Can’t we just go back to St. Nicholas Day?

If only Martin Luther hadn’t come along, maybe we could have gotten away with sticking a few presents in some shoes today and calling it a holiday season – over and done with. Christmas could have just been a religious holiday, and if you didn’t care for that sort of thing, you could go to the movies.

But no. Even though he’d gotten rid of all the saints, he was still worried that St. Nicholas was interfering with the true meaning of Christmas (I guess even back then the festivities went on for weeks and weeks). So he created the Christkindl, a little blond-haired angel who brought children presents on Christmas.

And so, oddly enough, we can blame Martin Luther for the commercialization of Christmas.

Find the red balloons

The people who gave us the internet (who, rather alarmingly, work in the Department of Defense) are now studying us.

They’re releasing ten weather balloons today, and giving $40,000 to the first person to report the locations of all ten. They figure this will require social networking, and they’re going to study how the winning group did this.

It’s quite clever. Maybe the balloon boy’s father should join a group.

But it’s also quite spooky. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) also invented the bionic hand, a dog robot, a remote-controlled beetle, and this:

St. Barbara and the Chumash Indians

The Chumash Indians believed the stars in the Milky Way were human souls on their way to a heavenly paradise in the western sky. In this paradise the souls would be cleansed, and then return to the womb of a woman in their tribe. The brightest stars in the sky were the gods.

St. Barbara was the daughter of a rich man who shut her in a tower to protect her from the outside world. Somehow she became converted to Christianity, and escaped through a crack in the tower her prayers had created. Her father captured her and had her tortured, but she miraculously didn’t die so he cut her head off. He was then struck by lightning and died.

The daughter became one of those many martyred saints, and on the eve of her feast day the explorer Sebastian Vizcaino found himself saved from a violent storm, so he named the Santa Barbara Mission in honor of her.

The Santa Barbara Mission was established so that the indigenous Chumash Indians would believe in all those tortured and beheaded saints instead of in the stars.

Sexual abuse is fine, but marriage is sacred

In any event, the bill’s collapse was a victory for the Roman Catholic Church, which led a shrewd and relentless campaign against the measure.

No, this is not from today’s headline story in the Times. Yes, the New York Catholic bishops, in their infinite wisdom, did campaign against the right of marriage for all people, not just straight people.

This quote, though, is from a story about the New York Catholic bishops who, in their infinite wisdom, campaigned against the Child Victims Act, which would loosen statue of limitations restrictions on lawsuits against child molesters.

Sexual abuse of children: no problem. Gay people who love each other getting married: no way.

The New York State legislature, in its infinite wisdom, went along with those saintly bishops both times.

An ostrich analysis of Obama’s Afghanistan speech

If you’re having a hard time dealing with what someone says to you, you can always resort to analyzing how they said it. “I wish you could have told me face to face, instead of in an email,” for example. Then you get to make that the issue. What content? Who ever said anything about content?

So let’s just forget what Obama said about Afghanistan last night, because I’m sorry but I just need to believe he’s doing the right thing in getting us out of all Bush’s quagmires. Let’s look at how he said it, compared to Bush’s Iraq “surge” speech of 2007.

More erudite, more complex, right? Wrong. There’s a site that analyzes speeches in terms of complexity, or what they call “lexical density.” Bush: 50%; Obama 46%. Or “readability,” on a scale from 6 (easy) to 20 (hard). Bush: 9.5; Obama 10.5.

Average number of syllables per word? 1.77 vs. 1.72. Average number of words in a sentence? 17 vs. 19.

Obama won on maximum sentence length, as you might expect (60 words, versus 43). And on total number of words: 1,671 more, to be exact.

Finally, here’s the gist of each speech, in terms of the ten most frequently used words:

Obama: “Our Afghanistan security people must war those Afghan Pakistan America.”

Bush: “Our Iraq Iraqi American help Iraqis forces those new Baghdad.”

And I’ll continue to stick my head in the sand when it comes to Obama’s sixth, versus Bush’s fifth, words.

The Advent Calendar

It appeared on a special table in the living room just after Thanksgiving. The first thing we did was find the biggest window, the magical Christmas window. Then it sat there until today, the First Day of the Waiting until Christmas Time.

My brother and I had to take turns, alternating days, which wasn’t really fair because whoever started also got the Christmas window. By the time Christmas finally came, though, the Christmas window was a letdown anyway, with all the presents waiting.

The little pictures inside were also a letdown. The best part was in the opening (true of presents as well): twisting the whole contraption, because the windows stuck; glitter clinging to our fingers, falling in small sparkles on the special table.

They have Advent calendars made of wooden boxes now, I see, with little drawers – and the drawers are empty, so you can put little tiny presents inside. Oh, I want one. But it’s already too late, and Chip and I would have to take turns, and it wouldn’t be fair. . .

Happy Birthday, Duc; too bad about the boar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I go to a museum I always wonder what the people staring at paintings are seeing. My museum style is to get through as quickly as possible, except when I’m with my artist friend Tina, who explains to me what she sees.

Today, though, I feel quite proud of myself – I can see that these two Très Riches Heures illustrations were painted by two different artists (Jean Columbe painted November; and the Limbourg brothers, who also painted both tympana, did December).

I’m including both here not just to show off, but because today is the Duc de Berry’s birthday, and he was born in December’s castle – the Château de Vincennes. Here I will also confess that I’ve been relying on commentary by one Michael Olteanu for all the Heures illustrations, since I really am quite hopeless without Tina, and I think this is hilarious:

The boar has been run down and speared by the huntsman on the left, and hounds are tearing it apart. . . This scene . . . completes the year in an appropriate setting and time, recalling the birth of the Duc de Berry.

Sorry, have to go, iPhone calling

Please excuse me for the next two weeks if you never see me; if I don’t answer your emails or text messages or phone calls; if I don’t read the books or see the movies or TV shows we’ve talked about; and if do I happen to visit you to take your picture, forgive me if I leave rather suddenly, because I’ll be working on linking it to your name. Don’t worry, though, I can find my way home with my compass, figuring out on the way how to get the little weather icon to stop telling me the temperature in Cupertino, which is 73 and sunny in case you were wondering. Or maybe it’s just a permanent icon, in which case it’s pretty depressing when it’s 45 here.

So do forgive me. I’m now one of those people who seem to find their laps so fascinating, who are recognizable only if you’re quite familiar with the top of their heads.

Catherine Labourés miraculous medal

If you look at my word cloud, you might be forgiven for thinking I’m an expert on George W. Bush, and so if you arrived at my site as someone did the other day with the query “What time did George W. Bush go to bed,” you might actually find the answer, or at least my projection, from my life onto his.

You might also believe I’m an expert on Catholic feast days, in which case you would have been sorely disappointed, as one searcher surely was, to arrive at Celebrating Time yesterday asking about “feast day November 27” and finding, instead, a disquisition on the iphone.

She, poor soul (sorry to be sexist here, but I am assuming it’s a she), tried again today with “catholic feast days 28 november,” so now I feel obligated to oblige, and, happily, one stone can kill both of these birds.

There aren’t too many saints who get two feast days, which puts Catherine Labouré in the august company of Joseph and John the Baptist. It’s her day today, even though she wasn’t martyred or beheaded and didn’t die or be born on this day. In fact, she didn’t do much of anything on November 28 except maybe rest up from her vision of November 27, 1830, when the Virgin Mary appeared and gave her all the specifications for a miraculous medal. “Have a medal struck according to this model,” Mary said. “Those who wear it, when it is blessed, will receive great graces, especially if they wear it around their necks. There will be graces in abundance for all who wear it with confidence.”

November 27 thus became the only Catholic feast day for a medal.

Since Catherine was only a postulant nun, she had to be secretly investigated by the Archbishop of Paris, but finally he determined the vision was real, the medal was struck, and all kinds of miracles resulted, including the conversion of a Jewish banker; but the real proof is that Catherine’s body, after she died, was “uncorrupt,” as they say, and you can still see it in Paris at La Chapelle Notre Dame de la Médaille Miraculeuse; whereas, most likely, that Archbishop’s body is long gone.

Black Friday: Yes, I’m writing about shopping

I hate shopping. I hate stores and shopping carts and coupons. I hate Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving (and after Thanksgiving) and canned Christmas music and fake Santa Clauses. I hate talking about shopping and bargains and what other people bought.

So I’ve been putting off doing something about my three-year-old cell phone with a battery life of just one, very short, conversation, because I was dreading going to the AT&T store. (Yes, I’ve made the big jump 1) to a smart phone; and 2) away from Verizon, because my very hip son tells me I’m an iPhone person not a Blackberry person, and since I’m so proud of this I now have to prove him right.)

But I learned yesterday (from this same hip son) that you don’t have to go to the AT&T store. I buy books and curtains and frying pans and even shoes online, but somehow it didn’t occur to me that you can not only buy an iPhone, but keep your number and get the Apple store to break the news to Verizon that you’re breaking up with them, all while happily sitting here.

I’m now on the cutting edge of communicative technology (albeit about two years too late), and you can expect all kinds of texts and tweets to follow. Maybe there’s even an app that will do all my Christmas shopping.