The Warren & the World is Story Warren’s weekly newsletter, providing a round-up of our favorite things from around the web as well as a review of what was on our site over the past week. We’re glad you’re here!
Around the Web
Abound in Hope, Be Full of Joy
Lori Harris has a piece at Grace Table on the hope and joy of Advent through the lens of family photo day.
- For me, family picture day is exactly like physical torture with a side of mental self loathing.
It’s torture because I have to manhandle children and run my fingers through unruly curls and pry open mouths to brush teeth. The self-loathing comes into play because the goal of the day is to capture a Christmas card worthy picture while knowing full well that the one picture you will mail to your loved ones will be the one where YOU look the least chubby and the most like Mrs. Cleaver. How the rest of your family looks is of almost no consequence no matter the hours you invest in color coding everyone and brushing their teeth.
But I thought that this year, the one we’re calling the Second Great A-Wrecking, deserved a commemorative photo marking our triumphal survival.
Discover New Ways to Teach Storytelling to Your Kids
At Imagination Soup, Melissa Taylor writes of the importance of Storytelling and ways to help teach it.
- Storytelling matters. We are wired for story. It’s how we remember our world, our experiences, and our life lessons. Let’s help our children become oral storytellers and writers of stories. Games like Tall Tales help.
For kids, storytelling improves listening, builds confidence, and grows imagination.
Will I Ever Be Good Enough?
Stacy Raeoch explores the doubt that comes with Christmas.
- Decorating the house for Christmas is something our whole family looks forward to. We usually start first thing in the morning, bringing out the boxes of lights and ornaments and figurines, delighting over the sentimental treasures that will soon adorn our home. Christmas music plays as we string lights on a freshly cut tree. It’s typically a precious family time that we all treasure. But one year, in particular, someone put a damper on the fun.
A Christmas prayer for my children
Tim Counts shares a prayer for his children this Christmas.
- As I picked up my 2-year-old son out of his crib this morning, hearing him chatter in toddler-talk about the mini Christmas tree in his room, it struck me that Your Son not only came as a little baby but also grew up as a boy. The Word who became flesh learned how to form words with his mouth. How incredible. How humble. How like us and yet unlike us you are, Jesus.
Around the Warren
Is Your Family An Obstacle To Your Creativity?
S.D. Smith talks about the creativity that is making family.
- “Your family is the most potent art you’ll ever be a part of creating.”
“No story I’ll ever create will ever have an impact in the world the way my family will.”
On Being “Cultured”
Barnabas Piper explores what it means to be cultured.
- There’s a term for people well versed in art and literature: cultured. When I hear this term I tend to think of sherry sipping, ascot-wearing snobs or of v-neck t-shirt sporting, fedora-wearing, scarf adorned hipsters in thick framed glasses. But that’s not entirely fair. Literature and art build cultures. They are the expressions of a developed culture, for better and worse. They express the values a culture holds. So to be cultured, in its truest sense, is to be tapped into the current of culture. It’s more than being versed in who painted what and which books released recently. It’s not being the first to know about new musicians or to have attended a foreign film festival or three. Nor is it to be encyclopedic in your knowledge of “the classics” either.
A Christmas Gift: Reader’s Theater “Why the Chimes Rang”
Glenn McCarty has a gift for you, a Reader’s Theatre for Christmas.
- Among the many things I love about Christmas is the way it brings families together. If you’re Way Up North like I am, this coming together is usually a result of a snowstorm-imposed quarantine. In other places, it’s under other, warmer, circumstances. Man, I envy you people … Regardless, the whole houseful-of-folks experience is part and parcel – no pun intended – of the Christmas season.
Something to Do with Your Kids
Meri Cherry has insights on how to provide your children with invitations to create.
And Something to Watch
Hetty White has created a new series of videos she’s calling “Poetronica”–video poems. This first one, “Starprint,” is a lovely meditation on the incarnation.
Thank you for reading. We’re on your side.
Carolyn Clare Givens is a displaced Northerner exploring the foreign ways of the South. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with her literary cat, Lord Peter Wimsey. She's the author of The King's Messenger and Rosefire and in her free time helps run Bandersnatch Books.
You can find her at carolyncgivens.com or on Facebook or Instagram at @carolyncgivens.
You can find her at carolyncgivens.com or on Facebook or Instagram at @carolyncgivens.
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