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Did you borrow my dictionary?

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As long as I have a post idea I haven’t used yet, I feel rich in material. What I always forget is that my idea bench is usually about one player deep.

I’d been meaning to do a post about how Christians have gone from complaining about the commercialization of Christmas to complaining about being left out of the holidays entirely, for some time. Last night I used it, and tonight I find myself swept and garnished of topics.

Which won’t stop me from posting. I’ll just write about myself. Haven’t tried that in, oh, a day or two.



I’m in the midst of a Christmas card crisis. I’m one of those tedious people who send a Christmas letter with their cards, and I have an annual protocol for it. First I write the letter. Then I translate it into Norwegian, so I can send it to my friends and relatives in the Old Country first, since mail takes longer to get there.

An indispensable tool for me over the years, in setting those letters in Norwegian, has been a book I acquired (oddly enough) during my sojourn in Florida. It’s an English-Norwegian dictionary, where you can look up the word in English and find the Norwegian equivalent (“Boat,” for instance, is “båt.” “Tree” is “tre” [which also stands in for “wood.”]. Squirrel, oddly enough, is “ekorn” in Norwegian. I’m not kidding).

But this year I’m being handicapped by the complete disappearance of my dictionary. It ought to be somewhere right around here by the computer, since I always leave things where I last used them, and never straighten the desk up. But I’ve been through all the piles and it’s nowhere.

I blame the elves (“nisser” in Norwegian).



Speaking of Norwegian, I see that my PBS station is broadcasting the new musical production, “Northern Lights: An Evening With Sissel” tonight. Chances are your PBS station is broadcasting it too, one of these nights, during the sacred Pledge season. I’m no great booster of PBS, but this is your chance to discover why I’ve been promoting this woman all these years. I expect you to watch it. You will be tested on the material.

Religion

Silent Night and Day

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More coming tomorrow. Snow, I mean. My old bones tell me we’re getting an inch or two more snow.



That’s a lie, by the way. My bones are indeed old, but they’re as surprised by the weather as I am most of the time. I get my weather off the radio and the internet these days, and those portents agree that it’ll probably snow tomorrow.

It looks very much as if our White Christmas is secure for 2007. Or “White Holiday,” as they say nowadays. I suppose singers make it, “White Season,” so it’ll scan. Anything to avoid the embarrassing, shocking word, “Christmas,” containing, as it does, the foul, profane syllable, “cris,” which must be kept at all costs from the ears of our children. (Or your children, anyway. I’ve done my bit for carbon neutrality and the maintenance of the gene pool by keeping my DNA to myself. No need to thank me. Just send a present.)

I’ve noticed there’s been some uproar from Christian groups over the Christmas advertising of the Kohl’s department store chain. The Kohl’s commercials (which star a very attractive woman who’s got a sort of Terri Hatcher thing going, I couldn’t help noticing) feature trappings and symbols that look Christmas-y in a generic, non-sectarian sort of way, but the music they use (to one’s amazement once one realizes it) is Cole Porter’s “De-Lovely,” hitherto never considered a trademark of the season.

All in all I disapprove. But I can’t help noting a certain irony in the situation.

Because I’m old, as mentioned above, and I can remember back in the 50s and 60s, when all the stores had Christmas sales, and Christmas decorations, and they played Christmas carols over the loudspeakers—and some of them even had crèches in their display windows.

And you know what? Christian leaders hated it. You’d hear it in their sermons, and read it in their letters to the editor. “Christmas is a holy festival of the Faith!” they’d say. “How dare these merchandisers hijack this blessed season for sordid gain!”

Which should be a lesson to all of us to be careful what we ask for.

Because the merchandisers have now done just what we wanted them to. They divorced their business entirely from our religious festival.

And we’re not happy at all with the result.

Reading

Drowning in Verbage

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Peter Suderman blogs, “The difficulty with reading these days is not that there is too little being written, or that no one is doing it, or even that no one is doing it well. It’s that there’s too much to read, too much to process. We are not short for words. We are drowning in them.”

Reading

Weekend reading report

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We got more snow today. I’m not sure how much. Three inches, maybe. It looks likely to be one of those ol’ fashun winters, like we used to have when I was a kid, back in the Later Pleistocene. One of my earliest memories is of going out of the house with Mom and my brother Moloch, through snow about waist high (considering that I was about three feet tall at the time), to my Dad’s old, World War II-era car. Might have been a Studebaker. He had one at some point along there.

The only thing is, that isn’t a real memory. Or rather, it’s a memory, not of the actual event, but of the film of it that Dad was taking with his Brownie movie camera that day. I’ve seen the movie enough times that, in my mind, I think I actually remember being there. But it’s all a construct.

Memory fascinates me. Especially my early memories. I have this idea (probably picked up from that quack, Freud) that if I could just pull the right memory up into God’s light, I’d solve all my problems.

Well, not the problem of making it through another winter, but other problems.

This weekend I read two books which follow up other books I recently reviewed, so what follows isn’t really meant to be a couple of reviews, just reader’s impressions.

Odd Thomas is the first of the three Odd Thomas books by Dean Koontz published to date. It was a hard read in a way, because I already knew (from Brother Odd) how it was going to end.

Nevertheless, Koontz completely blindsided me with the climax. And thinking back, I realize he telegraphed it from the beginning.

Well done!



Dragons From the Sea is a sequel to Judson Roberts’ Viking Warrior. Both are extremely well-written Young Adults about a young man in 9th Century Denmark who rises from slavery to become a warrior, and gets drawn into a grim drama of murder and revenge.

I enjoyed this volume almost as much as the first one. My only reservation is that in this episode Halfdan, the hero, joins a major Viking attack on France. Although the leaders justify the action as a necessary preemptive strike (I don’t think Roberts has a contemporary political message in mind here; he’s following history pretty closely), the realities of the thing are pretty brutal, and Halfdan does things it’s hard to root for.

(I pretty much dodged this problem in my Erling books. I sent Erling on one raid, but had it happen off-stage. Generally I kept him busy with politics and magical enemies.)

I still recommend Dragons From the Sea. It might not be for the more sensitive of the younger readers, though. (The violence isn’t gratuitous, and there’s no sex.) Good book.

Writing

Short Stories or Novels?

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“Is writing short stories first a good way to start ‘breaking into’ writing novels?” Author S.L. Farrell tries to answer this one with many commenters joining in. Farrell says short stories and novels are different. “You don’t learn to play piano by learning to play guitar,” he says. (via Jason Sanford, who is blogging on sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery now)

Goofing

Mysterious Map of America to Be Displayed

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The 1507 Waldseemuller map will go on display in the Library of Congress this month, but historians don’t understand it fully. The map was designed only thirteen years after Columbus landed on this side of the ocean, and modern scholars don’t know how the mapmakers knew enough to draw the land and oceans as accurately as they did.

TINFOIL HAT: So, why don’t we know how they could have designed this map? Could it be that someone doesn’t want us to know? Martians, or perhaps more likely, Brazilians?!?

Poetry

Christmas Trees by Robert Frost

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“He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;

My woods—the young fir balsams like a place

Where houses all are churches and have spires.

I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.”

From “Christmas Trees” by Robert Frost

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Notes from a cold climate

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The timing was spot on. In my mental calendar, November is a cool month that’s all about Thanksgiving. December is a white, snowy month that’s all about Christmas. So on the selfsame day that I turned the calendar page, the Frost Giants dropped four inches of heavenly sugar on us, like theater techies lowering the “Winter Scene” backdrop from the flyspace over the year’s stage, right on cue.

But four inches was all it was. No mighty blizzard. Commerce did not cease. Schools wouldn’t have closed if it had been a weekday (probably some would have been delayed, but they wouldn’t have closed).

It did keep me from doing any Christmas shopping. The roads were kind of slick, and as you know, one of my secret shames is that Mrs. Hermanson, my Chevy Tracker, does not actually have operative four wheel drive.

I did go out, though, to my regular Chinese buffet. The Guangzhou Restaurant in Robbinsdale has become my steady Saturday lunch venue. Their buffet is not extensive, but it’s good food, and not expensive. And now they know me, and pretty much expect me. I’ve achieved the status of “regular.” They don’t actually know my name, but I have a regular booth.

It’s not hard to have a regular booth on Saturdays at the Guangzhou. I think they do a pretty fair weekday business, but on Saturdays I’m sometimes the only one around. If I don’t show up, I think of all that food going to waste, and I feel guilty. (Not that most of it doesn’t go to waste even if I do show up. Even I don’t eat that much.)

But I didn’t drive there. That is silly on the face of it, I know. All summer, when the walking was easy, I drove to the restaurant. Saturday, when the arctic wind was blowing and snow was piling up, I trudged through the drifts. This was because, aside from the minimal danger of dying of exposure, my feet were more dependable than my slightly bald tires would have been on the streets that day.

I think I’ll walk to the restaurant more often in the future.

Starting next spring.

Via Mirabilis: You know that Gospel of Judas that National Geographic made a big production of last year? The one that suggested that Judas was actually following Jesus’ instructions in betraying him, and was a great saint in Heaven?

Never mind.

Turns out it was just a bad translation.

Could happen to anybody, right? Who among us has not promoted a major TV special and sponsored a national promotional campaign on the basis of a quick-and-dirty, slanted translation?

You don’t imagine there was any agenda here, do you? Is it possible that some people at NG jumped the gun on publication and fact-checking because they had an ax to grind against Christianity?

No, no. Forget I suggested it.

Reading, Religion

Reading Theology

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Joe Holland blogs about why he “Can’t Stop Reading Thomas Boston,” a Scottish minister who wrote on covenant and reformed theology.

He ministers to my soul by consistently taking me to the only One who can satisfy my soul. This is why so much of the modern, cross-centered movement has latched onto Puritans like Boston. They and I have found in him a kindred spirit, a teacher, a pastor, a theologian, a man thoroughly captivated by Jesus Christ.

For my part, I heard a couple sermons from Kelly Kapic who has worked on books by John Owen, particularly Overcoming Sin and Temptation. The modern church needs to be revived with the teaching of these men for our better health.