The heavens dance

Last week a strong solar storm, the strongest since 2005, hit earth and I was unaffected.  But those lucky enough to live in more northerly climes were able to watch the heavens dance.

You can download your own dancing heavens screen saver from the VisitFinland web site here.

And here is a lovely piece of music, Aurore Boreale, by the Finnish composer Uuno Klami.  Wikipedia asserts that Klami is the only composer to have fought in five armed conflicts.

Spongebob and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man - Presidential Elections in the U.S. and Finland: Compare and Contrast

The fantastic sideshow (think Tod Browning's Freaks ) that is the Republican primary has moved to the Sunshine State. The clear winner in South Carolina was Tubby Soft Squeeze a.k.a. Mr. Stay Puft, a well known villain from the past. If you have forgotten the evil deeds of Mr. Stay Puft you can rewatch Ghostbusters (circa 1984) or talk to any federal employee (also circa 1984). 1984 is the year Ben Jones, D-GA, filed an ethics complaint against serial adulterer Newt Gingrich. Yes, yes, Cooter pointed the finger at Newter. U.S. politics is stranger than fiction!

And what about Finland?

Finland's first round of presidential elections took place on Sunday. 7 candidates vied to fill the opening left by Tarja Halonen. Halonen has served her maximum two consecutive terms in office. Of the 7 candidates running for President of Finland, two were women. Of the remaining five male candidates, 3 had the first name Paavo. Any non Finno-phone following the election results on the Helsingin Sanomat web site had the fun of seeing that Google translate informed the world that Spongebob Squarepants had placed an impressive third, fifth, and sixth in the first round of the Finnish presidential elections. Spongebob Squarepants in Finnish is Paavo Pesusieni.

I will write more about the two finalists in a future blog. But first I have to post a short clip of Newt returning to power in Washington. Who're you going to call?

Ethereal beauty under ice

My friend Mike Cantrell posted this video from Finland on his blog and now the Washington Post has buzzed about it. I thought I would get in on the action. The video shows ice fishermen IN Lake Saarijärvi.

In Concord it is cold enough for the Republicans to flock to town, but not yet cold enough to skate on the White Park pond. If you read what Santorum and Newt think about aiding the disadvantaged you will know their hearts were frozen long before they came to the Granite State. We can only hope their hearts will thaw, but I won't hold my breath!

You are never too late!

I have been thinking about the 3 Kings for the past weeks. I sometimes feel that the 3 Kings are my kindred spirits. They were even more dilatory about Christmas than I am. Some biblical scholars speculate that the Wise Men may have arrived at the stable two years after the birth of Christ. I'm not that late, yet.

Even though the 3 Kings were late arrivals to the manger, they are still an important part of the Christmas pageant at our church. The pageant is open to any child from the youngest stars to the middle school students who are expected to handle the more taxing parts: Mary, Joseph, Gabriel. Middle school consists of that funny age when the potential Marys are all much much taller than any possible Joseph.

One Joseph candidate (tall enough middle school student) turned down the role. He informed his mother that this year he would be the Whiskey King. And you may ask where the Whiskey King fits in to the story. Well, in our church one of the 3 kings carries a Crown Royal bottle spray painted gold - hence a new hero is born: Whiskey King.

At the top of the post is a column capital from Autun Cathedral. My friend Inez told me about it. I love the fact that the 3 kings are sleeping together under a blanket and the angel is prodding them to get a move on with one long, angelic finger. "Get up sleepy heads and follow yonder star!"

According to tradition and the church calendar, the Kings will arrive at the manger on Epiphany, January 6. In Finland the Christmas holiday will last until Epiphany or Loppiainen. Here kids return to school on January 3.

I could write more about the kings. I have been to Cologne and seen their reliquary. But, I have to prepare for church. I will end with T.S. Eliot's poem about the 3 Kings:

Journey of the Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.'

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and thelack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling ofvegetation;

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

But there was no imformation, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say)satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt.I had seen birth and

death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Advent calendars to see and hear

Tomorrow will be the third Sunday in Advent. At the choir party today, we adults marveled at how quickly Christmas was coming. I remember time passing much more slowly as a child. I fell behind on the advent calendar this year. One moment it was Thanksgiving and the next...Advent!

We are recycling our advent calendar from last year, but I found some great advent calendars on the web!

Here is a wonderful on line advent calendar from the this is Finland web site. Each day has a special craft. I like the idea of making caramels from behind door no. 9.

Maybe I will make caramels while listening to the musical advent calendar presented by the Finnish Broadcasting Company, YLE. While this introductory video is all in Finnish, it is fun to watch the elf creeping around in the background. For December 6, the advent calendar has this lovely Sibelius piece.

And to drink while making Finnish crafts and listening to Finnish music: Glog of course!

I found recipes for Finnish glögi on line. I loved black current glögi when I had it at Kerttu with Keisha after language class. I am adding black current juice to my shopping list.

It is already 11.12 in Finland so feel free to listen to this!

Christmas Music and Global Warming

Everyone knows that Santa lives in Finland! Therefore, it is only fitting that I listen to Jouluradio all day. It is hard to get bored with Christmas music when it is sung in Finnish and Swedish.

It was only last year that my daughter addressed this envelope to Santa. You can see that, while she still believed in Santa, she wasn't quite buying the Finnish location. American kids have the idea of the North Pole drilled into their heads. Too many viewings of Rudolph and the reindeer bullies to quite shake the iconic image of a pole at the top of the world.

As the daughter of a geographer, I have learned to rely on maps. The map shows that it would be impossible for Santa to raise a herd of lichen eating reindeer in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, even if the polar ice cap is in tact. I recently signed an on line petition encouraging the Discovery Channel to air all the episodes of the upcoming series "Frozen Planet". Apparently, the Discovery Channel decided to show the final episode where David Attenborough studies climate change at both poles.

With a liquid North Pole, Santa must be in Finland.

But even if Santa is raising his herd of sleigh pulling reindeer in the sanity of Finland, he is not immune from global warming. It has been a mild winter in Helsinki and in Concord. Not mild enough to raise a tortoise in our house, but mild nonetheless.

Just for a change from Christmas music, you can listen to Stan Rogers sing about the Northwest Passage as you consider global warming.

You Learn Something New Every Day

I can waste hours on FaceBook reading everyone's posts and looking at the graduation pictures of kids I don't know (yes, I posted some of an important fifth grade graduation) that pop up at this time of the year. But the wonderful thing about FB is the tidbits of information that appear on my "wall". Because I liked NPR on FB, this story appeared on my FB page: Russian Women Prove it's Hip to be a Babushka. What fascinated me about this story was not the music or the charming woven birch shoes in the video, but the fact that the women are from the Udmurt republic, where the language is in the same Finno-Ugric family as Finnish.

I expected the Udmurt Republic to be somewhere near Lake Ladoga, but it is actually far to the east. Udmurtia is surprisingly distant from Finland. Like Finnish, the Udmurt written language was not developed until the 18th century*. Unlike Finnish, Udmurt is written using the Cyrillic alphabet. Another distinguishing feature of the Udmurts is the predominance of red hair. A population of gingers speaking a Finnishy language written in Cyrillic. The more I learn, the more I realize I have so much more to learn.

And what about Udmurt literature? You can friend Udmurt literature in Estonian translation on FB. I have, but since I understand less Estonian than Finnish it won't be a lively site. Maybe I can find some Udmurt literature for my Kindle. Amazon has a wide selection of translated fiction available for the Kindle. You have to search under World Literature. It is fun to have a world of World Literature within reach of your wi-fi. Sadly I could only find 3 items on Amazon with a search for Udmurt. One item is a children's folk tale and I am tempted by the I Speak Udmurt hat, but the third item does not succumb to Google translate.

Keep your ears open for news of Udmurtia. Now that I have learned that this region of Russia exists, it will suddenly be all over the papers. And, thanks to the babushkas, maybe the country will be famous for singing women in birch shoes rather than infamous as birthplace of the Kalashnikov.

*actually, written Finnish was developed earlier in a religious context. You can read more about the development of written Finnish on my blog!