Posts from December 2010

Our Christmas Offering at The Table totaled $1,300.  The entire offering will support Safe Ground, a city-wide effort to end homelessness in Sacramento.  May you continue to reach in love as the Season of Christmas unfolds toward the new year.

Celebrate Christmas Eve at The Table. Sanctuary of Central UMC | 5265 H Street Sacramento, CA  95819

Henri Nouwen prays:  Lord, just as you fed the multitudes with the loaves and fishes, feed our hungry hearts with the goodness of your Word.  Amen. (Wisdom)

Donald Heinz writes, Never more so than at Christmas is eating an expressive act that bastes the holidays in joyful excess and draws family and friends together in festive community (Christmas: Festival of Incarnation, 136). How will you taste Christmas with family and friends this year?

Alice Waters writes, Here are a few practices I employ to help me plan a menu, think it through, and cook it.  These are critical for large gatherings and complex events , but they are useful for simple dinners, too.  Once you have decided on the menu, make a game plan.  First write out the menu and draft a shopping list.  If, when you make the shopping list, you discover that the shopping, not to mention the cooking, is too…

Donald Heinz writes, The Cratchits’ simple but uplifting meal is the heart of Dickens’s Carol.  The family comes together in want and sickness, but finds reasons to rejoice and even to toast Scrooge.  The goose was small and so was the pudding, but Tim’s blessing and mother’s worrying and the family’s gratitude made it the perfect Victorian dinner scene.  The Dickens dinner would birth public charity meals in England and the United States (Christmas: Festival of Incarnation, 135). What has…

Donald Heinz writes, Isak Dinesen’s short story and later film, Babette’s Feast, describes what is surely meant to be a consummate sacramental meal.  A refugee who had been a famous chef in Paris but now does humble housekeeping for two spinster sisters in Scandinavia, (and who are) devotees of a severe Christian sect, has won the French lottery.  With every exotic ingredient shipped in from Paris, she spends her entire winnings on the most fabulous meal imaginable, which she convinces…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V7z-O1HG5E&feature=fvst] What are your most special memories from Christmas meals in the past?  What went into the preparation?  Who gathered around the table?

This week we transition from Touching to Tasting Christmas in worship at The Table. What are Christmas meals like in your home?  What makes the meals around Christmas different from other times of the year?

Frederick Buechner writes, I hear your words.  I see your face.  I smell the rain in your hair, the coffee on your breath.  I am inside me experiencing you as you are inside you experiencing me, but the you and the I themselves, those two insiders, don’t entirely meet until something else happens. We shake hands perhaps.  We pat each other on the back.  At parting or greeting, we may even go so far as to give each other a…

Clement Moore’s “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” has become the sacred text for the American Christmas, with the power to make every home a place of magic and everyone who hears the poem an eyewitness to a primal scene.  Probably more people can recite “Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house” than know “Now it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world would be taxed”…

Donald Heinz writes, The wrapping paper industry was born in 1917, when it was called “gift dressing,” and Christmas is now unimaginable without it.  Like every great invented tradition, it is now impossible to conceive a time when society went without it, even though through much of the 19th century wrapping Christmas presents was unknown and gifts were placed in stockings, hung on the tree if small, placed in very simple boxes, wrapped in very simple paper and string, or…