"The Weight of a Snowflake"

Children's Chapel for December is about peace and the power of one. The story I built for it was "The Weight of a Snowflake," which seems to be of ambiguous origin on the Internets. I took the short script, modified a few small details, and put it into a Spirit Play format.

It took me about half a week to make it from scratch, and I'd say about 9 hours (including planning the rest of the Children's Chapel around it). Nine hours of work for 45 minutes of time with the children, plus maybe another session here or there that uses the same materials in a different way made me second guess my time management skills. Not loving these stats, I made a really robust take-home sheet for families this week to bring the ideas home. And I'm referring them to the YouTube version of the story to listen to and watch together as a bedtime story.

I know in my bones that full-week faith is how children are going to move from doing UU to feeling UU, and that latter is what is going to help them to access--and add to--the wisdom, depth, and strength that UU has to offer. I'm still working on getting there.

A recording of the story I found on YouTube:

And the first sketch:

Building the pieces:

Then the story, in three stages:

And here's the whole thing packed up in its basket. I remembered to include in the script a sentence for each item as I'm putting it away, too, which is a nice chance to provide a little summary or add a bit of new information. 

Using this for Children's Chapel, I also presentied each child was a little end-of-year gift, a crochet wool snowflake (seen in the first image, and set in a little origami paper box). As I handed it to them, I had a little message for each one about having a unique, strong voice, and using it to add weight to the truths that are important. And for feast, we ate popcorn drizzled with white chocolate. Popcorn, in Spanish, is palomitas, which translates literally to "tiny doves."

Finally, here was the little altar setting for the children's service, with the story off to the right:

(The drums were our musical accompaniment for "Peace, Salaam, Shalom," which was our hymn.)

There were only a handful of kids there, but it was so lovely. One boy remarked how the tree reminded him of Ygrdasil, the Norse tree of life. Another asked me to tell her mom about the snowflake present so that she could be sure to remember it right. Afterward, when I was chatting informally with one boy's mother, he stood nearby and made a connection with what I was saying that began with, "It's just like in the story, about one voice." Their answers for the standard Spirit Play question, "I wonder where you are in this story?" were just beautiful--one child was the snow, for his favorite holiday of winter; another was the olive branch in the peace dove's mouth, where he thought the stories must come from; another was the trunk of the fir tree, strong and soft. 

It was such an honor to be there with them as they talked through their wonderings and knowings. Truly, it was one of those sessions that I think I would have spent twice as long on if I'd known how good it was going to be, so my resolution is to get smarter about time while keeping a very firm grasp on my priority of promoting incarnational spiritual growth.