“The critics said it couldn’t be done, but the vision and determination of General David Petraeus have brought greater security and cause for optimism to the people of Iraq. He is The Sunday Telegraph’s Person of the Year.” This British newspaper has better perspective, at least on this subject, than some stateside magazines.

Since the Walkers are doing Christmas this Saturday, I haven’t actually gotten much in the way of presents yet (special thanks, though, are due to Cousin Trygve in Norway, who sent a chocolate Santa from the inimitable Freya Company). One gift I have gotten was a fifty dollar grocery store card from the dominant local chain.

Since I have to get ready for Saturday, I figured I’d use the card to get what I needed, and do some stocking up, too. I mean, fifty bucks! I’ve never spent fifty bucks at the grocery store in my life. The very idea of spending that much seemed to me an all but impossible task. Do they make grocery carts that big, I wondered.

So when I went through the check-out line with my laden cart, imagine my surprise when the total came to more than a hundred dollars.

I was able to pay the balance. That’s not a problem. And I wasn’t throwing away money on non-essentials, by and large. Mainly I was stocking up on my usual staples.

And I realize that, when I deduct the value of the card, I got a really good deal.

It’s just that I’m not used to spending money at the grocery store the same way you folks with families do. I’m not used to shopping at that… altitude.

The oxygen’s a little thin up there, isn’t it?

I missed this news from several months ago and heard it again today as part of an immigration discussion. Bob Clark, the director of the popular holiday film A Christmas Story (as well as a variety of silly or stupid movies), was killed by an illegal immigrant who was driving drunk on April 4. I’m not one to call for rounding up all illegal immigrants and kicking them out, but it seems to me basic access points should be enforced. No one here illegally should be allowed to drive, and transportation workers, meaning truck drivers from other countries, should be properly trained on the rules of the road in both countries. Is that not common sense?

I suppose it wasn’t my first Christmas. I would have been about five months old then. And almost certainly not my second either. But it’s one of my earliest memories. A dark winter morning. My father woke me and carried me down the stairs into the living room. And there was a tree decorated with colored lights and glittering ornaments. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. In fact, I’m pretty sure that that was the moment when the category “beautiful” entered my conceptual world. The tree was wonderful in itself. But then he showed me that there were brightly wrapped packages under the tree. Presents! Toys for me! My joy was total, unmarred by philosophy or irony or trauma or experience.

And someday—and fewer years are left between today and that day than now have passed since that first remembered Christmas—my Father will take me, not down the stairs, but up the stairs, through the dark into a place full of lights and color and beauty. And there will be gifts there too, wonderful enough to make me forget all the wrong lessons I’ve learned in the course of sabotaging my own life.

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3) We often say that Christmas is for children, but we forget that we are all to be children, when it comes to receiving the Gift.

Merry Christmas.

Once again I share a Chesterton poem for Christmas. Unfortunately, this year it’s the same poem as last year. This is because of something I learned last night.

I have DVDs of three of the movie versions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I have the Sim version (of course), the George C. Scott version, and the musical “Scrooge” with Albert Finney (a little silly, but that’s the function of musicals). It’s my practice to view all three during the Christmas season.

Last night I watched the Scott version, and because it’s relatively faithful to the text, I followed along with my copy of The Annotated Christmas Carol, edited by Michael Patrick Hearn. In Stave Three, there’s a passage that goes, “All this time the chesnuts (sic) and the jug went round and round; and by and bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim….” Hearn says in a footnote here, “Apparently Dickens had no specific carol in mind; no such song has been found in Sandys’ or any other collection. G. K. Chesterton apparently realized this omission; in his Poems (1926) he included a verse, ‘A Child of the Snows,’ which might stand for Tiny Tim’s song until another might be found.”



It goes like this:

A Child of the Snows

There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,

And never before or again,

When the nights are strong with a darkness long,

And the dark is alive with rain.

Never we know but in sleet and in snow,

The place where the great fires are,

That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth

And the heart of the earth a star.

And at night we win to the ancient inn

Where the child in the frost is furled,

We follow the feet where all souls meet

At the inn at the end of the world.

The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,

For the flame of the sun is flown,

The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold,

And a Child comes forth alone.



Merry Christmas. Glade Jul.

Tomorrow, I guess, is the Winter Solstice. There was some discussion on the subject on Dennis Prager’s show today, and the conclusion seemed to be that the solstice came on the 21st last year, but will be on the 22nd this year. Sounds fishy to me. I suspect it’s a plot by the Global Warming conspiracists, intended to give them an excuse to release fiery press releases tomorrow, condemning the Bush administration for delaying the rotation of the earth for the benefit of Haliburton.

I’ve always been happy that we have a holiday featuring lots of colored lights at this particular time of the year. I go to work in the dark, and come home in the dark. I need colored lights. I’m confident any competent health professional would agree.

Incidentally, this is St. Thomas’ Day, the anniversary of the killing of Erling Skjalgsson, hero of my novel, The Year of the Warrior. It was a dark day when Erling died, not least for St. Olaf Haraldsson, who had some culpability in his death. But that’s a story for another novel, which (alas) will probably never be written.

The days are even shorter in Norway than here in Minnesota, this time of year. The Norwegians used to think of Jul (Christmas) as an old woman who came to visit now. Today she took a seat in the chimney corner. Tomorrow and the day after she would sit in two other kitchen corners. Christmas Eve she got the “high seat,” the best seat in the house, where she would be the guest of honor all the way to Epiphany. It was believed that there was no point doing any work today. If baking was done, the dough would rise wrong. In the oven, the cakes or cookies would move around, and you’d never get them out again. So give Mom a break.

At the precise moment when the sun “turned” (it was believed), the horns of the cows would loosen—but just for that moment. Also at that moment, all water turned to wine, then to poison, and then back to water again.

You’ve been warned.

The concert of Sissel and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is scheduled for tonight on my PBS station. Be on the watch for it in your own market.

I’m feeling better, thanks for asking. Not actually well, but I’m slogging back up the trail to my normal level of health, which (come to think of it) isn’t that high a climb.

Today was the last day for classes at the Bible School and Seminary. Students were stressed over their final tests and excited about going home for the holidays. We also had a farewell for my African assistant, who’s going home now. No doubt he’ll be relieved to give up working for me in exchange for going back to being the bishop of an entire diocese in his home country.

The more I think about that, the more bizarre it appears. Sometimes it’s necessary for God to teach His children humility, but using me as the instrument seems excessive.

All things considered, today was an improvement. I feel marginally better than yesterday. The Cold From… well, I’ll say Sniffleheim, which is a pun on the name of a bad place in Norse mythology that you probably wouldn’t recognize, seems to be retreating at last. And I stopped at a body shop after work to get an estimate on my bumper. They offered to let one of the technicians reattach it with a couple screws as a “side job,” and I got away for twenty bucks, which the girl who did the damage has promised to send me.

Ed Veith, over at Cranach, makes the sad announcement that the Luther At the Movies blog has been put to bed forever. However, Dr. Luther’s “miserable, execrable assistant,” Anthony Sacramone, has joined the blogging stable at First Things, so that’s some consolation.

He does a gorgeous takedown of The Golden Compass here.

New Line Cinema and MGM Studios have made an agreement with Peter Jackson to produce The Hobbit and a sequel film over the next few years.

Jackson and Walsh envisioned the first film covering the events of “The Hobbit” and the second bridging the 80-year gap between that novel and the first “Lord of the Rings” book.

It was that vision that led MGM, which holds the film rights to the book and is looking for new movie franchises, to insist that Jackson and Walsh make the films.

“Once (they) played out their vision for ‘The Hobbit’ as two movies … MGM just took the position that we wanted to deal with Peter and it was not an option to do it with anybody else,” Sloan said.

Here’s an appropriate quote for our modern political climate, courtesy of Bartleby.com.

“If you elect a matinee idol mayor, you’re going to have a musical comedy administration.” — Robert Moses, U.S. public official from New Haven, Connecticut

That could apply to a variety of people, couldn’t it?