Vonnahme family blog

The other day, eating pad thai and halibut curry with garden peas and cauliflower, this idea:

1. Grow a row of Thai Basil (Mammoth basil may be close enough)
2. Make it into pesto, using palm or sesame oil
3. Freeze it in ice cube trays and bag it
4. Add cubes to yummy Thai dishes all winter!

As part of doing the family musical number on Christmas Eve, I typeset our own sheet music for the first time ever, using the cool free tool GNU Lilypond.

So, without further ado, here is the sheet music, including lyrics and guitar chords, in PDF format and in the Lilypond markup language, in case anyone out there has a use for it.

I should also give credit to Sufjan Stevens for recording the song on a weird kids album from Paper Bag Records and thereby introducing me to it.

I love the lyrics. In the middle of a setting where humans in Rome and Jerusalem were acting like the human-devouring empire-beasts of Daniel’s prophecies, we have beasts of the stable, receiving the (later traditional) gift of speech on Christmas Eve and becoming more humanlike in worship around the newborn Jesus. The Messiah’s birth is the beginning of the New Creation, in which the first creation will eventually be fully redeemed and restored.

This is a couple months old, but still worth posting. Background: “chupa” (lit. “suck”) is the Latin American word used for “pacifier”, and it’s in our family’s vocabulary by way of our friend Terry Tuggy.

And then, out a LONG way from the Earth, is that one planet. It has a RING on it, and it looks like a chupa. That planet is called Chupiter.

—Lily

We played and sang the traditional carol “The Friendly Beasts” at our church’s Christmas Eve service, and we hope you enjoy this video (3′24, 7.5 Mb).

This is from last week when we were in Oregon:

Now. I’ll be the princess, you’ll be the unicorn, and Beren will be the knight. There will be a dragon, and Beren will have a BIG sled. And when the dragon comes he will HIT him with the sled and he will sleigh him…

—Lily