Chemistree

Chemistree

What is this thing?  For the past several years I have put this thing out somewhere in the chemistry department during the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Except for the lights, everything on it is made of chemistry lab equipment: a ring stand, rings, clamps, and various flasks filled with colored water.  (It's just food coloring; not exotic, toxic, and expensive to dispose of heavy metals.)

It's a Chemistree.

I saw one of these on Facebook several years ago and decided I needed to make one, too.  It's not hard to do, and even fun to set up and show off.  This year it even got a shout out on Facebook from a colleague.

But why?  

The obvious answer is that it is a play on one of our main Christmas traditions, the Christmas tree.  The frame are the branches, the flasks are the ornaments, and the ring of lights on the top is a star.  All it needs are a some presents underneath.  (Bottles of chemicals the students needs for their senior research projects, perhaps?)

But why not just put up a Christmas tree, then?  Because the Christmas tree is a symbol.  It points us to something else.  First and foremost, it is a symbol of the coming of Jesus Christ.  It helps us to remember the incarnation, the entering of God into the world.  Not because we deserve it, but because without his coming, death, and resurrection, we could not be reconciled to him.  

Switching to more personal reasons, I like Christmas trees because of the lights.  Winter is dark; the days are short and the nights are long, so the lights on the tree help to brighten my days and cheer me up.  As a result, we tend to leave our tree up longer than many--there's as much darkness in the months following Christmas as there is before.  Our family tree gets covered with ornaments that have been collected for years and years.  Each year everyone in the family gets a new one.  So that tree is covered with memories: stuffed animals, Veggietales characters, gold and silver stars, antique ornaments from our parents homes, and fine blown glass.  But all these decorations still point us back to the Christ child, gifts to each other to remind us of God's gift to us.  The tree is about Jesus, but it is for us.  It is good when we take this symbol and make it our own--tying our lives to the life of our Savior.  

The Chemistree serves a similar purpose.  We make it from the things in the lab.  We make it from the tools that we chemists use to probe and study the creation.  The creation that was created in and by the babe whose birth we remember at this time of the year.  Thus, using the equipment that helps us steward God's creation, we celebrate his coming to redeem us.

And so we come to the reason for the Chemistree.  Jesus comes to redeem his people, and he comes to reconcile all things, even the atoms and molecules that these tools enable us to manipulate.

Soli Deo Gloria