Hands of the Angels Saturday, December 6, 10:00 a.m.
The Hands of the Angels Knitting & Handicrafts group meets on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays 10:00 a.m. in the Parish Hall Living Room. Everyone is welcome to join and if you’d like, learn how to knit. The next meeting will be Saturday December 6, 10:00 a.m. Parish Hall Living Room This meeting will be to finish up projects and set up the Parish Hall for the sale.
Music with the Angels Part 1
The Salastina Society. This group was with us three times during our 125th Anniversary celebration. They will do a new series of concerts beginning December 6 with several others throughout 2015.
Saturday, December 6, 4 p.m. -- Salastina Society. Program features guest artist Adrienne Pardee, soprano, and includes Corelli's Christmas Concerto" Opus 6 No. 8 in G minor, Selections from Canatatas by J.S. Bach, Golijov's Lúa Descolorida for soprano and string quartet, Purcell's Fantasy on One Note and the Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, BWV 1043 by J.S. Bach. Tickets $28 online, $35 at the door; $10 students. Admission for COA Parishioners is $10.00 Please visit the Salastina Music Society website for more information.
Food For Thought: Video Version
Sundays, 9:00 a.m. Science & Religion DVD
This is the last of the DVD’s. We’ll conclude with a summary of the subject and possibilities for a way forward.
Advent Event: Sunday December 7
Following the 10:15 Liturgy on Sunday December 7
Hand’s of the Angels will have knitting crafts for sale
Global Hands in Hope Uganda crafts for sale
Annual Advent Parish Potluck in the Parish Hall
Make Advent Wreaths for use at home.
Make and Decorate Christmas Cookies to be served at the Late Christmas Eve Liturgy.
The Advent Wreath
For those who don't know or who have never made or had one, The Advent Wreath is of German origin. It contains four candles, three are purple (The color of preparing, as we say to the children in the atrium) and one pink or rose. Each candle stands for one of the four weeks of the Season of Advent that precede Christmas. We have a large Advent Wreath in the Church, and there is a small one of the Prayer Table in all three Atriums.
Making your Advent Wreath is a fun activity and a way of bringing Church into the Home. You can place it on your dining room table and light the candles when you have dinner.
Why three purple and one pink you ask? That's because on the Third Sunday of Advent, the Traditional Old Testament Reading was from the prophet Isaiah where he says that "The desert shall rejoice and blossom. Like the Rose it shall blossom abundantly." That of course leads us into the Christmas Hymn "Lo How a Rose er'e Blooming." So it all goes together.
We will have wire frames that have four holders for candles and we'll have a variety of greens that you can weave into them and make something unique and personal. We'll have the candles for you as well.
We ask $10.00 for materials.
For the Potluck
Please make a dish for 5-7 people
You can sign up for the potluck by emailing back to the Church Office.
For the Cookie Making
It would be a help to know how many children would like to participate. Briony who is heading this up can know how many gingerbread figures to make and how much cookie dough to have.
Stuff to Buy
The Hands of the Angels Knitting and Handcraft Group meets the Second and Fourth Saturdays at 10:00 a.m. in the Parish Hall Living Room. They make all kinds of things. They even make baby blankets that they give to families who have a new baby. They will be selling their crafts and you are welcome to browse and buy something. You might find a good Christmas present.
The Outreach Committee will be selling crafts from Uganda which helps to support a small NGO named, Global Hands in Hope. There will also be an opportunity to contribute to the acquistion of reading books for the children at their school in Uganda.
So it's great fun. If you've been away for awhile, it's a good chance to reconnect. So mark your calendar. Email a potluck sign up. Sign up for an Advent Wreath or Cookie Making, or both!
Hope to see you there.
Outreach Committee: Mission Giving for Advent & Christmas
Church of the Angels Outreach Committee has decided to try something different this year for Christmas giving, and we invite you to join us. Each Sunday during Advent, we will have a Christmas tree on the patio. The tree is covered with paper ornaments, each bearing the name of a children’s book. We hope that you will take an ornament or two, buy the book in hard cover, and deliver it to the church on or before the Christmas Eve Service. We will carry the books forward as our offering during the Children’s Christmas Eve Service. (Please leave the book unwrapped.)
We suggest supporting either the independent children’s bookstore “Once Upon A Time” in Montrose (located at 2207 Honolulu Avenue, La Crescenta-Montrose, CA 91020 – Phone: (818) 248-9668) or Vroman’s at 695 E. Colorado Boulevard Pasadena, CA 91101 - Phone: (626) 449-5320. If you would like to shop using Amazon.com, we have created a “Wish List.” Go to www.amazon.com, and click on “Wish List” at the far right. Navigate to “Find a Wish List or Registry” in the drop down menu. Enter “Global Hands of Hope Uganda” and you will see a wish list entitled Christmas 2014. If you need help with Amazon, contact Kelly at kellylcr@gmail.com or 626-665-6142.
On December 28th, Tracy Gaestel will fly to Uganda to deliver the books to an impoverished Christian School called Suubi Children’s Center. She will offer a teaching seminar to the teachers at Suubi (teachers need only a High School diploma to teach in Uganda). The seminar will train the teachers on using children’s literature in the classroom, and will include both instruction and hands-on training. Tracy will leave the books for them to use in the coming year.
This is the Outreach Committee’s first International venture, and we are nervous and excited. The book titles have been individually selected as resources that will be good for the teachers and the students at the school. We are fortunate that Tracy will be able to provide us with a first-hand report about the school and what they are doing. The director of the school knew Tracy’s siblings and wanted Tracy to come to present to the teachers at Suubi. It seemed natural for us to send books for them to use.
Suubi has been highly successful in teaching the children in the village of Bukkeka. You can read all about the organization and their work at www.globalhandsofhope.com
Have we abandoned Hillsides? No. Many people from the Los Angeles community donate to ensure the children at Hillsides have a Merry Christmas. When we started, Hillsides had a much smaller annual budget than it does now. At this point, they have great capacity to raise the funds they need for children’s presents throughout the year.
Please contact Tracy is you have any questions. Thank you for supporting education in Africa!
Christmas Flowers and Decorations for the Church
Thank you to everyone who signed up to donate for Christmas Flowers and Decorations for the Church. There are still opportunities open for people to donate flowers for a memorial or a thank offering.
We still need:
Window Arrangements $40.00 each. Need 1
Greenery around the baptistery: $70.00 Need 1
Poinsettias $10.00 each. Need as many as we can get
We’ll have some pictures so everyone can see what they are donating.
Along with the Sign Up there will be a place to write your memorial or offering. All those will be acknowledged in the Christmas bulletins.
Emmaus Road Monday, December 8, 7:00 p.m.
Emmaus Road shifts gears and begins it’s traditional reflections on Advent. We will be reading selections from the Advent anthology Watch For the Light, something we’ve been doing for many years. The readings from the anthology will be selected by different participants. The readings will be available on the table outside Church on Sundays.
Feel free to join us. The readings are not sequential so you are more than welcome to come to any or all of the Emmaus Road gatherings
Feel free to read with us. If you are not able to join us, please feel free to pick the readings at Church and read them for yourself as a way to move through Advent and prepare for Christmas.
The readings for the First Monday in Advent will be: Be Not Afraid by Johann Christoph Arnold, The Grand Miracle, by C.S. Lewis, and Waiting For God, by Henri Nouwen.
Calendar Committee to Meet Sunday December 14, 9:00 a.m. Parish Hall
Chris Ortiz is calling for the Calendar Committee to meet to draft the Church activity Calendar for 2015. They will meet between the 7:45 and 10:15 services on Sunday, December 14. Anyone is welcome to join and help with setting the calendar for the year to come.
Music with the Angels Part 2
Saturday December 13, 6:00 p.m. & 9:00 p.m. The "Nicholas Plays”
On St. Nicholas Day (12/6) In traditional areas of Alpine Europe, families are visited by a costumed Bishop Nicholas bringing rewards to well-behaved children while the errant are threatened by a fearsome folkloric devil known as the Krampus. Over the last decade Americans have developed a fascination with this figure resulting in the establishment of costumed “Krampus runs” and events modeled on those in Europe. Tonight the artists and costume-makers of Krampus Los Angeles will perform excerpts from an original translation of a turn-of-the century Austrian “Nicholas Play” in which these figures are featured. The play, which is some ways resembles the Christmas Mummers plays of Great Britain, will be paired with the English-subtitled debut screening of the 1955 film, “Der Struwwelpeter” (“Slovenly Peter”). Based on a Victorian-era children’s book, this darkly campy film -- like the Krampus tradition -- is the product of an old-fashioned style of child-rearing the Germans call “gingerbread and whip” and tells the tales of misbehaving children and their dreadful fates. The church will also be visited by a steam-powered Krampus-driven car evocative of the period.
“St. Nicholas 1888: A Kinder-Horror Holiday” December 13, 6pm, 9pm. Tickets $20, advance online purchase highly recommended:
6pm show: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/933187.
9pm show: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/933194