December 25th is not really Jesus’s birthday. This is not breaking news. Let’s stop pontificating on when sheep are kept in fields, whether or not it snows in Israel (it does) and making arguments for when his actual birthday is. Christmas has been celebrated on December 25th since A.D. 336, during the reign of Emperor Constantine. He made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Setting that date may have been an effort to weaken established pagan traditions, rather than following them. Hanging wreaths, decorating trees and lighting candles (and by extension strings of lights) have pagan origins. Celebrating the birth of Christ – the incarnation – is uniquely Christian. It’s not about a baby in a manger; it’s about the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. It’s about John the Baptist leaping in his mother’s womb and Mary and Elizabeth being filled the Holy Spirit. It’s about the angel appearing to Joseph and Mary and the faith it took for them to travel to Bethlehem. It’s about angels bringing good tidings of great joy and wise men traveling from afar to worship him. It’s about the deity of God being robed in flesh and walking among us. It’s about the point of contact between heaven and earth. It’s about the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, the first page of a story that ends at the cross… which for us is only the beginning. So don’t worry about the day. At this point the Julian calendar is off by 13 days and observant Jews probably ignored it anyway.

Just remember to contact Dire Straits if you have to move a refrigerator, microwave oven, custom kitchen or color TV.

A few years ago this meme was meant as a joke. Inflation has about brought us to the point this isn’t funny anymore.

President Zelensky has been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. It’s only been a few years (2007) since Putin was Person of the Year. Funny that.

I’m not making fun of anyone who tackles learning English as a second language. Americans study it for 12 consecutive years then still can’t always use it correctly. These directions came with a bluetooth speaker I bought a few years ago, just before Christmas.

I pointed out 10 years ago that SUV’s were getting smaller, compacts were getting longer, minivans were getting lower and that everything seem to be heading to the same place. I thought every vehicle would eventually be a station wagon and while that may not be entirely true they are all incredibly similar to each other. Here’s my post from 2014, written a full year before I went out and bought a Chevy HHR.

“If Paul could see the church in America, we’d be getting a letter.” I’ve seen that on Facebook several times this week, posted by various groups and individuals. I responded each time with the above meme, which I saw months ago but apparently not everyone did.

Earlier this week I posted what James says about small tongues kindling great fires and how social media platforms allow those to spread farther and faster. In a conversation with a friend IRL I suggested that maybe there isn’t more stupidity in the world we just see it more often. The Internet gives everyone a voice and some things are just more likely than others to go viral. You can find scholarship, sound theology and acts of kindness online but they are not as entertaining as people falling on AFV, failing on YouTube or the deliberate stupidity that made MTV’s Jackass popular. You might even find really smart people checking books out of libraries but no TikTok videos about them.

And I’ll leave you with this:

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