Baby Jesus Still Reigns in Post-Christian America

From TFP:

Even now, the most powerful nations bow before Him. Let them consider the fact that for decades, the Christ Child has found shelter in the White House. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world. Its president is the most powerful world leader. And yet in the house of the President, a crowned Christ Child occupies a place far more honorable and important than that reserved for the president himself. He resides there as king, and the house is decorated at its best to pay Him homage. No foreign leader is treated with more honor and respect than this tiny Child.

Indeed, this Christmas, this Presence shines with particular pomp and splendor. There is open mention of Christmas in addresses and greeting cards. It is as if some forbidden decree has been lifted. This year’s refreshing celebration, while not ideal, reflects a desire of countless Americans that He be treated in a privileged way. This new splendor is welcomed by a society long stifled by politically correct diktats.

For too long, the nation has suffered by those in power who have tried to minimize the event. They have even tried to make it non-religious or politically correct. They have avoided mentioning Him by name. But the force of that compelling grace of Christmas has proven stronger. No president has dared to expel the Child from the inn. For decades, the beautiful Nativity Scene has always been set up. While failing to acknowledge Him properly, there at least has always been room in the White House Inn—even in supposedly post-Christian America. (Read more.)

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Survival Guide to Awkward Holiday Conversations

From CaregiverStress:

It’s not uncommon for one sibling to provide much more caregiving to a parent than the other children. Still, this situation can cause resentment among brothers and sisters. And while speaking up to ask for help is a good strategy for eliciting help from others, it may not be as easy as it sounds. Maybe your sibling history has been rocky. Or maybe you’ve asked many times before to no avail but feel you need to bring the topic up again.

Before you choose a holiday gathering to broach such a conversation, however, ask yourself if this is really the right time and place. Holiday get-togethers often create stress for the participants simply due to the family dynamics involved. Is it wise to potentially add to that stress by approaching a sibling about your parents’ caregiving needs? If you do decide the annual family holiday party is the best place for you to have the conversation, consider these tips:

• Keep alcohol out of the mix. Sure, a glass or two of wine may loosen your inhibitions and give you the courage to approach your sister about providing more caregiving support, but alcohol rarely facilitates civil conversation. It may be best to have this talk while everyone is sober.
• Don’t be confrontational. Instead of attacking your sister for not doing enough to help with Mom, try confiding your own struggles. Tell your sister how difficult and time-consuming it is for you to take care of Mom, and express how grateful you would be for even a small amount of help. Be specific in your request. It’s OK to say, “Would you be willing to have Mom stay over a weekend each month?”
• Stay calm. If your sibling rebuffs your appeal, don’t get angry or emotional. Try to leave the door open to future communication by accepting your sister’s response and changing the subject. Then approach another time, maybe a few weeks down the road. You could use the technique of asking three times, in three different ways, to try to turn your sibling’s “no” into a “yes.”

(Read more.)

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Exploring the Conciergerie

 From Better Homes and Gardens:

On a typically graceful Parisian avenue, by the banks of the River Seine, is a building with the darkest of histories. A structure linked to the torture and deaths of thousands of people, the Conciergerie seems out of place surrounded by the grandeur of Notre Dame Cathedral and Sainte-Chappelle. This area of downtown Paris swarms with tourists at all times of year thanks to its proximity not only to Notre Dame but the Louvre Museum, the Pantheon and the Pompidou Centre. The Conciergerie has an altogether different appeal. Morbid fascination lures tourists into its below ground chambers where the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, was imprisoned as she waited to be executed. (Read more.)

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Abortion and Parental Notification

From Live Action:

Pro-life activists frequently try to pass parental notification and consent laws protecting young pregnant women from the abortion industry. A teenage girl who goes to Planned Parenthood or another abortion facility may not have the maturity to resist the pressure and “sales pitch” of trained abortion workers, and often, abortion workers lie to or pressure teens. Carolyn Kasdorf, a pregnant teenager, went to Planned Parenthood, unsure about whether to get an abortion. While there, she asked the abortion “counselor,” “Is it a baby?” Years later, Kasdorf recalls the abortion worker’s answer: “No, it’s not a baby,” she was told. “It’s just cartilage like your ear. It’s a blob of tissue.” (Read more.)

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Jolabokaflod

From Treehugger:

Icelanders have a beautiful tradition of giving books to each other on Christmas Eve and then spending the night reading. This custom is so deeply ingrained in the culture that it is the reason for the Jolabokaflod, or “Christmas Book Flood,” when the majority of books in Iceland are sold between September and December in preparation for Christmas giving. At this time of year, most households receive an annual free book catalog of new publications called the Bokatidindi. Icelanders pore over the new releases and choose which ones they want to buy, fueling what Kristjan B. Jonasson, president of the Iceland Publishers Association, describes as “the backbone of the publishing industry.” (Read more.)

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Christmas at the London Ritz

From The Telegraph:

‘It’s Christmas EVERYWHERE. EVERYTHING IS MAGICAL.”
This was my five-year-old son’s overriding impression of London at Christmas, seen from a taxi, a crowded pavement, a rooftop hotel suite – even King’s Cross station. An awe-inspired, open-mouthed impression of unadulterated wonder, and salient reminder to self that there is more to a city Christmas than a busy commute, longer-than-usual queues and an overload of piped Christmas music.

So hear ye, countryphiles and city phobes: from the mulled wine-scented markets of Leeds, Bath and Nottingham, to the shimmering ice rinks of Edinburgh and Bristol, it can be easy to forget that the UK has a good track record of city Christmases. Never mind the serene calm of your garden centre wonderlands and your home-made wreath workshops, what you really want, whether you’re pushing eight or 80, is the festive hustle and bustle, the “look-up-now!” lights, the window displays, the chestnuts roasting on a street vendor’s fire, and the in-store Father Christmas grottos of one of our fine festive cities. Which is why I decided to pluck my entire family from our countryside idyll into London ON A WEEKEND.

And I can report that city Christmases from the eyes of the children are indeed spellbinding. A recurring theme, when your base for this festive overload is one of its most iconic buildings: The Ritz. Yes, the place where 500 mince pies are baked fresh every day, that serves 60 turkeys at The Ritz Restaurant and makes 5,000 finger sandwiches a day throughout the festive season, is (not surprisingly) known for its charmingly traditional, but nevertheless super-sized Christmas. And this year, we were there to witness its transformation from iconic Louis XVI splendour to, well, festive Louis XVI splendour. (Read more.)

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Collateral Damage

From Life Site:

“Hefner himself was not single-handedly responsible for the massive social changes that rocked the Western world from the Sexual Revolution onwards, but he was easily the single most recognizable symbol of them all,” notes Jonathon Van Maren in his 2016 book, The Culture War.

[...]

“All revolutions have collateral damage, and in all revolutions some civilians get hurt,” wrote Van Maren. “But the catastrophe of Hefner’s Sexual Revolution will be felt for generations: Fifty million pre-born children aborted, marriages smashed or abandoned, millions of children growing up in broken homes, rates of porn addiction that have crippled a generation of men, and a hypersexualized society that uses the bodies of girls and women to sell nearly every product on the market. The destruction and the carnage are nearly unfathomable.” (Read more.)

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The Bulwark Against Apostasy

From LifeSiteNews:

Why have so many Christians proved to be so vulnerable to, even eager for, the pathological narratives of our time? Why, in short, do we tell lies to ourselves? We deceive ourselves because there are abundant rewards for doing so, while simultaneously the inner tensions inherent in the moral struggle of the human condition are eased, left behind, as if we were discarding an outmoded legend. Daily, we gulp plausible lies, a web of falsehoods coupled to flattery, to emotional and physical pleasures, and constantly reinforced by a new world culture largely contrived by the entertainment and communications media, by the corruption of education, by morally compromised politics, and most reprehensible of all, by ambiguous theology and spurious spiritualities.

In his second letter to Timothy, St. Paul exhorts the shepherds of the flock of the Lord to preach the word of God with determination, in season and out of season, to “convince, rebuke, and exhort,” to be unfailing in persistence and in teaching. “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound doctrine, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths” (2 Tim 4: 3-4).

If the current studies of faith and practice in the Western world are accurate, it appears that more than 80% of Catholics no longer believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the need for Confession, nor in other fundamental doctrines of the Faith. Consistently, this majority rejects Church teachings on sexual morality. Yet many among them continue to attend Mass or define themselves as Catholic as a kind of cultural religious identity, useful as an ethical system in which to raise one’s children as law-abiding citizens—as “basically good people”—but demanding no accountability before God and man. (Read more.)

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Persuasion

From The Conversation:

It is – among many other things – the most moving love story she ever told. Anne Elliot is the second daughter of the absurdly vain baronet Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall. Frederick Wentworth is an officer in the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Eight years before the novel begins, Wentworth proposes to Anne and she accepts him after a brief and intense courtship, only to be persuaded by her father and her older friend Lady Russell to break off the engagement. Wentworth, angry and badly hurt, goes back to sea, where he conducts a successful series of raiding expeditions on enemy ships, and amasses a fortune in prize money.

When Napoleon abdicates for the first time in April 1814, Wentworth returns to England and soon pays a visit to his sister, who now lives near Anne. Throughout his absence, meanwhile, Anne has found no one who compares to him, and has pined away to the point where now, at 27 years old, her bloom is gone and she has begun the descent into spinsterhood. Many critics have argued that, as a result of suffering and regret, Anne is already “mature” when the novel opens, while the rich and carefree Wentworth has a good deal of growing up to do before he recognizes – or, rather, re-recognizes – her worth.

On the contrary, for all that divides them when he returns, Anne has as much to learn about love as Wentworth does, and her journey toward their reconciliation contains as much confusion as his. Indeed, part of the enormous appeal of Persuasion is Austen’s ability to convey the ways in which Wentworth and Anne are moving steadily toward one another even as their various missteps, flirtations and assumptions seem to be driving them still further apart. Their reunion is the finest scene in all of Austen, and in it they do not even speak face to face, for Austen understood that mediated and misdirected messages frequently carry a far greater charge than explicit declarations.

Anne and Wentworth are both in a room at the White Hart Inn in Bath. He is sitting at a desk writing a letter. She is nearby speaking to a mutual friend, Captain Harville, about men, women and constancy. Harville believes that men feel more deeply than women. Anne takes the opposite view, and while she does not mention Wentworth or her own circumstances, everything she says is clearly with him in mind.

She has spoken to no one about her grief over Wentworth, and it is not long before eight years of pent-up anguish flood out of her. “We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us,” she tells Harville. “It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.” Wentworth, still writing his letter, overhears Anne’s comments and knows immediately that she is speaking about their relationship, and about all that has been lost. Seizing another sheet of paper, he begins a second letter in which he records his feelings toward her as she utters hers toward him, and which he leaves behind on the desk for her to read. (Read more.)

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