What should I report first? This is the second Sunday of Advent. I cannot find my most precious box of Christmas things, though I have put up the large Creche (inn, etc with lots of camels from the East}.

This afternoon I participated in the Advent/Midwinter Garden at our Waldorf nursery school. We filed into a dark and hushed room with only lyre music playing softly and one candle burning in the middle of a spiral path outlined by evergreens. We adults watched with glistening eyes as each child walked the path into the center, lit his/her candle (mounted in an apple) from the center candle, and placed it somewhere on a silver star along the spiral. I am sure the parents were a bit tense ... "Will my child know what to do? Oh, agony, her candle went out and she is going back to re-light it!" We teachers, on the other hand, apart from our eagle gaze that no-one set himself ablaze, etc.. watched each time to see how this particular child is incarnating. How does he or she move toward the light? What happens after the candle is lit? How confidently/slowly/ thoughtfully/ impetuously/ does this child bring the apple cum candle home to its star, and where on the spiral does the child place the apple? It is not that one analyzes all of this.... just noticing!

And then old friends over for supper, some of it left-overs (or carry-forwards, a useful concept from the Trinidadians). What a jolly evening. Lynn and I hardly mentio9ned politics (what a change from our customary conspiracy theories, perhaps because it all is so over the top these days) but she did Totally Agree that living in Washington is NO WAY TO LIVE.