As my mom and I ate breakfast at Cracker Barrel the other morning (a rare treat to go out to eat and my mom was using a two-year-old gift card), some of the waitstaff started putting up a big fake Christmas tree right next to the fireplace.
I was sitting facing the action and as my eyes went back and forth from the glowing fire to the lit-up tree while enjoying the Grandma's Sampler platter (with sugar-cured ham, bacon and sausage to go with pancakes and eggs), I thought about how synonymous Christmas trees (or Baal Poles, as my pastor likes to call them) are with celebrating the holidays.
Genesis 2: [16] And the LORD God commanded the man,
saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
[17] But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not
eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, at the time of
the Flood, was removed off the earth and cast down into hell.
Jordan says in a study, "It was on the earth until the time of the judgment of a
flood. The garden in Eden was there and those great cedars of Lebanon over there
in Ezekiel 31. They grow tall and that’s why in Genesis, when Cain goes out and
builds the city . . .
Genesis 4: [16] And Cain went out from the presence
of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.
[17] And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he
builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son,
Enoch.
"Cain kept his eyes back toward there because that’s where
those great cedars were growing up, the water and the foliage, and the trees
grew to be majestic towers and that’s where the idea of the steeples and all that
kind of stuff came from—it gets passed down."
Ezekiel 31: [3] Behold, the Assyrian was a cedar in
Lebanon with fair branches, and with a shadowing shroud, and of an high
stature; and his top was among the thick boughs.
[4] The waters made him great, the deep set him up on high with her
rivers running round about his plants, and sent out her little rivers unto all
the trees of the field.
[5] Therefore his height was exalted above all the trees of the field,
and his boughs were multiplied, and his branches became long because of the
multitude of waters, when he shot forth.
[6] All the fowls of heaven made their nests in his boughs, and under
his branches did all the beasts of the field bring forth their young, and under
his shadow dwelt all great nations.
[7] Thus was he fair in his greatness, in the length of his branches:
for his root was by great waters.
*****
Here's an article from 2013 and will have new post tomorrow:
On Easter Sunday
I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mom, casually scanning the morning’s
news headlines online, when I clicked on the New York Post website and saw one
of their top highlighted stories was a long profile of a British woman, now in
her 60s, who’s just released a book about how she was raised as a little girl
by a colony of Capuchin monkeys after being abandoned deep inside a South
American rainforest by kidnappers who botched her abduction.
She survived on
bananas, Brazil nuts, guava and figs as she modeled the monkeys' eating habits
and high-pitched cries and “even learned to climb trees, though she slept in a
hollowed-out tree trunk at night.”
The article informed that Marina Chapman, who has written a just-released book
about her 1950s experience, was “playing in her family’s vegetable garden when
a man grabbed her and smothered her face with a rag she would later assume was
dipped in chloroform. Such kidnappings were common in the era of La Violencia,
a precursor to the civil war that continues in Colombia to this day . . . She
believes the kidnapping was interrupted somehow, which is how she awoke from
her drugged state alone in the jungle . . . Over time, Chapman shed all
evidence of her past self, discarding her clothes and human habits.”
She was quoted as
having written in her book, “I was growing a new, muscular body, strong in ways
a child’s body normally isn’t. I had harder heels and palms, and an appetite
for strange jungle foods. I was also beginning to move around like a monkey, and
one of the reasons, perhaps, that I wasn’t aware of how I was growing was that
I almost always walked on all fours now . . .”
*****
Intrigued by the
woman’s tale, wondering if it really, really was true and anxiously wanting to
see a photograph of her (not provided by the Post), I immediately typed “Marina
Chapman” into Google and started reading other posted articles about her.
One I pulled up
from the London Telegraph reported that “after 10 years in Bogotá, Chapman
moved in with the Eusse family to the United Kingdom, where she worked as a
nanny and a cook. The family, though Catholic, attended the Abundant Life
church, a Christian Renewal congregation in Yorkshire. There, she met her
future husband, John Chapman, a 28-year-old church organist and bacteriologist.
In 1979, they wed. Marina Chapman did not share her jungle life with her
husband until after they were married.”
It was at this
point I stopped reading dead in my tracks and my eyes just stared at the
screen, thinking in amazement, “That’s Johnny Appleseed’s name!!!!!”
Appleseed, a
favorite character of mine in my childhood, was really John Chapman and, as
anyone who knows anything about the Christian adventurer, he lived in the
wilderness, had bear-like feet from walking barefoot all the time, even in
winter, climbed trees, slept in a hollow log and befriended and acted like
animals who he lived with and deeply cared about!!!
*****
To give you the
whole scoop on why this all has me so tickled, here’s an article I wrote a
couple of years ago:
I was nine years old when my family returned from being
missionaries in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador, and after a year of camping
out inside my grandmother's house in Akron, Ohio (I actually slept on the floor
in a sleeping bag set up beside my grandmother's bed), we moved an
hour-and-a-half away to a tiny farming/resort village called Loudonville.
Loudonville is popular statewide for its canoe liveries and
campgrounds on both the Mohican and Blackfork rivers. It's also home to the
Mohican State Forest and nearby Pleasant Hill Dam. Tons of campers fill the
area each summer.
My summer jobs in high school included working at one of the
liveries and at a custard ice cream stand in town. For two summers while
attending Ohio State, I worked at both a water slide and Putt Putt golf course
inside Wally Campgrounds (yes, just like in the Chevy Chase movie
"Vacation," but its name precedes the classic comedy by at least two
decades).
I spent all my free time during these summers cross-country
cycling through the gorgeous rolling farm hills or woods that stretched for
miles any direction you ventured outside Loudonville's city limits.
I preferred the back roads (and sometimes had to fight off
unchained dogs with my attached bicycle pump), but would also ride country
highways to destinations like Millersburg (known for its large Amish
community), Mt. Vernon, Mansfield, Wooster, Butler and Mt. Gilead.
Whenever I rode up Route 60 (the road my family lived on)
into Ashland, I'd pass a large fruit stand my mom always bought her cooking
apples from every fall. The outdoor/indoor market was named for Johnny
Appleseed, who was said to have spread the apple seeds and nurtured the young
trees that led to the property's apple orchards.
Because Johnny Appleseed was known to have been all through
the territory surrounding Loudonville, clearing trees and brush to spread seeds
and plant orchards, I'd think about him now and then on my excursions—actually
more often than I should admit!
I was fascinated by the guy's story. He was a true free
spirit, roaming the earth barefoot in a tattered, patched coat with a Bible
buttoned inside it, using his head to haul around the cast-iron stewpot he
cooked in.
He loved children, animals and nature and befriended the
Indians even as he helped settlers avoid them. Historical records even verify
that in the War of 1812, he traveled 30 miles to summon American troops to
Mansfield, Ohio, thus forestalling a raid by Native Americans who were allied
with the British.
Johnny's real last name was Chapman and he was born in
Leominster, Mass., in 1774. He left home at 23, heading westward into the
wilderness with a simple dream to plant apple trees. All he brought with him
was his stewpot, a hatchet, a flint and steel for making fire, a bag of
cornmeal and a sack of apple seeds.
"He gave away his clothes to anyone who needed a coat
or trousers or shoes," says the children's book I have on him, "The
True Tale of Johnny Appleseed," written by Margaret Hodges. "Most of
the time he wore no shoes. One man said that he saw Johnny breaking the ice in
a creek with a bare foot.
"All along his path he planted apple seeds. If he was
invited to spend the night in a cabin, he would not take a bed, but slept on
the floor. He would not eat until he was sure that the children in the family
were full. He loved honey but would never take it from a bee tree until he saw
that the bees had enough honey to keep themselves alive during the winter. A
strange man indeed!"
Johnny followed creeks and rivers westward using borrowed
canoes, then crossed the wild Alleghenys on foot. When a record winter storm
caught him unaware, he wrapped his feet with pieces of cloth torn from his coat
and wove tree branches into makeshift snowshoes.
"As time went by, Johnny walked so long and so far that
his feet grew almost as tough as an animal's paws," writes Hodges in her
book. "In other ways, too, he came to be like an animal. He could curl up
to sleep under a bush or in the hollow of a tree."
Of course, there were people who thought Johnny was nuts,
walking about in no shoes, a ragged coat and stewpot hat, but the children
always loved him and they were the ones to coin his famous name of Appleseed.
He would read stories from the Bible to them and even would tear Bible prayer
and devotional books apart, leaving sections in tree boughs during the
summertime for children to find.
By the spring of 1845, Johnny had come as far west as Fort
Wayne, Ind. and was staying with a family when news arrived that cattle had
broken into one of his new orchards 15 miles away.
"The weather was cold and wet, but he set off at once
and never stopped to rest on the long walk," writes Hodges. "'Cloudy.
Snow showers,' an Indiana farmer wrote in his diary that day. The next day the
weather report was, 'Snow showers all day.' When Johnny got back to his
friends' house, they put him to bed with a high fever. During the March snows,
Johnny Appleseed died, and his body returned to the earth that he had loved. By
early April, winter was past. The weather report read, 'In the night thunder showers—then
fair—first apple blossoms."
*****
When I wrote this
article on Appleseed I didn’t even know as much as I do today about how closely
linked he was with the Loudonville area. Wikipedia, for one,
writes, However, Henry Howe reported that Appleseed had been a frequent
visitor to Perrysville, Ohio. He was to propose to Miss
Nancy Tannehill there—only to find that he was a day late; she had accepted a
prior proposal.
Perrysville was
the other half of the Loudonville-Perrysville School District that I graduated
high school from and I rode my bike through the little town and its outskirts,
only five miles from downtown Loudonville, all the time. I knew its back roads
by heart!
My sister lived
in Mansfield all of her adult life. Wikipedia says:
According
to Harper's New Monthly Magazine,
towards the end of his career, he was present when an itinerant missionary was
exhorting an open-air congregation in Mansfield,
Ohio. The sermon was long and severe on the topic of extravagance, because
the pioneers were buying such indulgences as calico and
imported tea. “Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is
traveling to heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?” the preacher
repeatedly asked until Johnny Appleseed, his endurance worn out, walked up to
the preacher, put his bare foot on the stump that had served as a podium, and
said, “Here's your primitive Christian!” The flummoxed sermonizer dismissed the
congregation.
Well, I know I’m
not going to forget Marina Chapman’s story, especially after writing this! I
can’t wait to see the documentary National Geographic’s going to make on her!