Blog - Advent

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.

Google yields only one pop song, and an iffy one at that, with the word “finitude” in its lyrics.

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.

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

I am decorating for Advent.

“Let’s write words in the snow, Elsegirl,” I told my seven-year old daughter, after she had pulled me out to play in the 9° Sioux Falls nippiness yesterday afternoon.

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

Reader Question:

adventure (n.) early 13c., auenture “that which happens by chance, fortune, luck,” from O.Fr. aventure (11c.) “chance, accident, occurrence, event, happening,” from L. adventura (res) “(a thing) about to happen,” from adventurus, future participle of advenire “to come to, reach, arrive at,” from ad- “to” (see ad-) + venire “to come” (see venue). Meaning developed through “risk/danger” (a trial of one’s chances) and “perilous undertaking” (early 14c.) and thence to “a novel or exciting incident” (1560s). The -d- was restored 15c.-16c. Venture is a 15c. variant. As a verb, c.1300, “to risk the loss of;” early 14c. “to take a chance.”