Surprisingly entertaining after the 1:30 mark.



And another one -

Peace on Earth...

...from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

It was Christmas Eve babe...

In the drunk tank....

Merry Christmas

Have a Merry Star Wars Christmas.

Thoughts on Midnight Mass...

...Father Landry:

There is something beautifully symbolic about the tradition of Midnight Mass. It shows that Christians are so eager for Christmas to begin that they want to start celebrating on the first moment of Christmas day. People who ordinarily never go out late at night and are often at that hour dressed in pajamas and sleeping soundly adjust their sleep schedules to get up, put on their best clothes and head out alert to their parish churches.


The Christmas midnight Mass is the antithesis of the growing tendency to try to make the practice of the faith convenient and easy. It’s a bulwark against the propensity to fit the celebration of Christmas and the worship of God into our crowded life; it is, rather, an annual reminder that we are called to make our lives revolve around the mysteries of faith and that those mysterious realities are worth changing sleep patterns and inconveniencing ourselves.

For this reason, it’s highly fitting that the Gospel at Midnight Mass focuses on the shepherds awake in the fields to whom the angels appeared with the message of good news of great joy. As Pope Benedict reminded us in his Christmas Midnight Mass homily last year, the example of the shepherds emphasizes — as perennial lessons for the Christian life — the virtues that are on display and cultivated in the celebration of Midnight Mass.

Merry Christmas

"It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank."

Merry Christmas to everyone who has ever been there, or in a place - physical or spiritual - like that on this or any Christmas Eve.

Fantastic!

Food-court "Flash Mob" sings the Hallelujah Chorus.

Top 8 Historically Incorrect Christmas Songs....

...because there is nothing worse than a historically inaccurate Christmas carol.

And as an added bonus, the history of "Silent Night."

And the worst 10 Christmas movies of all time...

....including "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" and 2 out of 3 of Tim Allen's Santa Claus movies.

10 Best Christmas TV Specials...

...including the "Star Wars Christmas Special" about which George Lucas said that "if he had the time and a sledgehammer, he would track down every copy of this TV special and smash it."

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

The Twelfth Best Christmas Film....

...is "One Magic Christmas", according to John Nolte.

I'm a sucker for this film.  There's not a Christmas that goes by without my watching it, along with those other classics of the season, "Ernest Saves Christmas" and "The Muppet Christmas Carol."

I'm a fan, but I'm surprised to see so high a rating, given the plot holes, cloying sentimentality and the depiction of Ronald Reagan's America in the grip of the Great Depression.

Nolte writes:

Help arrives in the form of Gideon (Harry Dean Stanton), the unlikeliest of angels, who’s been tasked with the impossible: reminding this despairing mother of two of her blessings so that the Christmas spirit ripped from her by the hard realities of life can return. How far Gideon’s willing to go in order to accomplish this makes for some of the darkest moments you’ll ever come across in a holiday film, especially one from Disney.

This quiet, understated and sometimes grim spin on It’s A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol is not for the wee ones. But at 88-minutes there’s a ton of story and you have to be grateful that when the end credits roll no one On High has paid the bills or found Ginny and her family new housing. The film understands that God is not our own personal deus ex machina and that the angels can only help the willing to refocus their perspective on to that which really matters. Miracles are short-term solutions, it’s wisdom that helps you go the distance.


Obviously shot in not-America (Canada), the foggy, wet locations work to the film’s advantage in giving the story’s tone a feel of generic sameness and desperation. The two kids, one played by Sarah Polley, are terrific, and the always welcome Elias Koteas makes the best of a supporting role.

Catching this unprepared as to what you’re in for is best. Just be prepared enough to know this ain’t Miracle On 34th Street, and I doubt it could get produced in today’s era of hyper-high concept studio offerings and sterile, flourescent, 133 minute, indie Oscar bait. But don’t let that scare you away. When all is said and done, One Magic Christmas is a gritty life-affirming story set in a world where God exists and cares for us enough to practice some mighty tough-love.

OK, so maybe that's why I watch it every year.

Merry Christmas



The Widget, the Wadget, Boff and I went to the Christmas Vigil mass last night. This morning, we opened presents and the Widget and the Wadget are learning how to make their new Wii work. The rest of the family will be over this evening.

Then there is Casting Crowns update of a poem written during the Civil War by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - who had every reason to despair that particular Christmas[Fn.1] and yet found hope. In the face of going into an economically uncertain year under an untested leader, the poem reminds us that despair and pessimism are not Christian virtues: spe salvi.



Enjoy the holiday.


___________
1. The Longfellow selection linked to Lincoln's proclamation calling for a national day of fasting:

Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation.

And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.

And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

Now, therefore, in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in the views of the Senate, I do, by this my proclamation, designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th. day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer. And I do hereby request all the People to abstain, on that day, from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the Lord, and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.

Now that is something that has gone down the secularist memory hole. How strange it is for us moderns to think of a president acting as a kind of religious leader and assuming without question that profound expressions of religious sentiment were a natural part of American constitutional governance.

It's worth remembering for the next time someone claims that the weak expressions of religious faith in the public forum are antithetical to the Constitution.

Merry Advent

Christmas season doesn't start until later this month and then lasts until Epiphany.

Joseph Bottum points out something unsettling about the modern approach to Christmas that starts - it seems - sometime before Halloween:

These days, by the time Christmas actually rolls around, it feels as though this is very nearly what we’ve had: Christmas every day, at least since Thanksgiving. Often it starts even earlier. This year the glossy catalogues of Christmas clothing and seasonal bric-a-brac started arriving in September, and there were Christmas-shopping ads on the highway billboard signs before Halloween. The anticipatory elements reach a crescendo by early December, and their constant scream makes the sudden quiet of Christmas Day almost a relief from the Christmas season.

I don’t remember this opposition of Christmas and the Christmas season when I was young. When I was little—ah, the nostalgia of the childhood memoir—I always felt that the days right before Christmas were a time somehow out of time. Christmas Eve, especially, and the arrival of Christmas itself at midnight: The hours moved in ways different from their passage in ordinary time, and the sense of impending completion was somehow like a flavor even to the air we breathed.

I’ve noticed in recent years, however, that the ­feeling comes over me more rarely than it used to, and for shorter bits of time. I have to pursue the sense of wonder, the taste in the air, and cling to it self-consciously. Even for me, the endless roar of untethered Christmas anticipation is close to drowning out the disciplined anticipation of Advent. And when Christmas itself arrives, it has begun to seem a day not all that different from any other. Oh, yes, church and home to a big dinner. Presents for the children. A set of decorations. But nothing special, really.

It is this that Advent, rightly kept, would prevent—the thing, in fact, it is designed to halt. Through all the preparatory readings, through all the genealogical Jesse trees, the somber candles on the wreaths, the vigils, and the hymns, Advent keeps Christmas on Christmas Day: a fulfillment, a perfection, of what had gone before. I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh.

The I-monk offers this traditional solution to Christmas overload:

Many years ago, we made a decision to, as much as possible, speak of Advent and not of Christmas, until Christmas. I’ve never been able to hold off the Christmas music, but as much as possible we’ve stayed with that commitment.

It’s also amusing to watch my co-workers get the puzzled look when I start referring to “advent,” something some/most of the have never heard of. They often assume I’m one of the “Christmas is a Babylonian occultic festival” whack jobs, which we usually have somewhere in the gallery.

It’s really very simple: Christmas is the feast of the incarnation and the season following that event. Advent is the recognition that we need a savior and the longing for that savior to come, according to God’s promises.

Christmas is joyous, but the joy comes after weeks of waiting, watching, lamenting and calling upon God. Advent is that season of waiting; of looking for the signs and promises of the savior in the scriptures and in the world.

That distinction should save us. We think we can manufacture our own salvation by going shopping. Advent says we cannot save ourselves, that only God can save us and that in his own time and in his own way.

Have a joyful Advent season.

Christmas

Christmas gifts through Amazon.