beat down, made our house look spectacular and served elegant meals (who can make Yorkshire pudding anymore?).  My brother and I left Santa Claus milk and cookies and in turn he buried us under unimaginable gifts.  Frieda grew up with four other brothers and sisters in a house where Mom and Dad were both working full time and Jesus really was “the reason for the season”.  Meals were simple and gift giving was modest.  Her Christmas traditions (including take out chinese food on Christmas Eve) are as important to her memories as the crazy, story book Christmas’s I grew up with are to me.  Combining those two traditions and building shared memories is the challenge.  I’m trying to let go of the “over the top in every way” Christmas.  Matthew and Frieda Christmas is more casual and more modest than what I grew up with.  In turn Frieda puts more effort into gifts and makes our house and the events surrounding the holidays a touch more elegant than what she grew up with.  I would not say this has been an easy process.  I honestly considered blogging about our 3rd annual no holds barred Christmas cage match.

Instead I’ll share the other tradition we have cultivated.  Typically at this time of year I do a ski waxing clinic for the staff at Paragon Athletic Goods in New York.  A couple years ago on a whim, Frieda rode the train down to meet me and we spent the rest of the day kicking around Union Square, where Paragon and a lot of other great shopping and restaurants are located.  We had fun.  We did it again the next year and the next.  This year we expanded the tradition.  I had some travel points built up with Hilton so we got a room in the city for two nights.  Frieda came and watched me do my clinic at Paragon and we spent the rest of the day around Union Square.  There is a great outdoor gift bazar with lots of fair trade and international stuff.  There is also ABC Carpet and Home which might be the most amazing retail store ever.  We ate like vikings … pastries and coffee for breakfast, amazing Thai for lunch, mohitos at “Havana Central” and then seafood for dinner.  Where else but New York can you visit (gastrointestinally at least) France, Malaysia, Cuba and San Francisco all in the same block.  We spent Saturday in Soho shopping.  We visited the new Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex, which I didn’t know existed.  Frieda had read about it in a magazine and she waited patiently as I geeked out with my little museum head phones, running around and exclaiming “look at this Frieda Johnny Cash’s boots”, “look at this Frieda Buddy Holly’s suit … he was so skinny!”.  I saw Bruce Springsteen’s first car, a 57 Chevy that he was driving around Jersey when he wrote “Born To Run”, and Joe Strummers iconic 1966 Fender Telecaster with his old set lists still taped to it … a pretty good day for a music geek.  We always stop at Crate and Barrel store in Jersey on the way home and buy a few new ornaments for our tree and these sparkly candles Frieda likes for our Christmas dinner table.

Someday we hope to extend our New York tradition to our kids.  I picture riding the train and going to see a show, museums, maybe a visit to FAO Schwarz.  When my Mom was a little girl growing up in Troy, her father always took the family to the city for a day during the holidays.  She remembers that to be pretty magical.  If we can give some kids a little Christmas magic, balanced out with an advent yearning for Jesus, we will consider that we have done well.

We extend Christmas greetings and hope your Christmas is magical and filled with the presence of Christ.

You can always keep an eye on the blog right here to find out any updates on weather issues and how they relate to any terra nova events.

Each pastor (or in this case “pastor in process”) was asked to spend some time reflecting on what makes Christmas Unique in their homes, or what their favorite holiday traditions are. Paul Gordon is in the process of becoming an elder/pastor at Terra Nova in the area of Stewardship. 

Ah, Christmas time – the time of year when holiday traditions can stuff the December calendar before we can down one glass of Stewart’s eggnog - a tradition in itself!  In the 4 holiday’s that Nicole and I have shared, it has become apparent that we love holiday traditions!  Some of these have carried down from our families and some we have developed ourselves.  So when asked to blog about a holiday tradition of ours - the task quickly became choosing which one.  Would it be that our tree is decorated with ornaments from vacations and as we decorate the tree we reminisce about past trips?  Or, perhaps that we get our Christmas trees from Bailey’s Tree Farm in Cambridge, NY every year?  The again, maybe we should blog about our annual tradition of naming our Christmas trees (rest in peace Dougie, Bedhead, and Jafar).  But there is one tradition that was a result of our hard transition from spending Christmas with our families to spending Christmas by ourselves. 

Our first Christmas together was a difficult one because we were unable to spend it with our families.  To compensate, I was trying to recreate my family environment and Nicole was trying to recreate hers.  Not surprisingly, this led to some inevitable bumps– to the point that Christmas Eve wasn’t so jolly. 

As the Eve rolled on, TBS began its annual 24-hour marathon of the best Christmas movie ever made – A Christmas Story.  With a lack of sleep and anything better to do, we watched Ralphie shot his eye out at least 4 times over with his “official Red Ryder carbine-action two-hundred-shot range model BB Gun with a compass in the stock, and this thing which tells time.” 

At about 5 A.M. after several hours of laughing at Randy the slug, and Scut the bully, we realized that for the rest of our lives – we were each others’ family.  And while we began to open stocking candy early that morning - we also resolved to watch A Christmas Story every Christmas Eve…a tradition that continues.

“Only one thing in the world could’ve dragged me away from the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window.” -said by the father in the movie The Christmas Story in reference to the infamous leg lamp.

What makes Christmas unique in the Taylor house?

I’m a big fan of Christmas decorations, lights, trees, all of it. Aimee does an amazing job of making our house look great. A few years ago, she painted an advent calendar tree on a canvas and rigged up a system with magnets so that each day the kids place another decorated magnet on the canvas. It’s pretty cool, and I keep trying to convince her to let me market them and sell them on Ebay or something. Lot’s of kids have advent calendars that spew candy or something, but very few have a home made advent calendar made by their mom. So this is definitely a highlight of the Taylor home Christmas. 

When Aimee and I got married over 10 years ago, Aimee gave me a new Christmas stocking that she made (are you sensing the theme here?). We felt like as we were creating a new home together, the stockings our parents gave us as kids needed to be put away so that we could create our own traditions. There was no way I was going to sew her a stocking like she had done for me. It would take me years, and would look like crap. So instead, I went to the mall and found the nicest classic looking stocking I could find and then raided the house looking for interesting buttons that I could sew onto it. The idea was that I would sew a button on for each Christmas we had been together. So each year, after we have finished decorating the house, I sit down with her stocking and sew another button on. It’s the only sewing I do all year long, and I normally forget how to thread a needle, but after 10 married years a few years of dating before that, this stocking is starting to fill up and as I look at all those buttons I feel like it is a tangible picture of many great years together. It’s definitely one the biggest things I look forward to at Christmas. 

One more thing that I think is pretty unique in the Taylor household . . . lots of people set up a manger scene somewhere in their house at Christmas, but at our house Mary is pregnant until Christmas Day. During the night pregnant Mary is mysteriously replaced with not-pregnant Mary and baby Jesus. I’ve never met anyone who does this.

So far, we have gone through Hope and Peace and Joy. We have to see idols in our loves and society. They are the things which eclipse the Hope and Peace God would offer. We followed Elijah on a journey from the social reform and personal experience with the power of God, only to turn from triumph and hide in fear over difficulties. We saw the idols of Peace-of control of self, of peace through a relationship, or control of a nation or planet and considered instead how God is reflected in all those areas. 

This past week, we turned our attention to to joy. What are idols of Joy for you? What things are substitutes? I see few people who live with Joy, most I know stay too busy, numb or entertained to think much about it. What is your take on joy this advent?