5-minute Christmas skit

As Christmas approaches and the decorations begin to go up, one of the best ways to spread the Christmas spirit is by putting up a Christmas play that tells the story of the nativity of Jesus. Christmas is celebrated by people around the world, but there are a lot of people who do not know the story behind the celebration. The story of Jesus's birth is a beautiful tale of hope, love and divine providence, and enacting it makes the festival meaningful for everyone.

Below is a script for a short Christmas skit. This script presents the main events of the nativity story. The conclusion in particular, explains the relevance of the Christmas message for us today. The script is written for an audience who may be unfamiliar with the story of Christmas, and so keeps things simple. While this skit itself takes just around 5 minutes (or less!), the length and sophistication of the entire performance can be adjusted by including carols, props, lighting and other stage settings. This play is suitable to perform in a school, office, community gathering, or a variety of other contexts.

The Christmas Story - A Light for the World

Download script

Following are some carols that can be sung or played before or after the skit, or at appropriate moments during the skit:

• Silent night
• Mary's boy child
• Joy to the world
• Hark, the herald angels sing
• O come all ye faithful
• Away in a manger
• O holy night 
• What child is this
• Shepherds:
• Angels we have heard on high
• The first noel
• Wise men:
• We three kings

Copyright info: This script was developed from an initial script written by Fatima Oliver. This script is completely free from copyright restrictions and can be freely downloaded, shared and performed.

Use this script to share the heart-warming story of Christmas with everyone.

Saint Severus of Vienne

An evangeliser from India to France

Feast day: 8 August 

While native Indian saints like St. Gonsalo Garcia and St. Joseph Vaz who lived in the last 500 years are well known, it would surprise many to hear that there was a native Indian saint back in the fifth century. The Roman Martyrology, the official record of saints of the Catholic church, has this to say about the little-known St. Severus of Vienne: 

'At Vienne, in France, St. Severus, priest and confessor, who undertook a painful journey from India in order to preach the Gospel in that city, and converted a great number of Pagans to the faith of Christ by his labours and miracles.' 

So, who was this man, who traversed deserts and oceans, but was lost in the sands and flowing water of time? Severus was a priest and missionary who evangelised in the city of Vienne in south-east France and constructed many churches. 

Severus was said to be Indian by birth. He was a man of great wealth. His parents died when he was very young. Severus sold his possessions and distributed the money among the poor. Following God's call, he was ordained a priest and travelled to Vienne. At that time, there were still pagans who worshipped false gods and idols in the region. Severus stopped at a place called Vogaria before reaching Vienne. Here, he knocked down a tree dedicated to pagan worship. He found a treasure buried at the foot of the tree. Severus used it to found a chapel in honour of St. Alban (now the church of Saint-Alban-du-Rhône) and he baptised the pagans there. 

Severus settled in Vienne around the year 430. In Vienne, there was a famous temple known as 'The temple of the hundred gods', because it contained the idols of numerous pagan gods. With just a prayer of the saint, the temple fell to the ground. Seeing this, an exceedingly large number of pagans converted to Christianity. Severus began the construction of a church dedicated to the protomartyr Stephen at the exact spot where the temple consecrated to pagan idols stood earlier. While digging the earth to quarry stones for the construction, a silver vase, full of coins was discovered. Recognising that this was divine providence, and a sign of confirmation of his mission, Severus gave thanks to God and distributed a part of the money to the poor, and the rest was used for the upkeep of the building and to provide for the needs of the worshipers there. The vase in which the money was found was used at the altar of the church for centuries. 

There is an interesting story about Severus and St. Germanus (c. 378-448), the bishop of Auxerre. Germanus had promised that he would attend the dedication of the church of St Stephen, and when he died, his body was borne through Vienne on the day of the dedication of the church and carried into the church. 

Severus died around the year 455 in Italy, but his body was brought back and buried in the church of St. Stephen, which he had constructed, and which would later take the name of St. Severus. The church was rebuilt at the end of the 11th century and abandoned in the beginning of the 18th century. Its remains are still visible, embedded in a building. Thanks to the work of St. Severus, the last vestiges of paganism in that region were wiped out. The city of Saint-Sève in France is named after Saint Severus of Vienne. St. Severus of Vienne is considered as a saint in the Catholic as well as Orthodox churches, like all other saints prior to 1050.

Saint Severus was a man who did not let his wealth become an obstacle to attaining holiness, and could end paganism by the power of prayer. We can surely count on his intercession to help us stand up to modern-day versions of paganism: materialism and the worship of money. We can also pray for his intercession for the people of his homeland: the Indian sub-continent and its neighbourhood, many parts of which are undergoing crises. Severus' life is a reminder that Jesus was also an Asian, and there is a need to preach his Gospel in Europe too. He will also surely intercede for Indians living in France and Europe. 

In other languages:

French: Saint Sévère de Vienne

Spanish: San Severo de Vienne

(The sources for this write-up are the references listed in the Wikipedia article on St. Severus.)

The image shows a mereau (token) of the chapter of St. Severus of Vienne, dated 1524, that entitled the bearer to receive food. The token shows St. Severus holding a chained devil in his hand. This is because of an incident when he drove the demons away from a road where they had already killed a man.

An illustration of St. Severus of Vienne from the Facebook and Instagram pages of the Diocese of Grenoble

An impression of St. Severus of Vienne generated by MetaAI (with Llama 3.1). Like the old coin, it shows St. Severus with a chained devil.

When does night end and day begin?

A wise guru once asked his disciples: "How can we determine the hour of dawn, when the night ends and the day begins?"

One of the disciples suggested: "When from a distance you can distinguish between a dog and a sheep?"

"No," was the answer of the guru.

"It is when one can distinguish between a mango tree and a banyan tree?" asked a second disciple.

"No," the guru said.

"Please tell us the answer then," said the disciples.

"You know the light has come," said the wise teacher, "when you can look into the face of another human being and you have enough light in you to recognize your brother or your sister. Until then it is night, and darkness is still with us."

- earliest known publication with a similar story: Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit, Henri J. M. Nouwen, 2004

Konkani Wikipedia launched

It was milestone in the history of literary Konkani when the Konkani Wikipedia came into existence in June 2015; when the efforts of volunteers spread over nearly a decade bore fruit and thus, today there is a functional wikipedia with articles on a wide variety of topics, written from the point of view of Konkani people.

In March 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs all the Wikipedia sites, approved the Konkani Wikipedia, and the process of creation of the new wikipedia was completed in the end of June 2015. The Konkani Wikipedia project had been started in the 'Incubator', the place where the foundation starts new projects, in 2006. However, initially, there was little progress, and the pace of development only picked up in September 2013 with support from organisations like India Access to Knowledge, Goa University, Nirmala Institute of Education and Dalgado Konknni Akademi.

The Konkani Wikipedia has been assigned the URL:

gom.wikipedia.org

Here 'gom' is the ISO code for the language that is called Goan Konkani in order to differentiate it from the group of dialects spoken in Maharashtra. This group of dialects have features in common with both the Marathi and Konkani languages, and have been assigned the ISO code knn, and is called as Maharashtrian Konkani.

The new Konkani Wikipedia is a tri-script Wikipedia, with articles in the Devanagari, Latin (Romi) and Kannada scripts. There are around 1000 pages in the Devanagari script, 700 in the Roman script, and 100 in the Kannada script.

Not only the content, but even the interface and menus are available in both the Devanagari and Latin scripts. Although the default script of the Wikipedia interface is Devanagari, users can easily change it to Latin using a language selector feature.

There is also a proposal to develop a script converter, so that articles written in any script can be read in any other, but this is likely to take considerable time. For now, it is time to savour what is probably the moment when Konkani truly enters the online world.

Saint John Paul II and India map

Here is a nice map that shows some places in India that have something to do with Saint John Paul II. Click on the icons for trivia about the connection to John Paul.



John Paul II had a special love for India and India loved him too. He visited India twice.

Translation of a research paper into English

A New Theory for Preparing Models in Order to Analyse Engineering Structures

D. Simoes and Prof. T. A. Jadhav (both affiliated with Sinhgad College, Pune)

Note: This is a translation into English of this research paper

Abstract
In this paper, a new theory for preparing models by using  'finite elements'  is described, in which the integration is performed at the corner points of the element, instead of points in the interior. A user subroutine (UEL) in the Fortran programming language was written in order to test a new formulation in the finite element software Abaqus. Some test cases were analysed and the results were presented.

1. Introduction

I shall begin by explaining how the technique that is known as the 'Finite Element Method' (FEM) was invented years ago:

Figure 1. The invention of FEM

Figure 1 contains an accurate description of FEM, except that I did not invent it.

The way in the equations for calculating the stresses and displacements in an element (i.e. a single rectangle, in this case) are written and simplified is called as the 'finite element formulation'

Ever since research into finite element formulations began in the 1970s, the numerical integration (remember your calculus?) has been performed at some points in the interior of the element, because it's easier that way. However, performing the integration at the corners of the element (called 'nodes') has some advantages of its own and the first descriptions about this approach have been around since around 2000.

There's this awesome software called Abaqus that solves problems based on FEM. It contains element formulations already coded in. In case you're finding life boring and are not satisfied with the mundane, there's a feature known as the 'User ELement' or UEL, that lets you code your own element formulation and make Abaqus use it.

Figure 2. Sometimes when you are bored, one does something challenging, like writing an Abaqus UEL

In this paper we describe a formulation proposed by two awesome-sauce researchers, G. Castellazzi and P. Krysl. We then implement a new type of element, somewhat based on this approach, in Abaqus by writing a user subroutine (UEL).

We assume that the structures we are trying to model follow the Mindlin-Reissner plate theory.

2. Element formulation

After a series of several mind-bending-extremely-complex-equations-that-I-find-difficult-to-understand-myself, we arrive at

Figure 3 explains the indices:

Figure 3. Nodal patch illustrated for various mesh configurations

This, simply put, says that it is possible to approximate the strain at a node, by the weighted average of the strains of all the elements connected to that node, not without a few caveats, disclaimers and exceptions.

3. Abaqus implementation

At this interesting stage, I raise the stakes and put on my programmer's hat above my FEM hat (did you notice the watermelon above the gas cylinder in figure 2?).

We made several approximations and simplifications in the element formulation to get around the limitations of the Abaqus UEL, and write a FORTRAN code for the element formulation. We then prepared two simple FEM models (figures 4 and 5) and used these two as guinea pigs to try out the element formulation.

Figure 4. Simply supported plate with concentrated load

Figure 5. Clamped strip

4. Results

The table below shows the comparison between the results obtained in the two FEM models using the known formulae for the exact value of the displacement, the inbuilt element formulation in Abaqus, and the formulation that we coded in the UEL.

Table 1. Displacement results of test cases

Test case	Exact displacement	Abaqus inbuilt elements	New formulation UEL
Figure 5. Simply supported plate	0.021138	0.021502	0.014779
Figure 6. Clamped strip	29.468	28.894	24.224

5. Conclusion

As can be seen from the table, our code for the UEL formulation sucks. We would like to shift the blame to the the assumptions made in order to implement in Abaqus UEL, and due to the research being at an initial stage. What other researchers can learn from our mistakes is that Abaqus UEL is not suitable for implementing formulations that involve nodal integrations. To paraphrase Edison, we have not failed to implement this formulation accurately in Abaqus, but we have found one way that won't work. At least we have now learnt more about element formulations and Abaqus than we knew earlier.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the helpful people at Faurecia for permitting the use of their resources in order to run some of the simulations. We would also like to thank you, our families and friends who are always there for us. Science rocks, and praise God for that! :)

How lucky are you?

Something to ponder:

• If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of this world.
• If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.
• If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace, you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.
• If you can go to church without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death, you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.
• If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.
• Only one in a hundred people receive a college education.
• Only one in a hundred people own a computer.
• If you can read this message, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.

As you read this and are reminded how life is in the rest of the world, remember just how blessed you really are!