mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (winter berries)
(Written Christmas night)

I enjoyed the day today - mostly, anyway. I had a sneaky headache that wouldn't go away, but other than that it was fine with me. Rob didn't enjoy it so much, I think. He's not used to kids and we had three small ones (three under three, that is, plus a couple of somewhat bigger ones) and one in particular who kept making a ruckus every time he didn't get his way about something. We weren's sure if we were coming home today or tomorrow but the noise level decided it, I think. (I kept thinking of Dr Seuss: "Oh the noise! noise! noise! noise!") So we stayed until about 5:00 and then drove on home. We got here about 7:30, which wasn't too bad.

Of course, since I said that I didn't mind Christmas Eve services because of the carols, the service we went to turned out to be a sort of a mildly-icky contemporary service, not at all like the last time we went to that church. There were carols, but they were interspersed randomly (as far as I could tell) with songs I'd never heard before, none of which were Christmas-related at all. I call that false advertising. -- Oh, and I almost forgot the very best part: apparently they are in desperate need of a proofreader for the program that was handed out - one of the carols was billed, no joke, as "Hark, The Harold Angels Sin".

I was going to write more about Christmas, but I'm very tired and it's late. I'll talk about gifts and stuff tomorrow.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (winter berries)
Col wrote an entry about how we should celebrate Candlemas instead of Christmas, on the premise that what you want to do this time of year is drive the darkness away. I don't think it'll catch on but I like the idea. I was thinking about this issue because I've been addressing what I still call Christmas cards, although most of the ones I send nowadays usually say "Happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". I've noticed that in internet circles, anyway, there's a lot of interest in celebrating something-that-is-not-Christmas, whether you call it Candlemas or Yule or Solstice or Festivus, or just the "Winter Holidays" (my old employer has used that one the last couple of years). I know a lot of non-Christians feel left out by Christmas, although I never really did even when I stopped being a Christian - I think it's because I loved Christmas as a kid and I don't really have bad associations with it to speak of. Plus, my family was prone to shoving religion down your throat all year 'round, not just at Christmas - for some reason, less so at Christmas, really. And the only part of the Christ story I really like, still, is the Christmas part. It's sort of a sweet story as long as you leave out the bit about Herod slaying infants (and even that part is undeniably interesting), and I have to admit that I still rather like things like kids dressed up as angels and doing silly Christmas pageants, and I like Christmas carols, darnit. It's a hard thing to reconcile.

Since I wrote the paragraph above, somebody else wrote an entry I like about "the reason for the season" and, for one thing, how that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Christianity. At least part of it is just that name is so loaded, don't you think? Christmas - Christ-mass. It's almost an unsolveable problem, because of that. If you're not a Christian, you don't like that word. If you are a Christian, you're touchy about it. Well, not ALL Christians are, I'm sure. But the ones that are loud about it are, anyway - the "put Christ back in Christmas" crowd. Like practically everything else in American culture, it's all about the big divide between Christians and non-Christians. (That seems to be a peculiarly American thing. Do other countries have this problem, to the degree we do?)


(In honor of Holidailies, or the holidays, or something, I changed my theme to a really obnoxious - pink!! - Christmasholiday one. If you're seeing your own theme instead of mine, you can see the obnoxious one by clicking here. I dunno, we'll see how long I can stand it.)
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (dragon)
You know, I was a bit surprised that anybody wanted to attempt to film The Golden Compass in the first place. I mean, yeah, there's the "rousing adventure story" component - I bet they sold it with that image of Lyra riding the bear, just like the book - but there's also the difficult religious aspects, which everybody who's interested has probably already heard about in the last few weeks.

I loved the books.
possible spoilers ahoy! )

Edited to add that there happens to be a Golden Compass in 15 Minutes available in downloadable installments. (Yeah, I know it'd be easier to just read it on the web, but it's for charity, so be nice, you grinches.)


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