In Nome, Alaska, teachers receive the same professional journals and publications as teachers in other states. But the situations they face are quite different from all the other states.
A fourth-grade teacher, a newcomer to Alaska, had just received her latest curriculum resource and was discussing with the class the suggestions for a Christmas pageant. The instruction manual read: “For the children playing Santa’s reindeer, there should be brown outfits, and passable reindeer horns could be made of bare branches, trimmed to the proper shapes and painted.”
She looked out at the barren, treeless, snow-covered landscape. “Well, children,” she sighed, “I guess we’ll have to do something else. We can’t make horns of branches because there isn’t a tree for miles.”
The children looked disappointed. Then one little boy spoke up, “We haven’t any trees, teacher,” he said. “But we do have lots of reindeer horns.”
Sometimes we have to improvise. Our shepherds wear bathrobes. We make camels out of cardboard. But sometimes we substitute so much that we overlook the real thing.
We adults do a good job of substituting as well. We are so caught up in the festivities that we have forgotten the real message of Christmas. We have let Santa Claus and bright lights and packages take the place of the Christ Child and His message of salvation and hope.
This Christmas, let’s not substitute any longer. We will still have joy and happiness, but it will come from having Christ in our hearts and not tree branches on our heads.
I have seen advertisements over the last few years for headphones that have a “noise cancellation” feature. Here’s how it works. A microphone in the headset picks up nearby noise and the built-in processor then sends a sound to the headset at an opposite frequency, thereby canceling out the original sound. When you wear these headphones you hear nothing unless you have the connected to a music source such as a radio or an MP3 player. Basically, you put them on and the noise of the world seems to disappear.We live in a world full of noise. There are tv’s and radios blaring. There are machinery sounds coming from appliances to tractors. Telephones and school bells add to the clamor. It would be nice to put on some noise cancelling headphones and find some quiet.