Home for the Holidays

Hello dear friends, and merry New Year!

With the advent of this newest year in our lives, social networks and real-life conversations alike have been overflowing with memories of 2011 and hopes for 2012. And here in New Orleans, the store aisles dedicated to Christmas decorations and supplies have quickly been replaced with the purple, green, and gold of Mardi Gras. Before we get into that, though, here are a few words on the end of my 2011...

If you've read my last couple posts, you know some crazy stuff has been going on in these parts. I found myself hoping rather desperately that I could find some warm fuzzy feelings about New Orleans before she and I parted ways for Christmas. I lucked out and found those warm fuzzies in the form of caroling in Jackson Square. Hosted by a group called the Patio Planters, the event has been goin' down every Sunday-before-Christmas since 1946. Each year thousands of people (natives, transplants, and tourists alike) gather in the square just outside of St. Louis' Cathedral, reading from songbooks by candlelight, singing everything from "Good King Wenceslas" to "Feliz Navidad" with a little "Rudolph" sprinkled in. Apparently, this year, 8,000+ carolers kept us company. Local leaders both religious and secular introduced the carols and special guests. In true NOLA fashion, the Archbishop worked the crowd before his opening prayer with a: "So how 'bout those Saints? Are we going to the Super Bowl or what?!" To which the crowd replied with an assortment of cheers including the ever popular "WHO DAT!" The spirit of this town just doesn't get old. Jillian, Lauren, Ashley and I had smiles plastered across our faces the entire time (except for when I spilled hot wax on my hand...), and it was even "cold" enough for us to wear scarves! And, of course, we just had to fight the post-caroling crowds at Cafe du Monde for a few beignets and some cafe au lait. It would've been a great evening under any circumstances, but I was especially grateful to have this experience just a few days before I headed up to North Carolina. For your viewing pleasure, here are a few pictures of the occasion (none of which I actually took)...


Caroling by candlelight in Jackson Square. (That's Lauren, Jillian and Ashley.)

Excited about our songbooks. Can you say free souvenir?!

Lauren's sister Lindsay was in town to experience the NOLA holiday magic.

Just a few days after our caroling adventures, I was off to Davidson for Christmas with the family. Holidays have turned out to be an interesting thing in YAV land. Sometimes going home is a welcomed break from a stressful placement, and a chance to reconnect with friends, family, and the local coffee shop. But there is also the fact that I am not the same person I was a year and a half a half ago. Of course, the Allison that graduated from Furman also wasn't the exact same one that graduated from high school four years before that, but this seems to be a little different. It's also one of those things that I don't think I can fully put into words, but it has also been a very real part of my YAV experience. And I couldn't help but think about the rest of the YAV community, many of whom were either struggling with returning home a changed person or were struggling with not being able to return home for the holidays. Maybe it was the Christmas warm fuzzies, but again I just found myself thinking of how much I love this little YAV family, and how thankful I am that it's a part of my life.

After a quick six days in the homeland, it was back to New Orleans in time for New Years Eve. Given the fact that I managed to pick up an awesome cold on my way out of Davidson, Ashley and I just went out for a delicious Mediterranean dinner, and headed back to the house, snacks in hand, to watch the ball drop on TV. Highlights of the evening: the woman working in the vintage clothing store complimented my dress when Ashley and I were doing some pre-dinner window shopping, and a little seven or eight year old girl complimented my sparkly shoes. Score. My other favorite part of the evening was right after midnight, as I stood on our balcony watching fireworks in almost every direction. Just past the buildings and scattered trees you could see the the big display over the Quarter, and in almost any other way you looked, you could see the occasional colorful explosions that people were setting of on their own. Despite the fact that I'm not sure exactly how safe it is to set off fireworks in the middle of narrow streets that are lined with mostly-made-of-wood houses, I couldn't help but feel happy standing there breathing in the cool air of a brand new year. And however much of a love/hate relationship I seem to have with this city, I think it's also a place that I'm proud to call one of my homes.

Just six days after New Years, the next holiday season rolled around. Happy Carnival, friends! Be on the look out soon for a post about our Twelfth Night reveling and the first parade of the season. 43 days until Mardi Gras...

Love,
Allison.

Baby, it's cold outside.

Disclaimer: I realize that I still live in the South, and that the snow I'm about to talk about is not "real snow."

But it's snowing in Nashville!!! Has been all day actually, and with a high of 19 tomorrow, I'm not thinking it'll melt very quickly. Anyway, the winter weather makes for quite the cozy feeling in the Shed, so long as you stay under your blanket and keep sippin' hot chocolate. Here are some pictures from the adventure Beth and I went on around the house/block.

MB's not used to this!

Some YAV lovin' for the winter weather.

Home sweet Richards Street

One advantage to living behind a church is that you get to see how pretty it is in the snow...

Decorating the 2PC parking lot.

A little decoration I added to the porch. :)

All of this snowy fun aside, as we were wandering around the block with the snow falling around us, I couldn't help but think about all of the people that don't have a constant roof over their heads. Fortunately there are programs like Room In the Inn, and some churches in Nashville (like 2PC) volunteer to be extra hosts on certain nights when the temperature drops below a certain degree. It still makes you think, though, when in our minds a snowy day means running around in the cold for twenty minutes and heading back to our houses. As drafty as the Shed may be, it's still a house to be thankful for.

All my holiday love,
Allison.

Adventures of a Non-Baker

Well friends, I think I might've found a new hobby. :) PSF's been helping sponsor this even called Alternative Gift Fair, which happened today. It's a super cool event during which 22 Nashville nonprofits congregated in St. A's, and people could come "shop" for intangible gifts by making donations to the organizations in honor of friends/family/whoever. As part of our contribution we decided to chip in some baked goods in the form of cookies. Two students and I headed to a former board member's house on Tuesday to make the dough (which Jennifer and I would bake later) with the expectation of the standard chocolate chip business. But by the time we left to head back towards campus, we had seven different kinds of made-from-scratch dough! We only ended up baking six of them (the last is going to make an appearance at our PSF Advent party Tuesday night), but AGF-goers got to enjoy sugar cookies (in the form of green and read Christmas trees), lemon glazed ginger snaps, crescent cookies, thumbprint cookies with raspberry jam, gingerbread men, and molasses spice cookies!

Now, those of you who know me will probably know that the extent of my baking ability has up to this point largely involved boxed mixes that just involve adding some combination of eggs, water, milk, and/or oil. Why would one think to ask for an egg separator when you can just crack the whole thing into a bowl and pick the yolk up with your hand? While it definitely took some trial and error to not completely mangle my Christmas tree creations, and I may or may not have scorched the bottom of the first batch of molasses spice, all in all it was a lovely experience! And obviously I was obligated to eat the cookies I broke taking off of the cookie sheets. Oopsie daisy. So, who knows if I'll actually keep up this whole baking-from-scratch thing (there'll always be a place in my heart for break 'n' bake), but I've quite enjoyed my latest culinary adventures!

I ended up leaving my camera (and phone) at home today, but here's some documentation of yesterday's pre-AGF baking...

All sortsa dough, complete with baking instructions. :)

I rolled out the dough and everything!

Molasses spice.

Reject trees and experiments. A.k.a. the best cookies all day.

Day one of baking adventures: four doughs down!

More festive happenings coming up this weekend: Christmas lights at Opryland and Elf tomorrow with PSF! Oh how I do enjoy the holidays. 

Love,

Allison

UPDATE: A picture of the finished products, courtesy of Jessie, one of our lovely dough makers. :)

We did not, in fact, make the apples from scratch...

Theology, country music, and sports.

The father of liberation theology, an awards show, college basketball and the NHL...all in less than a week! Sorry it's been a while since my last update, friends. Life in Nashville has been pretty exciting lately, so here it goes...my latest Music City adventures, and in all likelihood some rambling to go along with it.

This past Monday I cashed in on the living-near-a-div-school aspect of my life and went with three of the other YAVs to see Gustavo Gutierrez speak at Vanderbilt. For those of you who don't know about Gustavo Gutierrez, he's a priest/theologian from Peru who's widely seen as the founder of the liberation theology movement. So I was pretty excited about it. I know Wikipedia is far from a scholarly source, but here's their page on liberation theology if you're curious and want to know more. One interesting thing that stuck out to me over the course of the talk doesn't even directly deal with the specific theology of liberation. It's more of a context thing: until this movement, really, theology was for the most part coming from the developed, Western world. Europe and North America, basically. Liberation theology brought with it studies of religious practice from the perspective of the poor and marginalized. Now, to be perfectly honest, this is not a population that I feel I can easily relate to. I do, however, think it's so important for bubble-dwellers like myself to try and see things through a different lens. One of the things Gutierrez mentioned is that it is not sufficient to just help the poor...that we must be against poverty itself. This sort of thing, if perhaps in different words, has crossed my mind more than once over the course of my life...volunteering at Luke 14:12 and in the other relatively few experiences I've had working with the homeless. Yeah sure, it's great to go serve a meal (seriously, it is), but at the end of the day I know I'll go back to my house, pick something out of the fridge for dinner, and go to sleep in a bed. (Toolshed or not, it's still here and it's still far more than a lot of people have.) Now, that's not to say that I necessarily know who to or would be able to start fighting poverty itself, but it's something to think about. Despite the severity and expansiveness of injustice and poverty in the world, the fact that those in its grip can still be so strong in their faith and in their convictions of hope for the future is truly and incredibly inspiring to me. I'm obviously not the most educated in the field of liberation theology and injustice in the world, but listening Gutierrez on Monday sure got me thinking.

Well, fast forward to Wednesday and totally switch gears: I got to go to the CMA awards! Definitely a different world than that of liberation theology, and not one much concerned with the "simple living" we YAVs in theory subscribe to (but our tickets were free, I promise). Through Mary Kate's friend's friend, we ended up with two tickets! We laughed as we were deciding what to wear though...I wasn't exactly planning on going to an awards show when I packed for my year as a volunteer! I'm definitely far from a die-hard country fan, but it was still super exciting to be there. I was all prepared to take my camera and document this adventure, but alas the tickets specified that photography wasn't allowed. Little did I know that everyone else would take their cameras anyway...oh well. At least I've got a ticket stub to prove I was there! Part of me couldn't help but feel guilty as we walk.ed towards the arena, passing right by homeless folks on Broadway. Granted, we weren't part of the ball-gowns-and-tux crowd, but there's still so much we have. But guilt or not, it was still a pretty exciting night

With Friday came more (free) tickets, this time to a Vandy basketball game! Our tickets came from the Presbyterian College side though (thanks again Mary Kate...), so we put on our blue and garnet and cheered for the Hose. Sort of. Those of you who know me well know that sports are not exacltly my life's greatest passion. But Beth and Sally got to see their alma mater play, and despite the fact that it didn't end so well for PC, it was still some lovely community bonding time. A couple pictures, stolen from Beth...

Nashville YAVs (minus Michael)

The Shed

As it turns out, there's this great website run by a group called Hands on Nashville (there are "Hands on..." groups in different cities, too) that has a giant project calendar of volunteer opportunities in the area. In the process of looking for things to do with PSF, I happened across a can drive for Second Harvest food bank that was going on a Nashville Predators (hockey) game. Turns out that if you signed up to volunteer, you got a free ticket after the game started! So off we went, four of us YAVs, to experience another part of Nashville. And I think I may have found a new favorite sport to watch. I was mostly joking when I said in the first period that I hoped it would go to a shoot out (and that we'd win of course), but as it turns out that's exactly what happened! And, in what I can only assume is the typical Nashville fashion, there was a live band playing music between periods. Admittedly, before this game the extent of my hockey knowledge came from the Mighty Ducks movies and Miracle, but hey...gotta start somewhere right? I actually took my camera and remembered to take pictures, so here's the photographic evidence of our Preds adventure...

Collecting cans/money before the game.

Bring it on Chicago...bring it on.

With Sally, Mary Kate, and Vic

Mary Kate and Sally are fierce fans...

Shootouts are exciting!

Preds win!!!

And despite the fact that little to none of this post has involved my talking about work, I promise I really am still working for PSF! We're going ice skating next week...maybe my new hockey experience will help me make less of a fool of myself in public? Probably not, but I'm looking forward to it nonetheless. :)

Love,

Allison.

Life as a tourist...

One of the advantages of having your parents come visit you in a city they've never been to: they want to do all the fun touristy stuff you haven't had the chance to do yet! (And, while our somewhat humble YAV stipends are actually plenty to live on so long as you're intelligent about it, it was still nice to be taken care of for a few days.) So if you haven't figured it out by now, the lovely Margo and Dave Wehrung were here this past week, and we sure packed in the Nashville experiences. Here's the list...with pictures!

Tuesday night:

• firstly Mom and Dad got to experience the excitement that is PSF on Tuesday nights. :)
• Live music at the Bluebird Cafe (we saw Marshall Chapman and Will Kimbrough...neither of which I had heard of before, but both of which were great!) 

Wednesday:

• Lunch at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, complete with live music, "world famous" barbecue (the menu said so...), and maybe a fermented beverage or two. 
• Some wandering around the Bicentennial Mall, admiring the capitol building and the nifty map of Tennessee that's in the ground (turns out I know more about Nashville than I thought...I could actually tell my parents what things were!). This was in lieu of a more exciting activity that was supposed to happen but fell through...but it was nice, anyway!
• Chihuly at Cheekwood = some of Dale Chihuly's awesome glasswork on display outside in this botanical garden...we walked around during the day and saw it in the light, then saw it again once it got dark! 
• Deeeelicious dinner at the Germantown Cafe.

Thursday:

• tour of the Ryman Auditorium, which has a bunch of really cool history that I didn't know until now! Still kind of bitter I'm not seeing the Avett Brothers play there this weekend, but one day...one day I'll see them live!
• tour of the Parthenon in Centennial Park. I'd been around the outside several times, seeing as the park is right across the street from my office, but it turns out there's an art gallery or two inside, and a giant statue of Athena. I mean, who doesn't need a lifesize replica of the Parthenon in their city? Totally normal, right?
• Annnnd then Mom and Dad came to TOT with me.

And that, my friends, is probably the busiest 2.5 days I've had since I moved here. I don't know, maybe not, but it's definitely in the running. Here's the photographic evidence for those who are interested...

Lunch at Tootsie's

Bicentennial Mall

Chihuly

Mom and Dad

Being good tourists at the Ryman

Athena's nobody to be messed with...

So there ya have it, my past week. I didn't realize how much I'd missed having close friends/family around, so it was a good few days. Hiking with PSF today, and some Halloween festivities later...then playing handbells in church tomorrow morning. Life in Music City continues!

Love,

Allison.