The subtitle of this book is the case for a more joyful Christmas. i have thought about this alot since we joined the Advent Conspiracy movement. I found this book at the library. This was a super quick read, like only 95 pages. i really recommend it. i jotted down some of the things that stood out to me. here they are randomly:
The point is to emerge from Christmas relaxed, contented, happy to have kept this season. To emerge closer to your family than you when Advent began. To emerge with some real sense that Christ has come into your world.
Books mentioned in it: Christmas in America, The Battle for Christmas, To Dance with God:Family Ritual and Community Celebration
There’s no uncorrupted celebration from some distant and pure time in the past that we can simply return to. Christmas has always been a concoction.
We have so much stuff that a pile of presents is no longer exciting, no longer novel. When you have a lot of stuff, getting more of it is less exciting than when you have very little.
What can excite us is the prospect of peace and quiet. The prospect of a lull, an interlude. Stillness scares us(that’s why the TV goes on when we walk in the hotel room) but it attracts us, too. If there’s one thing we’d like form Christmas, I think, it’s a little of that “season of peace”.
Once, working on a book, I watched every minute of TV that came across the hundred channels of what was then the world’s largest cable system on a single day. Those 2,400 hours of videotape yielded many insights, but if you distilled them down to a single idea, it would be this: You are the center of the world. You are the most important thing on earth.
That notion, so central to a consumer society, is anathema to a religious one. Living a life of faith means, more than anything, putting something other than yourself at the center of life.
So the point is not to stop giving: the point is to give things that matter. Give things that are rare-time, attention, memory, whimsy.
Ideas: plate with cartoon on it to highlight year, make own wooden blocks, make favorite treats, kids love sneaking out at night to drop off box of brownies on a door stop, candle lit eve dinner,
Kimi's Corner 