Candlemas

Took assembly at two of our local Church of England primary schools today. One after the other, so took the same assembly to each.

It’s Candelmas on February 2nd, so I reckoned that was near enough to choose as a topic for assembly. I took in a load of night lights and some bigger candles – a couple with medieval knights on the outside, one with medieval scenes etched into it, a scented candle in a glass and one shaped like a tortoise. Oh, and a box of long stemmed matches (most of which I managed to break without lighting a single candle.)

I lit the candles (eventually) and the children were mesmerised. One asked for the lights to be switched off, so we did that too.

I told them that around a hundred years ago, all lighting in churches was by candles, so on February 2nd every year, all the candles for the year were brought into church and blessed by the priest during a service of Holy Communion. (None of them knew what Holy Communion or Mass or The Lord’s Supper, was. They may be Church of England schools, but the level of ignorance aspires at least to the heights of the rest of the world.)

Then I blew some bubbles  – well, didn’t exactly blow them. Used this wand thingy that our youngest daughter had given me for Christmas, whcih produced huge bubbles when I waved it around in the air. Mostly produced huge bubbles, actually. I wasn’t all that good at it. One of the kids suggested that they could probably do it better, but I wasn’t giving up my wand.

The purpose of the bubbles? They each contain a rainbow, so I reminded the children of the story of Noah’s Ark and the great flood, and that God put his sign in the sky when the waters subsided, a sign of a rainbow. So we know God is with us when we see rainbows. Hence we ‘attached’ our prayers to the bubbles.

So I waved these huge bubbles over the candles, knowing that hot air rises and therefore the bubbles would float up to the ceiling. Little mini-science lesson, there. I’m topic based, me. So I knew the bubbles would float upwards on the warm air from the candles.

Or not.

Mostly not. Mostly they popped on the flames.

When one did eventually float up, a great cheer erupted from the school and it took the teacher all her time to calm them down. I grinned to myself.

One little girl had a birthday today, so I had her blow out all the candles while we sang, ‘Happy Birthday’ to her.

It was quite fun. I enjoyed it, anyway.