From my wonderful colleagues I got the idea of doing a "blessing of the backpacks" as the children of the congregation go off to school.  It's not a new idea -- Christian churches have been doing it for years, and apparently some UUs, too -- but I had never heard of it before.  Churches often apparently put some sort of zipper pull tag on the backpacks.  Here's an example found on Pinterest:


A couple of colleagues shared their ideas, and some images, in a closed Facebook group, which started me thinking.  I'm fairly crafty with things like this, so I knew I could come up with something.  I was inspired by Karen G. Johnston's example created by her DRE and a member, but couldn't figure out their fancy knots:

http://awakeandwitness.net/2015/08/27/blessing-of-the-backpacks-a-mini-primer/

But, on the other hand, I do have some tricks up my own sleeve.
Here's my prototype:

My prototypes cost me over a dollar each to make, but to make in bulk they'll cost less than 30 cents apiece, not counting tools or jump rings.  You start with 1-inch bottle caps, the kind that are designed for jewelry and crafts.  You can get them in silver, black, mutli-colored, patterned -- really any way you want.  The ones that I used are also described as flattened bottle caps, but you can get ones that are more bottle-cap like.  My price of $0.30 each is based on using these:

Print out your pictures, sizing your pictures to one-inch.  Your church logo or the UUA logo would work nicely in these.   As you can see, I used one of my Zentangle chalices, on a star-shaped background. Please do check with me before using my artwork.  I liked the symbolism of the star for kids who are all stars. 
I can get about 45 onto one page.  And here's the big secret: I print these out on full sheets of label paper.  That makes my chalice self-adhesive, which simplifies what could be the messiest, gunkiest, error-prone stage of the process.  Label paper seems pricey, but when you price it out per item if you're making a ton of these, it's less than one cent per chalice.

You'll need to acquire a one-inch circular punch.  I like Martha Stewart's punches for my scrapbooking, so I got hers. 

Punch out your circles on the label paper.  And the next step is that BEFORE you remove the backing, stick a one-inch clear circular epoxy sticker on top of that circle.  This makes the backing much easier to get off, really.  And you're going to stick the epoxy sticker on anyway.  So do it in this order and trust me.  Then just remove the label backing and pop that circle into your bottle cap.  The bottle caps I got came pre-punched with holes and jump rings in them, so it was important to line up the top of the sticker with the top of the bottle cap.  Bottle caps are cheaper if you don't buy them punched, though, so you'll need a bottle cap punch, and then jump rings or split rings if the hole it makes is too small for your ball chain.  Probably any metal punch of the right size would do, but they sell ones specifically for this.

Jump rings are not priced into my 30 cents each, but they're less than a penny each, if you buy bulk.  This is where you have a difficult choice to make, because jump rings open up very easy if a kid is pulling on this backpack charm, but split rings are a pain to put on.  My more expensive bottle caps came with split rings already on them.  I think there's probably a tool to make those jump rings easier (I do see things called "Split ring pliers, but they just look like needle-nosed pliers with a sort of hook on the end).  If someone knows if these are helpful, please inform us in the comments.  I mostly just juggle around and pry with my needle-nose pliers until I get them opened.  They're like little mini key chains, and you know what a pain it can be to get keys on and off a regular key chain!

So that's the chalice bottle cap part of the charm done.  Next I got some bright peace sign beads to add on.  I'd add UU beads, except that I don't have any alphabet beads where the hole is big enough for the ball chain to go through.  But that would be a nice option.  Turns out you can get packs of all Us. 

And then lastly add a ball chain key chain of about four inches.  You can get these in packs pre-cut.

And there you have it!  Cute backpack charms for the blessing of the backpacks!

I took my daughter to see Brave this week, and really loved it.  As I reflected on what I loved so much, I realized that this was almost the first "princess movie" I had seen with a positive (and living) mother figure.  The movie is the first animated movie I've seen with my daughter which is really a mother/daughter movie.  There are good father/son movies - Up! is an example of a father-stand-in and boy movie.  How to Train Your Dragon and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs both figure heroes who have strained relationships with fathers who don't understand them which get resolved through the events of the movie.  If you look to animal characters, you quickly see a strong father/son relationship in The Lion King and Finding Nemo.  But stories that tell about mother/daughter relationships are exceedingly rare in the animated film category.  First of all, as has been pointed out, this is Pixar's first animated film with a female star.  But there are plenty of Disney princesses, right?  However, if you think about it, the average movie princess has a mother who is dead and a step-mother who is evil..  It's the staple of Grimms' fairy tales, and nothing new.  But even while the Disney movies change up the Grimm Brothers' tales in many ways, they don't, by and large, introduce princesses with wonderful and living mothers.  Here's the list of Disney Princesses (including some that they don't always list):

Princess (Movie) - mother status
Cinderella - Dead, evil step-mother.
Snow White - Dead, evil step-mother.
Aurora (Sleeping Beauty) - Honestly, I can't remember.  Probably alive, but asleep the whole time?
Ariel (The Little Mermaid) - Presumed dead.  I don't think she's ever mentioned.
Jasmine (Aladdin) - Presumed dead.  Again, I think she's not mentioned.
Tiana (The Princess and the Frog) - ALIVE, and a positive figure, but not in most of the movie, as, well, she spends most of her time as a frog.
Pocahontas - Presumed dead.
Belle (Beauty and the Beast) - Dead.
Rapunzel (Tangled) - Mother alive, but Rapunzel abducted and raised by evil witch.
Mulan - Mother alive, but Mulan is away for most of the movie.

As you can see, only one of these princesses was raised by a loving mother who is still alive when the movie's storyline takes place, unless you count Sleeping Beauty.  And, again, aren't they all asleep for the most part?  And the two movies where we really see the loving and caring mother, the girls are away from their family setting for most of the movie. Tiana in The Princess and the Frog spends most of the time removed from her family setting and wandering as, well, a frog.  Mulan bravely goes off to war, and has some strong feminist elements, but her primary relationship even when she's with her family seems to be with her father.  My husband loves Mulan, because he sees it as a father/daughter relationship movie, so I don't think I'm exaggerating this.

And while a lot of the fathers are dead, too, in princess movies, we do have strong father/daughter relationships with Ariel, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Belle, and Mulan.  Not all of these daughters are removed from their father's care through the whole movie, notably Jasmine and Pocahontas.

For bad examples of mother/daughter relationships, Disney's Tangled really takes the prize.  Here we have a daughter raised by a woman/witch who keeps her locked in the tower and apparently just wanted her because the girl's magic hair keeps the witch young.  The mother/witch figure is truly disturbing here, because it is portrayed as a twisted version of real affection.  Whereas the evil stepmothers in Snow White and Cinderella are just flat-out mean and nasty, the witch in Tangled is not directly so for most of the film. 

Brave is so very different in that it tells the story of a girl asserting her independence and developing her own identity, but it does so while having her deal with a loving, caring, and living mother.  And, even more unusual, the heart of the story is really about the relationship between Merida, the daughter, and Elinor, her mother.  They want different things for Merida's life, and the tension develops from this.  They love each other, but they don't understand each other, and they don't know how to communicate and regain the closeness they had when Merida was younger.  In one heart-breaking moment, they each, in anger, destroy an object that is precious to the other.  Elinor realizes immediately what she has done; Merida takes much of the movie to understand what she needs to do to repair things, literally and figuratively. 

We need more of this sort of movie--stories that tell of girls developing their identity and individuality--and we need more with mothers who aren't dead or evil who are a part of these girls lives.  So while there's much to critique in this movie, my bottom line is thankfulness.  I think this is a story that will stand up as my own daughter reaches those ages where she needs to pull away more from mom.  It will be something that I can refer back to as a metaphor for our real lives.

When I was a child, I went to a UU church that was a larger-sized church for a church in our movement.  The church religious education program was large enough to have paid staff, and a different classroom for every two grade levels through 7th grade, an eight-grade class of its own for coming of age, and an active high school group.  But a church that size often comes in a larger metro area, as was the case with Birmingham Unitarian Church in Bloomfield Hills, MI.  And so, in my school, I was one of only a small hand-full of families with Unitarian Universalist children in our school district of Ferndale, and in my grade there was only one other UU.  I was lucky--I think my two sisters had no other UUs in their grade in our school.  When I got to High School as a freshman, there were still the two of us UUs in a graduating class of over 300, and three UUs that I knew of in the school, although I later found that there were two sisters who went to another one of the metro area UU churches.

Now I'm in a smaller church and a smaller city, and the situation is very much the same.  We have a smaller church school, with K-5 in one class.  As I think about our UU children and youth, I don't think we have any two families with grade-school children in the same school.  I think we have children in Jackson schools, Columbia schools, Hanover-Horton schools, Grass Lake schools, and a couple more school districts further north of Jackson, but no two children in the same school from different families.  At the High School level, it's possible that we have more than two families with children in the same school district, if we count members who are not active in the church and whose children don't come to religious education classes, but our few active teens are all, I think, in separate school districts.

What these two examples tell me is that the vast majority of UU children and youth grow up fairly religiously isolated in their school lives.  Before we get to college, where we're in educational systems with thousands of students, we don't have enough critical mass to, for example, form high-school-based religious club.  And it also means that our children in religious education classes pretty much only see each other once a week.  Occasionally strong friendships can form--some of my daughter's best friends are her church friends--but it's harder for our children to make friends with children from their own religion.

There are positive things about this, of course.  It means we raise flexible, tolerant children, who are good at being allies and bridge-builders.  It means our children learn quickly and early how to relate to people of other religions and appreciate and embrace that diversity.

But it has its drawbacks in terms of support for our children when they face religious intolerance, which they sometimes do.  And I think it's also a factor in retention.  My child wants to go to church so often for the primary reason that she loves the other children there and doesn't get to see them any other time of the week.  But if she hadn't made those strong bonds there, there would be much less drive from her to go to church.  And, as we see, our teens often start to get to be reluctant to go to church, and we lose them.  I continued to go to church as a teen despite any strong friends who were active in my youth group, because we had a strong program--it had a sizable group, it was fun, and it was engaging. But if you have a small group, and no strong friendships, it's a rare UU youth who will prioritize religious education in a busy teen schedule.

Unfortunately, this means rocky roads for most UU religious education programs -- there's simply no magic formula to making friendships happen so that children will want to come to church. The best answer I have is this: One of the primary reasons someone comes to a UU church for the first time is because the person has been invited by someone that person knows.  What better person to invite than the parent(s) of your child's best friend?  If it works, you gain a friend at church, your church gains a member, and your child gains a reason to want to go to church. 

I can think of no better way to help our children be less religiously isolated, to help grow our religious education programs and churches, and to build the drive in our children and youth to want to come to church.

Dashed off a letter to the UUA today.  Leaving off the official's name to whom I addressed it, the text of it was as follows:

I am writing to you as a Unitarian Universalist minister and as a Girl Scout Troop Leader and Girl Scout Troop Organizer. I’ve paid attention over many years to the “continuing struggle for inclusiveness” situation between the UUA and the Boy Scouts, as outlined at http://www.uua.org/re/children/scouting/169633.shtml.

I’m proud as a Girl Scout leader that Girl Scouts do not share the Boy Scouts’ discrimination towards atheist and agnostic scouts and troop leaders nor their discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender scouts and troop leaders. Indeed, I proudly tell my Brownie Girl Scouts on a regular basis that the Girl Scout Promise, which includes the word “God,” can be, according to Girl Scouts USA, replaced by any Girl Scout to reflect her own spiritual beliefs. I model this in my troop meetings by replacing the word “God” in the GS Promise with “love,” “earth,” “peace,” and another of other terms.

Similarly, Girl Scouts has recently been in the news for their inclusive policies on transgender Girl Scouts, and has come down on the side of believing that any child who considers herself a Girl and wants to be a Girl Scout is welcome in Girl Scouting. I confirmed this through calling GSUSA directly and asking about transgender girls being welcomed in scouting, and through conversations with my own area coordinator.

That’s why I am disturbed that right under the “UUA and BSA” page on the UUA’s website, the next link is to a list of “Alternative Scouting Organizations,” and that this page then begins with stating “In addition to the popular Boy Scouts of America and Girl Scouts of the USA, there are other scouting organizations.” (http://www.uua.org/re/children/scouting/169569.shtml.) This statement makes it look like the UUA has problems with Girl Scouts similar to the problems with Boy Scouts, and perpetuates a common misunderstanding that Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts are related organizations that share common policies and practices, when this is not the case. Girl Scouts ought to be listed as an “Alternative Scouting Organization” along with Camp Fire USA, Navigators USA, Scouting for All, and SpiralScouts. I grew up in Camp Fire, and can say that I have found Girl Scouts every bit as welcoming, if not more so, to girls of regardless of race, religion, socioeconomic status, disability, sexual orientation or other aspect of diversity. My little troop last year was a group of girls who through themselves and their parents represented every aspect of that list of diversity types, in fact!

I’m hoping the wording on the UUA’s webpage can be changed to represent the positive relationship that the UUA has with Girl Scouting. If you are not the person who this letter should be directed to, please tell me who I can refer this issue to. This March is the 100th anniversary of Girl Scouts, and I’ll be highlighting Girl Scouts in our church this year, where several Girl Scouts have earned their “My Promise, My Faith” badge for learning about how the Girl Scout Law relates to the Unitarian Universalist Principles. I would love it if by the 100th anniversary our organization could show more support for this inclusive and supportive scouting institution.

Thank you for your care and attention to this issue.

In faith,

Cynthia Landrum
Minister
Universalist Unitarian Church of East Liberty
Clarklake, MI
Girl Scout Troop Leader & Troop Organizer