Weekly Photo Challenge: Letters

Letters and symbols, icons and shorthand. We use them to convey meaning, experience, fact and story to create a reference. Weave several together, and you have history. We’ve created these continually throughout time, and have become so prolific at it that most of us have begun to filter out these symbols habitually. We don’t bother to slow down to read signs. We delete pop-up messages and junk mail. We are inundated and overwhelmed with letters all day long and hardly think about them. What if we focused in on one letter, one symbol, and let it represent an entire text, like the medieval scribes did with illuminated manuscripts? This illuminated letter represents my daughter Rebecca’s first Christmas in 1989. What kind of a history does this describe? That there once was a mother who commemorated her child’s first Christmas by making a special ornament. She decorated a tree with it every year for 20 years. The child grew up, her father died, and she moved away from home. The mother stopped celebrating Christmas, but she gave her daughter the special ornament to keep. Soon the daughter had her own house and her own Christmas tree. She decorated the tree and invited her mother to come celebrate with her. Her mother was pleased to see the ornament hanging in just the right place, so she took a picture of it. The End.

14 thoughts on “Weekly Photo Challenge: Letters”

Cool post! 🙂
http://psychosomaticallyinlove.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/weekly-photo-challenge-letters/

scillagrace says:

April 25, 2014 at 4:49 pm

Thanks! Yours, too! I thought that your photo might have been from Salzburg. I’ve been there, but not to Bratislava.

Reply
- psychosomaticallyinlove says:
  
  April 25, 2014 at 4:53 pm
  
  Yeah, I was surprised myself stumbling upon this in Bratislava. I never even knew he had visited there. 🙂 As you say, one would expect commemorating plaques of Mozart mainly in Salzburg, Vienna and Prague. 🙂
  Thank you for commenting and liking!

Hi Scilla,
These things are symbols and, unlike letters and words in a common language, they have different meanings for different people. Often it’s just a trigger to recalling a certain family story (a little girl was born and loved…), which is another way of remembering who we are and where we came from. Just for fun, we keep a two foot tall skeleton in our coat closet. But it is also a frequent reminder not to take ourselves too seriously, and a symbol of the many stories we have that make us who we are. Those stories often find their way out of the closet!
Thank you again for another thoughtful and thought-provoking post.

scillagrace says:

April 25, 2014 at 6:04 pm

Thanks for your comment, Naomi, and for your confession of skeletons in your closet! 🙂 (I bet you have a lot more fun stuff in there…costumes, props, etc. I’d love to take a peek!)

Reply

We’ve been getting or making ornaments for the girls since they were babies. When they’re ready to be out on their own for Christmas, they’ll have lots of lovely ornaments and memories to take with them. I think that makes it even more special.

janet

scillagrace says:

April 25, 2014 at 9:55 pm

My daughter made me a couple of ornaments that year, too, with the beads she uses for making jewelry. They hang from my light fixture year ’round. 🙂

Reply

What a lovely story of R

scillagrace says:

April 25, 2014 at 9:56 pm

Thanks! and she’s a lovely person. 🙂

Reply
- seeker says:
  
  April 25, 2014 at 11:55 pm
  
  And that speaks how lovely of mother you are. 😀
- scillagrace says:
  
  April 26, 2014 at 6:27 am
  
  Aw! How kind of you. 🙂

Pingback: Treasured Letters | A New Day: Living Life Almost Gracefully

This makes me think of my own meandering in the Hebrew Aleph Beit and how meaningful each letter is. The fact that your daughter displayed her ornament gave me goose bumps. Touching.