The Most Wonderful Time

By -
I'm not really sure why Christmas is called "the most wonderful time of the year" - here in East Central Illinois, it is cold, drab, and grey. Snow won't typically show up until mid-January. Some folks are extra cheery, but they tend to be the folks who are cheery all year long anyway. Folks say that people are more caring and more willing to give during the holiday season, but these days, with the economy still depressed, I don't know that I particularly see it.

Lots of people complain about the commercialisation of Christmas, but that is a complaint that has been around for decades. I admit that I don't understand why Christmas decorations show up in department stores in early November (or even late October). I understand that consumers don't buy stuff for Thanksgiving, but that doesn't really explain why the stores have to jump straight from Halloween to Christmas.

All that being said, I do enjoy the holiday season. It is the time of year that I get new socks, which is always exciting. I like winter, so the added bonus of the eventual dumping of snow on the ground is awesome, and it is just about the only time of the year that I can justify consuming large quantities of hot chocolate.

On top of all that, there are the religious implications. Christmas is the time of year in which we can take time to give especial thought to the birth of Christ, to His life, and His teachings. Of course we should be thinking of Him throughout the year, but this is the one time that we really focus on His birth, which was miraculous, in and of itself. The account given in the Gospel According to St. Luke contains some beautifully written poetic prose (I don't think it was prose originally, but the style in which it is written these days certainly is).

Sometimes it seems that the hardest part of Christmas is being able to answer that age-old question: "What do you want this year?" But, really, my list hasn't really changed much over the past several years. In fact, I could probably pull up my post from a year ago and it would still be valid. However, I don't want a hippopotamus now, as my baby sister got one for us already. I do know that Gretch has decided we need the complete Pixar collection. It is considered a short-coming of ours that we do not own any of them. We do have a couple of the DreamWorks Animation films (Bee Movie, Flushed Away, and Shrek) though. Me, I want a hula hoop.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crafty Craftiness

By -
Image
So... um, so much for writing a new blog post once a week. I don't even remember how long it took for me to stop. I keep meaning to update, but then life happens and I don't get around to it. I probably have too many blogs that I try to keep up with in the first place. I update my teaching blog every day there is school. I update the million minutes blog a few times each month, and I thoroughly neglect the GreedCycle blog that Gretch and I started over a year ago. Anyway, Gretch and I have had a lot going on, but since we really don't  want our blog to be just medical updates, I haven't been writing about them. And since the day-to-day activities of our lives rarely seem to be "blog-worthy" (other than my teaching which, as already mentioned, is blogged about elsewhere), I end up not updating this blog as much as I probably should. Who knows, maybe I'll get back into the swing of things this year. New year, new chance to hold myself to a standard of u
Read more

And This Is Life Eternal

By -
Many of you know that I am a professional educator. I work in the Freeport School District as the Curriculum Coordinator for 21st Century Teaching and Learning. Whenever I have the opportunity to share this with others upon meeting them for the first time, one of the first questions I get is, “Is that your real hair?” Apparently, there are things people care about more than know what it means to coordinate the teaching and learning efforts of an entire century. (The answer, by the way, is yes, this is my real hair; no, I don’t dye it; yes, it really is this curly; and no, you cannot touch it to see if it is actually a wig.)  Once I am able to get the discussion about my amazing naturally curly hair out of the way, we get back to the question of what it is I actually do. My favourite way to describe my job is that I am a teacher of teachers and that my main responsibility is to get them to put away the worksheets and step away from the PowerPoint so that they can engage their student
Read more

Who Are You?

By -
A thought has been running through my mind this morning and it doesn't seem to be planning on leaving any time soon. I have things I need to get done (such as applying for more jobs for the coming school year), so I am hoping that this may help me at least share the thought well enough that I can worry about other things. The thought is really more of a question. Who am I? Who are you? How do I define myself? How do you define yourself? So often in our lives, we have opportunities to introduce ourselves to new people. I've mentioned before how I have this habit of introducing myself as Alex Valencic but, if I am writing my name, it is always Alex T. Valencic. After sharing my name, it is inevitable that someone will want to know more about me, and the first thing they ask is what I do. How we respond to this question says a lot about what we think of ourselves, I think. When someone asks me what I do, I respond by either saying I am a teacher or I am a professional educat
Read more