A Week of Updates! And the meaning of Christmas, by Richard Beck and Linus

Good Tuesday night! It is late but I haven't written anything really in a week so I wanted to say hello. I was so happy to be Buddy the Elf, as I have watched Elf twice in the last month with my kids and that movie makes me smile. I try and not consume the sugar Buddy does, but then again I don't wear tights either.

Jack and Sophie have their theatre performance on Thursday afternoon. They take a class called Make A Play and are able to choose the characters they will be, then all the kids along with the class instructor "Make A Play," hence the name. They will be performing on the Amy Graves Stage at McMurry University this Thursday at 4:30pm.

Another very exciting thing that I haven't blogged about is that Jack nominated his homeroom teacher, Ms. Nickell, for the Teacher Tribute sponsored by Arrow Ford. We found out last Monday that Jack's letter was selected and Ms. Nickell won. So on Friday the news, radio and newspaper came to Jack's school to award Ms. Nickell. It was a surprise to everyone except the principal, 2 secretaries and Jack, Rob and I. It was so much fun to be a fly on the wall and watch it all happen. Jack was also given some gift certificates to Blockbuster, Mr. Gatti's and Primetime, which none of us knew that he would receive, so we were all surprised.

As Rob and I were leaving Wylie Intermediate I told the secretaries that we were so lucky to be in our school system. My kids have just been so blessed.

We have some sweet friends, Dennis and Natasha, who are from Russia. They are living in on campus family housing, the have 2 young daughters, and Dennis is currently working on his schooling in Bible. He and Natasha have dreams to take the Word of Jesus back to Russia as missionaries. Please keep them and their support in your prayers. They are mighty in His name.

Tomorrow the high is back in the 30's...ahhhh. It's almost Christmas.

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Thanks to Richard Beck for his posts about Christmas.
Scroll down a couple of posts then you will see his Christmas posts.

Richard is a professor and psychologist, his posts are normally about 3 stratosphere's over my head, but he has a dedicated following of other very smart people. (Of which I am not one, if I just had the smartness of the tip of one of their toes I would probably be smarter than I am now) Each one of these points he writes on below have a post that talks about how he came to his final points. This is his final summation of his last weeks of writing.

From Richard's Blog:

So, to recap, these are all the lessons I learned about Christmas from watching TV:

I learned that Christmas was MORE and that it had something to do with finding community.
I learned that, because of Christmas, there were no more misfits, no more outsiders or marginalized ones.
I learned about empathy, compassion, and that Messiahs might be misfits.
I learned about how community can be the route for the redemption of evil.
And here with Charlie Brown, I learned that the humility of Christmas makes it oft overlooked and despised.

But to this point in all this TV viewing no one ever connected the dots among all these things. No one had spoken the word that explained just what all this stuff had to do with Christmas. So I perfectly understood why Charlie Brown screamed "Would someone please tell me the true meaning of Christmas!!!!!"

Well, Charile Brown and I finally got our answer. Linus steps forward and explains it all: