Celebrando la independencia de Guatemala: el 15 de septiembre

Guatemala…

hay mas ideas para celebrar aqui:  Arte de la bandera y papel picado,  Pastel de papel para el 15 de septiembre,  y Manualidades para el 15 de septiembre

Que disfruten el dia!! 🙂

 

Guatemalan Independence Day Flag art and Papel Picado Cake Bunting

The fifteenth of September is always a busy time around our house!  Not only are we celebrating Guatemalan Independence Day, but also our youngest’s birthday.  I’m usually busy doing a bunch of party related stuff.  This year I only had time/energy for a few simple Independence Day crafts.

Last year we did fun paint chip wall art, and some printables, but this year I only did a super quick post-it note flag and a few desserts and just pulled out the banner from last year.  You do what you can, I guess!!  I found these really cute post-it sticky notes at the dollar store (or Walmart) and the package came with both blue and white….so….. That was easy!!!  Stick the notes onto a blackboard, and there you go.  I was going to somehow create the coat of arms for the middle of the flag….but minimalist modern is ok I suppose….

Another super easy but very cute idea was to make papel picado bunting for the cupcakes.  I so love papel picado art!!!  Here’s a little definition from wikipedia:

Papel picado (“perforated paper”) is a decorative craft made out of paper cut into elaborate designs. Although it is a Mexican folk art, papel picado is used as a holiday decoration in many countries. The designs are commonly cut from tissue paper using a guide and small chisels, creating as many as forty banners at a time. Papel picado can also be made by folding tissue paper and using small, sharp scissors. Common themes includes birds, floral designs, and skeletons. They are commonly displayed for both secular and religious occasions, such as Easter, Christmas, the Day of the Dead, as well as during weddings, quinceañeras, baptisms, and christenings.

I made myself a little banner for the 5 de Mayo and I confess that it’s still hanging in the kitchen because I like it so much!  Very cheerful.  Well, I’m also into stuff with paper doilies right now, too.  So I figured I’d use one to make the other….as a cake/cupcake decoration! Grab a small paper doily and punch out some scalloped circles, or even plain circles will do.  Easier yet, just cut out some circles or rectangles with scissors.  I used the scalloped punch because that’s what was in easy reach.  I punched out shapes from the edge of the doily, then folded over a little flap at the top.  Punching out shapes in slightly different areas of the doily gives a different look to the little pennants.  I trimmed some with the scissors so that I could fit more into the bunting.  Using 2 long bamboo skewers, I wrapped some baker’s twine around one end, tied it and hot-glued a button on to hold it.  Then I eye-balled how long the string needed to be and tied it to the other skewer.  I stuck the skewers with twine on into the cake/cupcakes and then added the doily pennants, already folded; arranged them a bit and glued the flaps down.  It took about 10 minutes from start to finish, and my daughter and I loved the look!!

Here’s another view, I love to see papel picado banners silhouetted against the light…

Here are some desserts we had to celebrate the 15 de Septiembre, Guatemalan Independence Day:

Mini cupcakes iced to look like ice cream cones, with a blue skittle on top for Guatemalan flag colors!  They turned out cute, but what a pain in the neck to ice crumbly from-a-cake-mix mini cupcakes!!  (only made 4).  The sandwiches were a lot easier….

I saw the idea on this German blog and it looked so fun and easy, too.  Cut out circles from 2 slices of white bread, spread one side with jam, add sprinkles if you want, then from the other side of the bread, cut out a little heart (with cookie cutter) and slap the two sides together!  I used a few fondant buttons for decoration, and the cut-out hearts…. After dessert we went on a bike ride to a little lake…. I know, it’s a very Canadian scene to celebrate a Guatemalan holiday, but since I can’t be down there, I have to enjoy what we have here!  Our weather has been unseasonably warm, so we have to make the most of it.  It was a fun afternoon, and our little princess enjoyed it!!

to the north

The breeze was whipping past my face as I sped near the edge of a cliff, traveling parallel but closer and closer all the time.  I was standing on the back of a truck, holding on tightly, staring out to the scenery flashing by.  Finally I was right at the edge, because this is what I came for, the glimpse over the edge…I looked down and there was no guardrail at all, just the edge of the road, a strip of dirt, and then nothingness until far down I could see a thick cushion of treetops, dappled by sunlight.  There was the white facade of a church peeping out of the trees, along with glimpses of a few other building from the town.  Lifting my eyes up, I could see the greenness turn deep blue as my vision extended to the far hills and mountains.  Then I decided I’d rather see this from behind some sort of guardrail, so I looked for even a small one that I could stand behind.  There was a small one, of sorts, but we were traveling so quickly past it.  (and that’s how you can tell it’s Central America,  few guardrails!)

Now I noticed a beautiful sound, a song that I recognized, playing past the rush of the wind.  I started humming along with it, as I looked down at the treetops and breathed in the clean fresh mountain air.  The cliffs and mountains were on my right, but  now we were turning left and I could see some ruined buildings.  I knew it was a part of Antigua.  There were all sorts of old ruined cathedrals and bits of old walls and columns.  I wanted to look at them all, but we were approaching so quickly that my eyes fixed on one that was painted bright pink, and I gazed as we drove past at golden lions intertwined among the black wooden railing on the window boxes.  I dearly wanted to see the other ruins and was determined to come back with my camera….

And then Henry said, “Good-bye, I’ll give you a call later”….and the music in my dream tapered off and the ruins and mountains melted into the daylight behind the curtains in our room as he kissed me goodbye.

Yes, that was what I was dreaming about 2 hours ago.  If you know me, you know that I have very vivid dreams, and remember a lot of them (too many, my Mom would say!)  I can hear and taste and smell in my dreams!  I dream in both English and Spanish.  And yes, Guatemala is my favorite place to dream about….it’s probably where 90% of my dreams take place, go figure.

A few minutes later, I “happened” to pick up a book I’ve been reading, and read this quote:

“Oh hurrah!” said Shasta.  “Then we’ll go north. I’ve been longing to go to the north all my life.” –THE HORSE AND HIS BOY, CHAPTER I, “HOW SHASTA SET OUT ON HIS TRAVELS”

And then after some more quotes from that book, where the boy Shasta is setting off on an adventure to the North with Bree the talking horse, this book continues on:

For while Shasta, like Reepicheep, was motivated by desire, his was a desire of a very different kind.  In part, it was nothing more than a vague sense of not belonging, of being a stranger in the only place he’d ever been able to call home.  But it went far beyond this.  For reasons he didn’t comprehend and couldn’t have explained, Shasta was consumed with a deep, almost inarticulate desire to go north.

“So is there in us a world of love to somewhat,” wrote C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy (quoting seventeenth-century English poet Thomas Traherne), “thought we know not what in the world it should be.”  This is Shasta’s story in a nutshell.  He was a victim of what the Germans call Sehnsucht: an ardent yearning after a nameless, indefinable object.  Lewis referred to it as a “lifelong nostalgia—-”  “our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside.”

This for sure stuck a chord in me.  I know that I do long for Guatemala, but really, I know it’s deeper even than that.  Farther on in this chapter the authors add:

Have you ever felt that bittersweet pang, that stab of joy, that soul-piercing arrow of heartbreaking loveliness and longing that, for Lewis and Shasta, was “shot from the North”?  It comes to each of us in a different way.  We encounter it in the light of a red gold sunset, the melancholy of a misty seascape, the cold gleam of stars among bare branches on a winter’s night; in “the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”

Wherever we meet it, it confronts us with inescapable evidence that we, like Jack and Shasta and the Old Testament patriarchs, are “strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13), exiles in a foreign land, hoping to discover a way back home.

Put yourself in Shasta’s place.  You’re sitting on the seashore, absently mending the nets, gazing off longingly toward the north.  Do you sense the undertow of nagging restlessness?  Can you relate to the undefined feelings of homesickness, the ache of unspoken discontent?  If you can, you may begin to have some idea of what the Bible means when it says that God “has put eternity in [our] hearts”  (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

The implications are well worth pondering.

REFLECTION:  We were meant for bigger and better things.

And so ends the chapter called “NARNIA AND THE NORTH” in the book Finding God in the Land of Narnia by Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware, published by SALTRIVER, an imprint of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. 2005.  I have really been enjoying reading this book and what I read this morning really complimented what I experienced in my dream today.  I recommend it for every Narnia fan!!  It’s something to think about today….

I wanted to include some photos of Guatemala that remind me a bit of my dream, so I found these on my friend Sam Ovalle’s facebook page and grabbed some of the ones of his climb of the Pacaya Volcano in 2000.  (Thanks for permission Chrissy!! 🙂