Tag Archives: Christmas

Merry Christmas…

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No Friday post, I know! So bad of me. It wasn’t our anniversary, but it was our only day to celebrate it. Seventeen years ago of a lovely December day, Dave and I were married. Outside were the frost-covered trees; inside were the stained-glass windows and the beginnings of an unforeseen adventure together. We had no idea that trying to do right by our own youthful foolishness would put us so far ahead in life.

In fact, we had no idea whether it would work at all. Sometimes it didn’t seem so.

But it has. It has more than worked.

I wish you all a wonderful holiday week. (Don’t drink and drive, do bless a random stressed-out person if the opportunity avails itself.) I’ll be back at it in January. See you then.

How do I explain Newtown to my children?

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Nothing makes such horrible loss any less horrible.

And so, I’ve found myself struggling with how to put it in context for my kids.

Not too long ago, a pastor acquaintance at an urban church posted this link to a proposed cease-fire in Burma which would end 60 years of conflict. To North Americans, this is irrelevant. Just another foreign turf war, and after all, there are so many. But for that pastor and his congregation, this was deeply emotional news. Eighty percent of his congregation are refugees, the majority of them Burmese. They have seen their neighbors and loved ones shot. They have lost, and lost, and lost. When asked if they would like to send their children to summer camp, their response was, “Will I ever see my children again?” Because to them, the word “camp” means refugee camp. It means permanent dislocation.

They are people of war and grief and loss. And they are not farther from God and goodness than we are.

But where we live, it’s easy to mistake the relative peace in our lives for relative goodness in ourselves and those around us. We tell ourselves we’re the ones who go out to solve the rest of the world’s problems, because, look at our peace and prosperity. It shocks us when our sense of goodness and order is violated by the brute facts of human nature: This is not a good world.

Nothing makes such horrible loss any less horrible. Nothing.

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The Seasonal WalMart Report

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I thought this would be a rant. As it turns out, my head hurts too much, and I have been cowed into such a numb state of submission that there is in fact very little rant left in me.

We all but completed our Christmas shopping yesterday, and I managed to survive the Emporium of International Corporate Clone Doom. I would have preferred going down Rosser Avenue into the old district and supporting some of the little shops there — always struggling, closing down more and more often. There’s a bookstore I’d like to get into before it disappears, as so many other places have, in fact it’s located in my favourite piece of Brandon architecture, one I’ve scooped up and relocated into a fictional small-town storyworld. There’s also a fair-trade international shop, and I do love that sort of thing.

Even the “old” mall is somewhat better, in my view. It’s not completely the bottom of the disposable junk barrel the way the new Corral Center is. However, we didn’t get there. Instead, four elves–oops, I mean imps–dodged each other, secrets in hand, through the aisles of WalMart. Continue reading →