Blog - Christmas

“Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.”
So, tells Matthew in 2:7-8, said King Herod to the wise men after learning from them that the king of the Jews had been born.

Merry Christmas!

This morning, I found myself trolling some earlier blogs I wrote about Advent and Christmas, trying to remember what thoughts I have had about them in the past (I have lots of thoughts, but can hold on to only one or two at a time).

I know Christmas is around the corner (even my family is starting to bust out the Christmas decorations), but Advent does yet have dibs on our attention for a short spell.

Saturday, my father, my daughter, and two friends went to cut our Christmas tree.  Every year, we march out to some spot out of town for the annual sawing down of the Tannenbaum.

If you have never read Wendell Berry, or worse, never heard of him, stop reading this blog this very moment and go to your nearest local bookstore to buy his stuff up before your neighbor snags all the goods first.

I’m a soul and I like cake.

Appropriately, I think, I tend to keep personal updates off of my OMG Facebook page.

I was fussing with the idea of re-posting this blog this week, but then a friend of mine made reference to it today, and I viewed it as a sign that maybe I should just as well go ahead and do it for the third year running.

We have been waiting for weeks now to sing that very first verse: “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!”

This blog will be laced with obscenities.

So rumor had it, when I was young and svelte, that when a person ages, their metabolism slows down, and they gain weight more easily, and it takes a lot longer to work it off.

So tonight I learned that the tradition of paper advent calendars with windows that open to chocolate, or, for the more pious of us, Bible verses, started in Germany in the early 1900s.

A week ago or so a pastor friend of mine posted this text from Psalm 23, verse 6, on her Facebook page: “Your beauty and love chase after me everyday of my life.”

Today we awoke to a Christmas Day for the picture books.

Those are Holden Caulfield’s words, not mine, from J.D. Salinger’s book The Catcher in the Rye.

I am decorating for Advent.

In the bleak midwinter, frost wind made moan,

These days I’m reading a lot of the Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann.