How to Make a Wishing Shrine

From an early age, we're taught to make wishes. We wish upon the first star we see in the nighttime sky. We make a wish when we blow out all of our birthday candles on a cake. We wish on a falling star on a warm summer night. So, what makes us stop making wishes?

Inspired by Noelle Oxenhandler's book The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, My Soul: A Memoir of Fulfilled Desire (Random House, 2008), my friends and I set out to make our own wishes come true. In her book, Oxenhandler describes the importance of visually representing your dreams to help make them into realities. One way she did that was by creating a wishing shrine. Placed in conspicuous place in your home, a wishing shrine reminds you of one true wish you want to obtain. A wishing shrine is easy to make if you follow the steps below.

1. Obtain an empty box. You can use any type of small box that you have lying around your house. I used an empty box of chocolates, while my friends used a cigar box and a shoe box. If you're handy with wood, you can even build your own box.

2. Decorate the outside of your box. Your goal is to cover up anything on the outside of the box that you don't want showing. You can use acrylic paint, decorative paper, tin foil, wrapping paper, or anything else you have to cover up the box. I glued scrapbook paper to each side of the box to cover up the chocolate box's nutrition information and pictures.

3. Add items inside your box to depict your wish. You can cut out pictures from a magazine, make paper replicas of your wish, or glue small objects. You can also use stamps and lettering sets to add words to your box. One of my friends, who wished for money, glued small fake gold coins, paper palm trees, puffy stickers of beach wear, and shiny necklaces to her box.

4. Decide where to place your shrine. Choose a place that the shrine will be visible to you on a daily basis because you want to be reminded of your wish often. My shrine hangs on the wall next to my bed, where I see it when I wake up and go to bed, and a friend placed hers in her living room, where she spends most of her time in her house.

Using these steps, my friends and I had a fun night creating our wishing shrines. Because we varied in the amount of creativity in our backgrounds and in the way we envisioned our shrines, each one was a unique representation of our greatest desire.

If you're interested in buying Noelle Oxenhandler's book for more ideas about making wishes come true, visit these websites:

www.barnesandnoble.com
www.amazon.com
www.borders.com