Social Media: What are you doing with it?

The Christmas specials are coming! The Christmas specials are coming!

It's Christmas specials time on TV again, and that means they're dusting off the best of the best of the best, sir! (Know that line?)  So, we're dusting off our DVDs too and having some movie nights as we watch pop culture on family room screen.

(You can click on the DVD picture and it'll take you to the Amazon.com page, just in case you *gasp* might not have the DVD/blu-ray and want to order it.)

Our Family Favorites:   

#5 

Full of suspense and love and cuteness, this is the quintessential Christmas coming-of-age tale. And the song rocks. That sound Rudolph's nose makes when it lights up is one of the most aggravating sounds ever, though.

#4

You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch. As beautiful as it is to see his heart burst out of the x-ray box, I have to admit I watch the Grinch to see two things: Max the dog and Cindy Lou Who (who was no more than two) because Max reminds me of Pepper and Cindy Lou Who reminds me of Kelsey when she was little.

#3

Linus's speech. That is all. I watch this DVD multiple times each hear just to hear Linus tell the Christmas story.

#2

Heat Miser and Snow Miser. I hate the Mother Nature part, but the Heat Miser and Snow Miser songs are priceless.

#1

Who doesn't love a good Christmas back-story? The good guy raised by elves. The evil Burgermeister Meisterburger. "Put one foot in front of the other" ... yes, I know he's the Winter Warlock, but he's much more Gandolf-like that witchy. And the penguin... we have one almost exactly like him in our front yard each year. And the best part is when they talk about Christmas Eve being the holiest night of the year.


Love, love love the Christmas specials. What about you? What are your favorites?

Got any ideas?

We are looking for a Christmas event to attend this year as a family.  Traditionally, we buy tickets to a December UNC game and trek over to the ol' university to see the Heels play basketball.  But we didn't do that this year.  Granted, a Carolina basketball game isn't exactly a Christmas event, but we work in looking at the lights and spending a little time with the Carolina blue Santa. 

We looked into getting tickets to see the local theatrical production of A Christmas Carol, but they were very pricey, and the actor who has always played Scrooge had surgery recently, so his son is playing the lead role this year.  We hope the dad makes his return to the role next year, so we're going to wait and see.

So... what do you recommend for a family of five to do to make Christmas memories? Kid-friendly, fun, and cheap inexpensive are a plus. 

First Sunday in Advent? Tomorrow!

Well... this would be why I'm not coordinating the Celebrating Christmas blog anymore. Today is First Advent Sunday Eve, and I just got home from buying new Advent candles for our wreath.  Life happens differently each year.

Two years ago when we did Celebrating Christmas live, I was teaching one class at the Christian school where our kids go. Last year I worked full time and did well to remember my name and address on any given day. This year I'm part time and I can remember my name and address most days, but I realize that celebrating the coming of the King needs excellence. With nearly 50 short stories to read, exams to write and grade, and essays to teach, there's just no way that's going to happen.

So, if you're one of the people who said you'd be interested in writing for Celebrating Christmas, let me challenge you to post your thoughts on your own blog, and I will link to it, if I'm not already linked to it. :)

We'll have a cyber-Christmas party and encourage each other along the way.

During the holiday season (and don't get me started about the whole why-we-should-call-it-a-holiday-season thing... I did a post on it here two years ago), I hope that you will take a few minutes each day to treasure the One Who came to reconcile us to our Creator.  I pray He will be the center of your holiday season.  Goodness, I pray that He will be the center of MY holiday season.  I am so "prone to wander, Lord I feel it/ prone to leave the God I love."

With that in mind, here's my list of things I'm doing during this holiday season to focus on loving Jesus and loving others:

1. Keep reading through the One-Year Bible for my quiet time.
2. For family devotions each night, use an Advent calendar that focuses on the gospel message.
3. Sleep at least 6 hours a night so that I will be alert and engaged in # 1 & 2.
4. Work diligently during my planning time at school so that I can sleep 6 hours at night.
5. Have coffee with at least 3 friends between now and the end of Christmas break. 
6. Host one holiday fun event. Maybe even a caravan of Christmas lights tour and dessert fest... hmmm...
7. Update my iPod to include funky, deep, and Christmas worship playlists.
8. Exercise.
9. Get to know the neighbors better.
10. Family movie nights.  And LOTS of laughter.

By the way, if you are observing Advent this year and haven't settled on devotions yet, click here for a couple of Scripture lists you can use.  

So... what about you?  What do you hope to do this Christmas season?

Falalalalalalalala... 'Tis the season to hang holly...

Tomorrow is November 28:  the first Sunday in Advent 2010! Woo Hoo!!!  We spent yesterday decking the halls inside since it was a little rainy and wet outside.  My favorite "structural element" of the house to decorate is the banister.  It used to be the mantle, but like I said before, the house has a big ol' honkin' TV hanging above the mantle, and that big ol' honkin' TV gets close to flamin' hot sometimes, so we're a little twitchy about starting a house fire by stuffing dried pine boughs under it.  So, yeah, I *heart* my front entry decor.  It whispers "Christmas" to me in a classier way than the Santa gnome who lives on the front porch next to the front door. 

When we deck the banister, we start by hanging 2- 8' pine garlands, attached end-to-end and wrapped in 16' of berry garland.  We used two types of berry garlands:  one set of garlands has larger berries -- about the size of small crab apples -- and the other set of garlands has smaller berries that look like clusters of holly berries.  Some very old plastic adjustable ties secure the top, middle, and bottom of the garland.  Since no part of the garland wraps around the top surface of the rail itself, the kids can still propel themselves upstairs, holding on the both railings and leaping 3-4 steps at a time. 

Next come the bows.  It took me a couple of years to figure out that spending a little extra time labeling bows in the undecorating phase would make decorating the next year a TON easier.  The bows are made of nylon-netted wire ribbon, trimmed with gold beads.  They are the greatest bows in the world.  They don't get creases in storage.  I just toss them in the banister box and put it in the attic for the year.  When I take them out, I fluff the loops a little and straighten the streamers, but there's no remaking bows every year like I had to do with velvet ribbon.

Hey, look!  I misspelled banister.  :) I do it twice more. Now I know why my thesis adviser said that I misspelled so consistently that she began to doubt the correct spelling of several words.   :) :)

The bows are attached with wire at the top, in the middle, and at the bottom of the garland.

Then comes a ribbon wrap.

It runs in three sections so that it's easier to wind around the garland:  top to middle; middle to bottom; bottom wound around the main support posts. I tried using one long ribbon, but three shorter sections are MUCH easier to manage.

Next I wrap gold beading around the garland, in three sections again.

And then add in some poinsettias to give the garland more dimension.

 

And there we go.  The banister is done.  I love all the red and green greeting us as we come and go throughout the season.  

 

At the beginning of this post I mentioned that tomorrow is the first Sunday in Advent, so stay tuned later this evening for a special Advent post.  If you haven't gotten out your Advent wreath yet, do it today.   Ideas for wreaths are here and here and here. Or you could just google "Advent wreaths."  That works too.

It doesn't have to be fancy -- just five candles, four in a circle and one in the middle. Remember we're celebrating the fact that God became flesh to pay for our sin; it's really not about the snazzy decorating, although, in His infinite love and glory, He gives us beautiful things to point us back to Him.

How perfect is that?  I stand in awe.  Got to go... I feel a little worship moment coming on... 

How to make a turkey explode in the oven on Thanksgiving Day...

I am not gifted in the kitchen.  Well, that's not true.  I have done some lovely tie-dying in the kitchen.  I've whipped up tons of homemade playdough.  Sometimes I work on lesson plans on the laptop on my kitchen counter.  I guess I am a little gifted in the kitchen; I just can't cook.

OK, that's not true either.  I can cook.  I do cook.  I just don't like to cook.  I'd rather clean the house five times over than cook one meal.  True story.  

Thankfully, my sweet hubby doesn't really care.  And my kids don't know any better.  And my mom and dad, who come for the big days (Thanksgiving and Christmas and various birthdays) still smile like they did when I brought home the gold spray-painted plaster of Paris imprint of my hand from Vacation Bible School.  

All that to say, it really shouldn't have surprised me when Jimmy took the turkey out of the oven and there was a fault line running from wing to wing.  The best we can figure, although neither of us heard it, the turkey exploded while it was cooking.  

Apparently, that's the reason why they tell you to thaw it first and don't cook it with water in the pan.  Something about steam build-up inside the bird yada, yada, yada.  I think it otherwise went pretty well, considering at 8:00 on Thanksgiving morning it was frozen solid.  After six hours of cooking at 400 degrees, it reached a toasty, moist 193 degrees on the inside.  It tasted good; my momma and daddy smiled and said so.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

Cookies before dinner?  There was a lot of that going around too.  Gramma made the traditional family ginger snaps. Mmmmmmmmmmm...!

And in other Thanksgiving dinner adventures, I completely forgot about gravy because I hate the stuff.  Instead of buying Sister Schubert's Parker House rolls, I accidentally got Sister Schubert's Sausage Wrap rolls.  I cut up a mini watermelon and a cantaloupe and forgot to serve them.  And I forgot the buy pepper. :-/ But you know what?  We had one of the sweetest, most laughter-filled family times we've had in years.  Thank goodness God's blessings don't depend on my domestic arts skills. 

Since the dishes are done and the kitchen is clean...

Let's recap Thanksgiving day.

Since the TV is above the mantle in this house, I had to figure out where to put the old mantle garland.  The light seems so much more festive with berries. 

Gramma and Granddaddy joined us.  Silly folks!  I love my family.

The kids after dinner.  They had to work hard to stay out of the coma state...

... that wiped out Jimmy. 

Ah, Thanksgiving naps.  Nothing like them. 

He woke up. Such a great day!

Thanksgiving...

100 or so great works...

Going around Facebook is the BBC list of 100 Great Books everyone should read. You're supposed to copy the list, paste it in a note, and make bold all the titles you've read. If you've read more than six, you're ahead of most. I've read about 30, which is downright shameful for English majors. Sigh. I do not love Jane Austin the way that the BBC loves Jane Austin.  Nope, not even a fraction of the way the BBC loves her. 

I have a little contempt for this list anyway because anything that puts The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as separate entries is a little suspect to me. Last time I checked LWW was the first book published in the Chronicles. They also listed the Complete Works of Shakespeare and Hamlet as separate works. It's been a long time since grad school, but as I recall, Hamlet was an essential title in completing the works of Shakespeare. Perhaps it was THE essential title.

So I decided to come up with my own list of great books I have read that I think most everyone else should read. I like getting 100% on quizzes and such.

1. The Bible
2. To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
3. The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis) - There are seven books in the series: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Prince Caspian; Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Silver Chair; The Horse and His Boy; The Magician's Nephew; and The Last Battle.

OK, after these three, the rest of the list is random. Only #1 -#3 are ranked in their order of greatness.

4. 1984 (Orwell)
5. The Iliad (Homer)
6. The Odyssey (Homer)
7. Le Morte D'Arthur (Mallory)
8. The Giver (Lowery)
9. Beloved (Morrison)
10. Hamlet (Shakespeare)
11. Othello (Shakespeare)
12. Macbeth (Shakespeare)
13. King Lear (Shakespeare)
14. Oedipus the King (Sophocles)
15. Medea (Euripides)
16. The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne)
17. Beowulf
18. The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)
19. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
20. The Great Divorce (Lewis)
21. Gulliver's Travels (Swift)
22. The Prince (Machiavelli)
23. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston)
24. The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
25. As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)
26. Native Son (Wright)
27. Black Boy (Wright)
28. Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Tolkien - The Fellowship of the Ring; The Two Towers; and The Return of the King)
29. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
30. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
31. Invisible Man (Ellison)
32. Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin)
33. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
34. Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
35. The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
36. Waiting for Godot (Beckett)
37. Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks
38. Poetry of E.E. Cummings
39. Poetry of T.S. Eliot
40. Poetry of Nikki Giovanni
41. Poetry of Langston Hughes
42. Poetry of William Shakespeare
43. Poetry of William Butler Yeats
44. Poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
45. Poetry of John Donne
46. Poetry of John Keates
47. Poetry of Emily Dickinson
48. Federalist Papers (Hamilton, Madison, Jay)
49. Writings of Thomas Paine (esp. Common Sense, Rights of Man, Crisis)
50. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll)
51. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Doyle)
52. Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand)
53. Treasure Island (Stevenson)
54. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (Stevenson)
55. Frankenstein (Shelley)
56. The Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan)
57. Walden (Thoreau)
58. Time Quartet (L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time; A Wind in the Door; A Swiftly Tilting Planet; and Many Waters)
59. Selected Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
60. Bartleby the Scrivener (Melville - We're going with this as a novella.)
61. Ulysses (Joyce)
62. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)
63. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
64. The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
65. The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri)
66. Fairy Tales and Stories (Hans Christian Andersen)
67. Grimm's Fairy Tales
68. Faust (Goethe)
69. Dr. Faustus (Marlowe)
70. The Epic of Gilgamesh
71. Leaves of Grass (Whitman)
72. Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
73. Metamorphosis (Ovid)
74. The Metamorphosis (Kafka)
75. Paradise Lost (Milton)
76. Siddhartha (Hesse)
77. The Jungle Book (Kipling)
78. The Thousand and One Nights
79. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
80. Pere Goriot (Balzac)
81. Poetry of Shel Silverstein
82. The Portrait of Dorian Gray (Wilde)
83. Dracula (Stoker)
84. Death of a Salesman (Miller)
85. A Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry)
86. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
87. Night (Weisel)
88. Cane (Toomer)
89. A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams)
90. Our Town (Wilder)
91. Poetics (Aristotle)
92. Republic (Plato)
93. Mythology (Hamilton)
94. Origin of Species (Darwin)
95. The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
96. Democracy in America (de Tocqueville)
97. Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Johnson)
98. The Color Purple (Walker)
99. Twelfth Night (Shakespeare)
100. All's Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare)
101. Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe)

I do not agree with every word in every one of these works, but they are all great works because of their impact on the world; and educated Americans need exposure to a good number of these books/essays/collections. So, as my good friend Melinda says, take what you need and leave the rest.

What do you think?
How many of these books have you read?
What are the books I left off this list that you believe are great works?

Ah, I found it online...

Our must-have Thanksgiving dish is Sweet Potato Souffle. I googled it to see if anyone else calls it the same thing. Sure enough, here it is! Click on the picture for the link to the site and the recipe. Ah-may-zing goodness awaits you.

(It's pretty much the same recipe that we use, only we double the topping because it's everyone's favorite part.)

Happy Thanksgiving Eve Eve!

Confession...

I took a nap instead of peeling wallpaper off the kids' bathroom walls today.

Ode to Angst...

By: Kelsey and Julia

Thank you, Michaels...

...for the 40%-off Lego storage bin.
I can't tell you how hopeful I am that it works.

Happy 451st...

When the boys go to get the cake and candles, sometimes they get creative. Zane swore he couldn't find a 6, so instead of turning 46 this year, Jimmy turned 451. Because 4=40 and 5+1=6. So yeah, 451=46.

[Yes, that's the mandatory Harris Teeter birthday cake. :) Ah, tradition.]

Happenings down at the CB...

On Jimmy's birthday, our sweetheart of a daughter agreed to supervise her youngest brother while Jimmy and I headed to the beach for a few hours to rest and relax and do a little maintenance on the condo. When we got there, we discovered the painting project was already underway. Woo hoo! We're going tropical colors in the ol' complex. They all have snazzy names (that I don't know), but basically the two oceanfront buildings are purple and aqua, and the three courtyard (second row, ocean view)buildings are melon, lime green, and Carolina blue (and by Carolina, I mean Tar Heel).


The rocks are uncovered again. That chunk of stimulus money disappeared into the ocean, never to been seen again (and I will refrain from writing what I'm thinking beyond that statement). Sad, but goodness people, it's the ocean. It causes erosion. Always has; always will. And that would be why we didn't buy oceanfront.


It's still gorgeous down there, though. So beautiful. So peaceful. Someday we may live there year round. :)

What I love about Sundays...

Football...

Revolutionary...

Zack: Look, Mom.

Sitting in front of a carefully crafted wooden-block pyramid, slowly moving a big block towards it.

Zack: This is what England did to America.

Knocks pyramid down.

Zack: But that was back in the 17's when America was trying to get started. And that was just a fake American pyramid.

Confession...

People who are not fun get on my last nerve.

[What does she mean by fun? Is she talking about one person in particular? Who could it be?]

a. Fun=focusing on the lovely, pure, admirable, etc.
b. Nope. I may even be talking about my own self.
c. See b.

Sassy little editor...

The bows lasted 12 minutes...

Hope...

Target sure is optimistic about the amount of snow our little South Town will be getting this year. I wonder if they know something we don't know...

CAROLINA Pottery...

I made my pilgrimage to Carolina Pottery. It was... ah-mazing. It's still not Ikea, but it'll do in a pinch, especially since it isn't a couple of hours away. Here are some lovely things I found...

Carolina Christmas... (It wasn't in the budget today, but I'll be back later.)

I really want this friend for the Santa gnome who lives on our front porch all year long.

Carolina nutcrackers and trashcans and towels... oh my!

I would LOVE to have a new stocking. Just sayin'.

I thought these were pretty. I don't like matchy matchy. Just pretty pretty.

That is all. Well, not really. I actually found an apple green area rug that I really want for the family room. It matches the green polka dots in the curtains. But the reason we need a new rug is that the shih tzu does so on the rug a lot, so I hate to buy a new one just to have her mess it up. We're working on barrier protection for the rugs. In the meantime, instead of spending money on a new area rug, I bought a new bottle of pet smell and stain removing shampoo for the steam cleaner. Stewardship and all.

I did get all the teacher presents for Zack's teachers. High school teachers don't get presents much.

Best book...

Disclaimer: The bad thing about being a writing teacher is that you spend copious amounts of time editing other people's writing and very little time working on your own. I am excited to spend my upcoming breaks adding these tools to my writer toolbox and not just my editor toolbox.

I've been on a quest for the best writing handbooks. I teach two creative writing classes and one journalism class. I have to have a book that can handle any style of writing. It has to be lean and muscular enough to lift journalistic writing and flexible and swift enough to undergird imaginative writing. I figured I was in for a lengthy and somewhat painful search.

Not so. Very quickly I found a title popping up all over the place. That title: Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark. It's been around for a few years, but this is the first year I've gotten my teaching feet underneath me enough to be out of survival mode and into growth mode.

Clark's book is a mini writing institute. In the Introduction, Clark hooked me with two ideas. First, we should be a nation of writers. Why should a select few be tagged to speak for everyone? Writing is a craft, an acquirable skill; anyone can do it and do it well, if given the right tools. And second, he collected the tools from the Poynter Institute, which is THE quintessential journalistic training forum.

Every writer should have Clark's book on his desk. I started to say on his shelf, but this book is desk-top material, not shelf material. It's one for daily use. As matter of fact, I have three book titles on my desk at school. The Bible, the AP Stylebook, and Writing Tools. I'll never teach without them again.

Word of caution: If you are thinking about using Writing Tools with a student, make sure the student is at least high school age. Many of the examples of good writing deal with sensitive topics (PG-13). It's not a book for teaching the younger kiddies how to write.

Pumpkins and such...

It took me until mid-October to have time to take down all the beachy stuff and replace it with scarecrows and pumpkins, but it did get done without bypassing fall and moving on to Christmas. (Ah hem... CVM and TTC, I'm talking to you.)

Here's a brief recap of what late-October looked like around here:


Kelsey has always loved football, and since she discovered there was such a thing as Powderpuff football, she's been gunning to play quarterback. On October 16th she got her chance. Quarterbacking was OK, but what she fell in love with (almost by accident) was playing... LINEBACKER! Yes, our little princess played linebacker. In the first series of the game, she got three sacks. Three. I kept hearing the PA announcer call her name. It was great. She had a blast. We had a blast. You know Jimmy was working the chains. He had to find some excuse to be on the sidelines.

We are grateful for Powderpuff. It was a bright spot in Kelsey's fall sports season. Volleyball was horrible. Many, many issues arose surrounding the coach and team dynamics. I have no complaints about what happened on the court or in the games, but some of the no-parents-allowed-behind-closed-doors-practices allegations left us deeply concerned and prayerfully considering how we should handle things (beyond letting the coach and athletic director know our concerns. We have done that.)

Other than that, Kelsey has learned what life is like when you opt to do everything all at once. :) Lots of late nights and sleepy mornings.


Zane found his dream costume: the gorilla. As you can see, he made it part of his normal wardrobe around the house. Silly boy. He wore it to school on Animal Planet Day during Spirit Week. It was hot. The body of the costume has been in the back of the Suburban for a couple of weeks now. I don't know where the head is, and that means I don't know when or where it might show up. That scares me a little.

Zane had a great football season and played center on offense and linebacker on defense for the JV team. They finished 8-2, with both losses coming against their arch rivals down the street. Zane dressed for all the home varsity games and even got on the field for a kick-off (or kick-off return or punt or punt return or something else special teams... I'm not sure which. I'm pretty ADD at football games.)

He hit a couple of bumps early in the transition from middle school to high school, but he's rallied since and done MUCH better. :) I love it when my kids' teachers stop me in the hall to tell me how well my babies are doing in school.

Our fall play at school is You're a Good Man Charlie Brown, and they have been manic in promoting the play to elementary students. Zack has been in a near frenzied state about the production and hounded me to no end for tickets. Bless his heart. So when we heard that It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was on TV, we HAD to watch it. Mind you, we have it on DVD and it's readily available on the interwebs, but hey... nothing like the real live broadcast to create a sense of excitement and urgency.

I wouldn't trade those little boy giggles and belly laughs for anything. He thought it was absolutely hysterical. And as a result, we HAD to get a pumpkin from the most sincere pumpkin patch and carve it according to The Pumpkin Patch Parable. If we aren't both culturally-relevant and super spiritual, then I give up (that's a joke, peeps. Don't get up on the ledge over it.) Conveniently enough, the most sincere pumpkin patch was just around the corner and had a gargantuan inflatable jack-o-lantern anchored mid-patch. We arrived there at 2:30 p.m. on October 31st. Discount! Free little pumpkins! Boo-ya.

The Zackster loves third grade. He has a rockin' teacher who is funny and fun. And he genuinely likes the rest of the kids in his class. He's making some bffs and we're having sleepovers and doing things outside of school, which is probably late in happening, but when you're the youngest and have been raised in a car shuttling the older sibs to their activities for nine years, carving time for little guy activities isn't easy.

Speaking of carving...

Happy Fall-Festival-Harvest-Season-Pumpkin-Patch-Parable-Carving-Reformation-Day-All-Saints-Eve Celebration!