Winter Solstice Celebration

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Many Celebrations this Winter Solstice

 

Flickering firelight illuminates small hands gluing, weaving, and cutting. Are these elves in the North Pole? Nope, these are the kids and families participating in this year’s Winter Solstice Celebration!

 

You may recall last year’s blow-out Solstice at the Old Manse. Families, friends, and strangers who became friends gathered around the fire pit singing carols like “Deck the Hall” and “O Tannenbaum.”  Voices of the Earth, the Arts & Environment chorus, lit hundreds of candles handed out to the crowd. Everyone heartily drank warm cider and roasted marshmallows on the fire. This year, you can guess, is slightly different. We won’t be at the Old Manse. But we still plan to celebrate the Solstice! Instead of gathering in one spot on one day, we’re celebrating over many days.

 

Ninjas in Nature is hosting a Winter Ninja Festival to enjoy the freedom of running around outside and the satisfaction of building your own fire.

 

 

In our winter self-care workshop, gather what brings you warmth and joy during dark months and create reflective collage art before hibernating at home.

 

Finally, families can craft their own solstice ornaments at Concord Market. Glue, cut, and weave lily stem stars. Twist and tie fabric evergreen trees. Wrap cranberry wreaths to hang on the tree. Don’t forget to visit Concord Market and pick up some hot cocoa or cider to enjoy!

 

Join us around the community fire this Solstice for all these outdoor, winter workshops. To learn more about and sign up for our collection of Winter Solstice activities, visit the Arts & Environment class page. Who knows how you’ll light up this Winter Solstice!

 

A Beautiful Display of Gratitude and Appreciation for Concord’s Emergency Personnel

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Three months ago, Concord resident, Ned Perry, reached out to Jennifer Eaton (resident and owner of of Copper Penny Flowers) to start planning way to recognize and show appreciation for our First Responders in Concord.

 

Like so many of us in Concord, Ned Perry wanted to find a way to thank our police and fire fighters for all they do for Concord, particularly during this stressful period of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

 

Jennifer went to work, searching for the perfect vase and then developing an arrangement that would be perfect for the event.

 

   

They came up with a plan and placed the orders for 100 cobalt blue vases. When the vases arrived, Copper Penny Flowers staff went to work, filling an arranging 100 lovely bouquets for the November 13th event, enough so every full-time member of the Police Department and the Fire Department would have an arrangement to take home with them at the end of her/his shift.

 

 

 

At 2:30 pm on Friday, November 13th, a small group of representatives of the Concord community gathered in front of the West Concord Fire Station to present the fire fighters with the floral arrangements, formed into a large heart shape.

 

In attendance:

 

The West Concord Fire Station, Ned Perry, Nancy Crowley and Dorrie Kehoe (both long time community leaders work on the fire station window boxes all year long) Maynard Forbes (owner of the West Concord 5 & 10), Jane Hotchkiss as a representative of Select Board, Jennifer Ubaldino, Executive Director of the Concord-Carlisle Community Chest.

 

 

 

Bonus – This event gave the fire fighters an opportunity to show off their brand new sharp yellow jackets – – – made in Concord!

 

Below, Jennifer Eaton puts final touches on the two heart formations.

 

 

An hour later at 3:30 pm, a different small group of representatives of the Concord community congregated in front of the Walden Street Fire Station to present Fire Chief Judge with similar blue vases and arrangements for the fire fighters who work in the Concord Center Fire Station.

  

 

Following the presentation to the Concord Firefighters, the small group of representatives moved over in front of the Police Station and presented a blue heart of flower arrangements to Chief O’Connor to thank each member of the Concord Police Department for everything each employee (from Dispatcher to Captain to Chief) do for Concord every day of the year. Chief O’Connor took a few moments to thank the community for the recognition and support.

 

 

 In attendance were: Police Chief O’Connor, the Concord Police Officers, Jennifer Eaton of Copper Penny Flowers , Peter Lovis of the Cheese Shop, Jennifer Ubaldino Executive Director of the Concord-Carlisle Community Chest, Jane Hotchkiss representing the Select Board and Ned Perry.

 

 

We would like to thank these front line workers for their dedication and service. We are so  grateful for the Concord Emergency Personnel.

 

We’d like to thank Jennifer Eaton & her Copper Penny Flowers staff for all the thought and time they put into making these lovely arrangements.

 

We’d also like to thank Ned Perry. We are so lucky to have people in our community like Ned Perry who take notice of all the people who contribute to making our town the special place we call home. It’s one thing to feel gratitude but quite another to be the one to put it into action.

 

Ned is known around town for being fiercely pro-Concord and a long time advocate of supporting our local merchants while always taking notice of the helpers and those in need.

 

Every town should be so lucky to have a Ned Perry to call a neighbor.

Concord Museum’s Memorial Day Offerings

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To commemorate Memorial Day and pay tribute to those who died in service to our country, The Concord Museum has crafted a special edition of History at Home. 

The program includes an introduction, comments on Ralph Waldo Emerson (whose birthday is today), a tribute to Peter Brooke, and then four vignettes about the Melvin Memorial including a conversation with Harold Holzer, a description of Daniel Chester French’s sculpture, Mourning Victory, a tour of the Memorial itself in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, and then a few excerpts from the recent rededication of the Memorial (last June) including a very touching keynote address by our curator, David Wood, and a poem read by Neil Rasmussen.

Check out these links:

Concord Museum Memorial Day Program

History at Home

Memorial Day Op-Ed

Concord Journal Guest Commentary (May 21, 2020 edition)

Our Memorial Day tradition of honoring military men and women who died while serving our country originated in the aftermath of the Civil War and became a federal holiday in 1971.

Each year my wife and I attend the ceremony in the village where we grew up, smiling at the high school band playing songs we performed at their age; warmed by the remarks made by decorated veterans; and touched by such time-honored rituals as the playing of taps; the 21 gun salute, and the reading of names of those who lost their lives in battle.

This year there will be no parade and yet, it seems, we have so much to mourn including the recent loss of loved ones and those who have risked (and in some cases lost) their lives while caring for others.

In chronicling the history of Concord, my colleagues and I at the Concord Museum are guided by the words of Robert Penn Warren: “History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.”

On Monday, May 25, 2020 we will be posting a special Memorial Day video program that we hope will provide solace and perspective to those who view it – uniting us in ways to better face the future.

The posting will feature our Curator David Wood’s keynote remarks last June at the rededication in Sleep Hollow cemetery of the Melvin Memorial which honors the lives of three brothers from Concord who died in the Civil War. Their surviving brother commissioned his boyhood friend, Daniel Chester French, to create a sculpture later called, Mourning Victory.

David’s remarks were based on one of the brother’s diaries which include his account of being captured by the rebel forces (where he would die in captivity) and of his brothers’ deaths from dysentery and a fatal charge in Petersburg.

While observing a different civil war in his native land in Ireland, the poet, William Butler Yeats, minced no words about the destruction it unleashed which, to me, are reminiscent of our recent experience of this pandemic.

We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere

A man is killed, or a house burned

Yet no clear fact to be discerned.

 

Despite the destruction all around him, however, outside Yeats’s window he notices a more hopeful natural phenomenon: honey-bees building a home in a starling’s empty nest.  Seamus Heaney once championed Yeats’s poetic observations for “satisfying the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences at times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth telling, and, on the other hand, to credit as a reality the squeeze of the hand, and the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures.”

We hope our special virtual Memorial Day observance will elicit such sympathies and our need to protect each other in this, our moment of collective crisis.

 

Thank you and best wishes on this unique and solemn “stay-safely-in-place” Memorial Day.

Concord, MA 9/15/08 Tourists visit the Concord Museum, on Monday, September 15, 2008. (Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff); Reporter: Brad Kane; Section: NWWk; Slug: 21nwtouris Library Tag 09212008 Globe NorthWest