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Poverty and Wishes: They aren’t poor, I saw a bag of chips
We delivered a food basket to the families from the local community house. My children, like most, didn’t understand poverty after all, they can’t have soda whenever they want it, (milk builds strong bones) and hamburgers from McDonalds are hard to come by. (I think it’s my aversion to hydrogenated oils.) To them –they knew about poverty first-hand. The family we visited was kind, and their two children were delightful. Our children and theirs saw no differentiation between economic levels. As we left the apartment, my four year old said, “They’re not poor. I saw a bag of chips. To me, his comment was really a wish: They are just…
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Scientific proof that Santa did it
Santa did make it to every house yesterday, and despite all the whining and naughtiness at my house, he came to ours too. But how? Live Science found Santa expert Larry Silverberg, a noted U.S. engineer and self-described “rocket scientist.†He believes that Santa has made scientific breakthroughs that “the rest of humanity can only dream of.†How does Santa know what to bring? Using an underground antenna, he collects brain wave signals, similar to the way signals come through a cell phone. How does he get to every house? Look at Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, and see that space and time are bendable. So Santa uses this knowledge…
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Getting Ready for Santa
If you haven’t been there yet, check out the Norad site, which uses satelite to capture pictures of Santa as he travels on Christmas Eve. You can check him each hour, (don’t forget to hit the refresh button) and see him as he travels to China, Russia, England, New York and makes it back to the North Pole. When we see that Santa is crossing the Atlantic, the boys in my house and ready to jump in bed so they can be sure to be asleep before he arrives. How do they do it? This is directly from the Norad site: “NORAD uses four high-tech systems to track Santa –…
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Winter Solstice How it All Began
The Winter Solstice happened early this morning at 00:22 Universal Time on December 21, 2006. It happens the same time for everyone, although our clocks say different things. The solstice is unique among days of the year  the time of the longest night and the shortest day. The dark triumphs but only briefly. For the solstice is also a turning point. From now on (until the summer solstice), the nights grow shorter and the days grow longer, the dark wanes and the Sun waxes in power. December 25th was the date of the winter solstice in the calendar Julius Caesar devised for Rome in 46BC. Today the winter solstice…
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Christmas Play
Here we have the wooden nativity set and the Coca-Cola trucks mixed up with the wooden pieces of Noah’s ark. “Did the zebras come to visit baby Jesus?’ Let’s put Noah beside Mary. No, maybe we should put Mary in the ark, and leave Noah and the shepherds with baby Jesus.”
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Rejuvenate
You know it’s coming. The frenzy of the last-minute errands, wrapping presents late at night, the fussy kids, that one in-law who never fails to say something that hurts you, late parties, endless cooking and cleaning. So now, while you still have the chance, pull in and center yourself. If you do this for yourself, you will also be giving a gift to your family. It works like this: While recovering from an illness in 1665, Dutch astronomer and physicist Christiaan Huygens noticed something very odd. Two of the large pendulum clocks in his room were beating in unison, and would return to this synchronized pattern regardless of how they…
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Miracles happen
Now, you’re probably going to think this is from one of those sappy Christmas movies, but this really did happen. Just as I was finishing up my previous post about missing my Mom’s cookies, a car drove up in the dark. Someone knocked on the door, and ran away. At my doorstep, was a plate of iced cookies, cut into Christmas shapes, pretty and festive, like my Mom’s. There were also and chocolates wrapped in foil. The note said, we had just been “Claus’d” by two of my son’s classmates. So maybe we are never alone.
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Grieving at Christmas
Missing my Mom’s Cookies It’s the handwriting that does it. As you read it, somehow they become real again, and you tell yourself there’s no way someone so real could be gone. I’m doing much better than last year. I think it was right before Thanksgiving when I saw the end caps at the grocery store piled with yellow and brown shinny bags of chocolate chips, white jars of marshmallow cream, flat bags of powdered sugar and boxy ones of flour. It hit me so hard. My Mom wasn’t baking cookies for me that year. I looked around the store, and everybody was busy buying stuff, and no one even…
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Where do you hide presents: Survey results
Other than the most obvious answer, “I don’t hide the presents, Santa does,” I received quite a few helpful suggestions. Here they are: “Cover the wrapped gifts with towels or newspapers.” “Place them on a high shelf in a linen closet.” “Store them under the bathroom or kitchen sink, or in the laundry room.” “I would hide presents in the basement in Avon boxes, they just thought they were my stuff and never looked in them. Also we would hide them in the garage in garbage bags. They would never look in the garbage. Then I heard of someone hiding them in boxes that were marked for HALLOWEEN. At Christmas…
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