The Grand Experiment, the village council called it. Marigold sniffed; Mayor Belfast always did tend toward the dramatic. Bunch of nonsense, in her opinion. What folk were thinking electing that bunch of nincompoops she would never know.
Six months they had wasted building the stupid things. A whole row of cottages made entirely of turf. Except the hare-brained idiots hadn’t been able to figure out how to hold up a roof made of dirt, so modern eaves of wood painted black stuck out like a sore thumb. Glass windows had been the next logical step, but only in the wooden sections. That looked well! She rolled her eyes.
The entire town had come out for the unveiling; the result had been underwhelming. Marigold really didn’t know what that sorry excuse for a mayor had expected, trying to talk up walls and floors made of dirt like they were the golden streets themselves. The tour had been a disaster from start to finish. The only person remotely interested in living in one of those fake caves was crazy old Miss Hartskell. The council had finally been forced to accept her application to recoup the cost to the town.
Since then that batty old witch had taken over the row with strays, plants, and incomprehensible handicrafts. No one bothered to argue; it wasn’t like the cottages were in demand. And even Marigold had to admit that from the main road they looked like pretty green hills nestled in an old Grove. Too bad she had to pass it on her way to work at the town hall every day.
“Rain before noon, Marigold!” Marj Hartskell waved delighted lyrics as she delivered her forecast through a cascade of tumbled curls. “Morning, Marj,” Marigold called back through the open car window. Potty old hag. “See you at tea time as usual. For goodness sake, don’t bring any wildlife!”
It was a house like every other. Brick walls, stone trimmings, wooden doors, and shingles roof. At least, that what everyone saw during the day. A nice, ordinary dwelling, if a little old-fashioned and pretentious.
The moon told a different story. Bricks and boards gleamed, reflecting the soft rays with a greenish light that could only come from glass. As the moon rose higher, the house transformed, seemingly a thing of crystal. Though glass, the faceted brick revealed nothing inside. Shadows melded with shifting light in a nocturnal dance, seen only by the rare soul unable to sleep and out for a midnight constitutional.
Such walkers avoided the gleaming property, spooked by its ghostly appearance. None of them would ever have noticed that one shadow moved differently. As far as they knew, no one had set foot in the mansion for a century except for a daily woman, hired to clean, and a caretaker who visited one day a week for maintenance. The servants were frequently plied with questions over a friendly ale at the local pub, but to no purpose.
Only in the moonlight did that independent shadow flit across windowpanes, or pass through green-hued doors of carved glass to pace restlessly on the manicured drive. Silent, it would retreat with the stars into its daily disguise, invisible, waiting.
Hera’s hands rested on her trembling knees, breath coming in deep gasps. The bowl perched on a rock nearby, but her head swam, threatening to make her black out. She knew why the Wise Ones required this journey. She did know. But the sick trying to force its way up her throat questioned.
The bowl was old, older than even the oldest Wise One. And ugly. Hera thought it looked like a rotten orange, which churned her stomach even more. It had been found long ago by a boy on the cusp of manhood, drunk from out of need and carried home out of curiosity. Not until the boy failed to age for years after did the ancestors learn its nature. And its danger.
So many had died for the bowl in those days. So many twisted by its gift, a curse to the undeserving. So those who were left set it here, to be retrieved only by one with great strength of character. At the coming of age, every boy and girl set out to climb the mountain between sun up and sun down. Once up for the bowl, once down to drink, then back up to replace the bowl. Few succeeded.
Everyone believed Hera would fail. The smallest and weakest of those born in her name year, she stood small chance at physical prowess. She smiled at the secret she knew. To use the bowl, strength of will mattered most. She stood on the mountain, where many turned back too soon.
She forced a deep, ragged breath and reached for the bowl. With the first step down her legs threatened to give way, but she took another step anyway. The hardest challenge was yet to come; few made it up the mountain, but fewer still could bring themselves to return the bowl after drinking. Only the wise ones knew the fate of those without honor. Hera would not fail. She would be a Wise One. She must be a Wise One.
Part of Christmas tradition is the giving of gifts. It has been argued that this tradition has become too commercialized, that focus on gifts detracts from what is important. I certainly saw advertisements that missed the point and pushed the idea of social status rising from gift quality or price. However, the concept of giving gifts stems from the core of God’s nature and is one of the ways humans in our limited capacity can try to reflect Him in our lives.
Gift giving is one of our favorite family traditions, and rather than allow financial restrictions to cast shadows on our joy, we decided to let it motivate us to deeper intention. Wish lists became highlights of interests and favorites. The kids used their own money saved from birthday gifts and odd jobs for family to buy things like stickers or art supplies, or used their talents to make gifts to suit the receiver’s personality. I raided my fabric stash and used outgrown clothes to make hand-sewn treasures.
It was a simpler approach, reminiscent of a time when life was simpler, but there was nothing easy about it. Handmade gifts take time. A lot of time, squeezed between the usual chores and responsibilities that don’t vanish because holidays are coming. Artwork requires both work space and space for drying paint, which in our full little house means the dining table. Sewing with scraps and old clothes means working with materials that weren’t designed for small projects or for particular work with needle and thread. It means aching eyes and fingers from hours of close work creating straight, invisible stitches. Handmade gifts make surprises difficult, as everyone is working right in front of each other.
The hard tried to take over as Christmas drew closer, raising stress levels and encouraging distractions. Tears flowed, panic attacks occurred. It’s harder for adults to remember the important things than for kids, it would seem. It was the kids who kept us grounded with their excitement for everyone to open the gifts they had made.
When the time came to wrap everything and fill stockings, the true blessings began to be revealed. What we had feared would be a sparse spread had grown to as many or more packages as usual. They were small, but so much thought and effort had gone into every single one that they seemed larger than life. On Christmas morning, stockings that had felt underfilled were received with unmitigated joy. Sticker sheets and snacks produced reactions associated with gifts of gold and incense. Paintings and purses were pored over and strutted with as if made by the world’s finest creators.
Simplicity isn’t easy; it never was. In so many ways our lives are much easier now than when life was simpler. There’s nothing wrong with easy, but sometimes having everything at our fingertips makes us a little too focused on what we can have. Love isn’t about stuff or money, it’s about what we are willing to give up or go through for someone else. Nothing we did was extraordinary; our usually easy lives made hard begin to feel burdensome, but hard carried love that would never have been seen otherwise. Sitting in their little piles of love offerings, our kids declared our recession Christmas to be the best ever. They understood better than we did the blessing of love found in hard simplicity.
No matter what other traditions people may have around the holidays, food is always a key factor. Every family has their favorite recipes, associates certain flavors and smells with family and good times. My favorite holiday memories from childhood involve baking with my grandmother. We made piles and piles of candy, cookies, and pies.
Although most of the time I rather hate the perfectionist and time-consuming nature of baking, for a few days in December I throw myself into the process with joy. My children wait impatiently for the announcement of “baking day,” and all have their special requests. This year they were all old enough to participate independently, and my thirteen-year-old has fully co-opted her particular preference: sugar cookies.
Made of little more than flour, sugar, and butter, those economical little cookies are the perfect family activity. Everyone’s fingers and noses (and probably clothes) are floured as much as the cutting board. Reindeer, trees, snowflakes, and “gingerbread men” take shape under cutters pressed by small hands. The oven is impatiently watched between turns to “cut,” and golden cookies cover every surface while voices clamor for “just one.”
Other easy recipes soon join the marching shapes. Pretzel and cracker dips splatter chocolate in remote corners. Oatmeal cookies redolent of cinnamon fill the house with their comforting aroma. Gingerbread puffs delightfully in muffin tins. Homemade eggnog whips in the mixer.
When all the beautiful food is finished, it’s time to package it up. You see, while we do enjoy eating some of our goodies ourselves, we bake with another purpose. The time spent together is our gift to each other as a family, and the results are our gift to friends. A little of everything is packed into little bags with holiday notes attached, and on the Sunday before Christmas the kids get to hand deliver every package with an excited hug and a Merry Christmas. These gifts, made in an atmosphere of love and by the labor of their own hands, unconsciously reinforce the meaning of giving in their hearts.
Only when the gifts are ready and the mess cleared away do we taste the fruits of our labors. With a holiday movie on the screen, a fire crackling in the heater, and lights twinkling on our rather Seussical tree, we savor the taste of love.
There were lights in the mist. I glanced at the sun overhead as if to reassure myself that it was in fact daylight, that the glare that squinted my eyelids reflected from the snow. Surely that’s all it was, my eyes playing tricks. It was just bright spots under the trees where the light made it through the canopy.
There was no canopy. The branches were bare except for the straight evergreens, but they stretched over summer shadows. And there were lights, dancing now in a fog that drifted like smoke. I shivered, shuddered really, but my feet wouldn’t obey my will to run. Run as fast as you can. Run away!
There were footprints on the bridge. Someone had scraped the path, and the handrails might have never seen snow, but the boards underfoot were invisible through a layer of scuffled snow and ice. Flakes puffed up and fell again as I watched, leaving new marks. My teeth chattered, and I shook my head frantically.
Gran had told me of the frost brownies. Tales for children. No serious adult would believe such fairy stories, but then again Gran had always been a bit strange. A puff of snow fell across my shoe and I stared at it without comprehension. Ice crawled up my leg, tickled my spine like sweat in the summer except in reverse. My hair crackled slightly and a loose lock fell into my face, swinging oddly. Then it giggled.
For many years our family has been extraordinarily materially blessed around the holidays. Both parents and kids felt the magic of love (perhaps parents more than kids by knowing the sources of those blessings). This year, however, few have been unaffected by economic trials, and holidays must adjust accordingly. Instead of being stressed out or upset about this fact, our family decided to embrace the situation and make a different kind of magic.
One of my favorite holiday entertainments is looking at Christmas decorations. Beautifully coiffed trees, houses bedecked with twinkling lights, and outdoor displays that inspire awe capture my imagination every year. Not so very long ago, none of the materials for those displays existed. Instead, people used plants to dye fabric and ribbon into bright colors, and wove vines and branches into garlands to turn their homes into fragrant, cheerful, peaceful wonderlands. While fake plants did exist, materials were expensive and such things were hard to find even for the wealthy.
Instead of buying more decorations this year, we decided to emulate our ancestors and make our own. The woods are full of beautiful materials that cost nothing but the time taken to gather and arrange them. Moss, pinecone, and bark become a forest mountainside. Bare twigs in a painted bottle become winter ambience. A wild grapevine becomes a perfectly twisted wreath in my husband’s skilled hands. Adding a little saved ribbon and a few well-placed bits of bright paint creates a festive air.
The best part of it all is something that can’t be found in a store or on a website, something that can’t be bought for any money. The whole family went to the woods together, kids shouting with excitement over the perfect pinecone or insisting that a brightly colored freshly fallen leaf should take center stage in our table centerpiece. Eyes and minds focus on what God created, lungs breathe in clean air beneath the trees. Imaginations soar with possibilities. Innocent joy is shared. The world around us – filled with angst, selfishness, and materialism – is shut out. Pressures of work and school and our own differences melt away for a little while and we are just together.
The street was empty, oddly so. That squirmy feeling was back between my shoulder blades, and I scowled at the too bright clouds overhead. Why on earth had Lakra sent me here? Cryptic to a fault, that one. Trustworthy? I still wasn’t sure.
I knocked on the wooden door set deep in the stone, my other hand rubbing the filigree of my sword grip. The door flew open and a wrinkled hand shoved a scroll into my chest before it slammed shut again. I scrabbled to hang onto the rolled paper, staring at the worn boards as if they might bite me at any moment. “Hello? Nice to meet you too?”
Nothing but silence answered me, and I stepped back into the street to examine the scroll. “This better be worth it!” I yelled at no one in particular as I unrolled it. Inside were two lines of angular marks and a sketch of a river basin. “Seriously? Hell runes?” I was going to kill Lakra when I saw him again. A simple quest, that’s what I told him. Just for a few golds. And he sent me for hell runes. I made a fist around the scroll, crumpling it irredeemably, and stomped back down the still empty street.
What image comes to mind when you hear the word “rock?” Now imagine a rough, mossy rock. If you were told the rock was in a forest, what would you see? Would your vision look different if you read that the rough, mossy rock protruded from the loam in the deep shadows cast by ancient oaks?
Description tends to get a bad rap these days, probably because inexperienced writers often try to describe everything in their world at once without context, forgetting that readers first need a reason to care about what they are seeing. In the process of combating such boredom, others sometimes run to the opposite extreme, insisting that descriptive modifiers should be eliminated. Effective description lies somewhere between the two extremes.
The easiest way to add descriptive words is the way we all learned them in grade school. “The fat white cat lived in the creepy old brown house.” It’s easy, and it communicates facts, but it doesn’t make me want to read more.
“Coconut lay sunning herself on the front step, her round belly white against the brown boards. Her ear flicked at the sound of slow steps on the walk, and her nose twitched. Peanut butter. It was the one called Penelope again, the one who never stayed on the sidewalk like the others.
“Coconut lazily opened one eye, the tip of her tail rising and falling like a long, slow breath. Penelope’s forehead wrinkled, and the tip of her pink tongue protruded through set teeth as she took another hesitant step forward, staring at the weathered door above Coconut’s step. The cat waited until Penelope put a hand on the splintering handrail, then yawned and lurched to a sitting position, wrapping her tail around her haunches and fixing the child with a green-eyed stare. Penelope swallowed loudly, but reached one hand toward Coconut’s head with a weak grin.
“This would never do; Coconut had an image to uphold. Creepy houses did not shelter friendly cats. She arched her back and leaped straight into the air with a yowl that set her own fur on end. Penelope jerked backwards, whimpered something unintelligible, and fled. Mission accomplished, Coconut smoothed her fur with a few well-placed licks and stretched back to full-length in the sun.”
There was nothing technically wrong with the single sentence, but only one of those descriptive modifiers really crossed over to engage the brain’s sensory interpretation. We don’t absorb true sensory information so concisely, instead collecting tidbits of information and compiling them into an impression of our surroundings. That impression then engages an emotional response, allowing us to respond appropriately (or inappropriately) to those surroundings.
The use or lack of descriptive modifiers is not a determining factor for good or bad fiction. Whether or not our descriptive language can be interpreted as sensory information is what matters. Can you picture a cat behaving the way Coconut did? Can you feel the aging wood under your fingertips? Does your pulse quicken with Penelope’s mixed reactions? Can someone live within your world?
My favorite story is the Tolkien’s _Lord of the Rings_. In that story, the ring possesses power to change and shape the world to the will of its maker, appealing to the deepest desires or fears of whoever holds it. At one point, Frodo tries to rid himself of that responsibility by offering it to the most powerful being remaining in Middle-earth, Galadriel the elf queen.
At the time, all Galadriel longed for was an end to evil in Middle-earth. The ring’s power whispered to her promises of success. All she had to do was wear it, become a goddess able to banish Sauron and shape the world with her own ideals. All would bow before her, it promised, following her command, and the world would be only good. For a moment she faltered, everything she had ever truly wanted seemingly at her fingertips. There would be no more war and suffering; life would be perfect and effortless. Easy.
The problem was that all the promises were a lie. The ring’s creator was entirely evil, and the power within the ring came from the depths of his own wicked heart. Indeed, that power could not be separated from him; it was his voice that spoke through it, and he that wielded it regardless of who held it. Galadriel’s vision could never have been accomplished, and in trying to achieve it her own heart would have been irrevocably twisted into Sauron’s image.
Galadriel’s desire was natural. She and others like her were embroiled in a war against apparently impossible odds. Fear, pain, sorrow, and death covered the world as completely as the clouds of smoke and ash belched into the sky by the enemy’s forges. Any with the courage to stand against evil found themselves beleaguered from every side.
In similar fashion, followers of Christ in the first century A.D. faced the greatest hardship they could have imagined. Choosing a life that reflected God’s character brought opposition at every turn. Confused rumors led to accusations of treason. Rejection of religious traditions drove wedges in formerly peaceful relationships, even between parents and children, husbands and wives. Refusal to follow societal customs and disapproval of pagan practices often meant businesses failed, jobs were lost, families were hungry. Punishments for standing out were often harsh, as citizenship was a privilege granted to few and without citizenship few human rights were respected.
Under such circumstances, it would have been hard to resist the urge to compromise. After all, they truly wanted to change the world into God’s image. Why not punish those who rejected Him as harshly as they had been? Why not force God’s ideals on the world instead? Why not use the tools of idolatry and materialism to become accepted back into society and make life, and teaching, easier?
The problem was that being different, living that harder life, was God’s image. Everything done to them, all the power leveraged against them, was the power and mindset of evil. Satan whispered through society just as surely as Sauron used the ring in the story. Using his tools might have felt easier, but the price would have been the destruction of everything they sought to build, would have been the loss of their very identity. Sauron could not produce anything good or beautiful because he himself was terrible. Satan cannot build anything worthwhile because he himself has rejected the source of all worth. “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” (James 1:17)
Galadriel resisted the ring’s call, saying that instead of embracing power she would diminish. God’s people who resisted society’s pressure for an easy life and earthly influence apparently experienced a similar sensation of collapse as more and more landed in prison or were executed, and those who remained became outcasts. In reality, Galadriel’s act of humility regained her true greatness, the glory that had been lost in banishment from the presence of the gods. Her banishment was ended, and she returned home to the throne that should have been hers all along. God’s people who surrender control and remain content with the battle in which they are placed will also receive a greater glory than any they could seek here on earth.
James 1:11–12 (CSB): Blessed is the one who endures trials, because when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.
The Word Worker 
