Weekly Meanderings (Christmas Edition)

Last updated on: December 24, 2010 at 12:03 pm by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings (Christmas Edition) 2010-12-24T07:14:30-06:00 Scot McKnight

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We’ve not done a Weekly Meanderings on Christmas, at least that I can remember, so this is a Special Edition of Weekly Meanderings that will focus on Christmas links. And it comes a day early!

Two reindeer were mysteriously spotted in the area …

Gary Stratton takes on Ricky Gervais over It’s a Wonderful Life.

Syler Thomas on the Christmas tree tradition: “Needles are the glitter of the Christmas season. Glitter is the bane of my existence. It is Satan’s arts and crafts. You get the glitter out, and all of a sudden glitter is everywhere. And not just on surfaces, but somehow, you always end up with one on your cheek or your forehead. You try to vacuum it up, and it just stays there. You can almost hear it mocking the vacuum. “You suck,” it says. “But not hard enough.” It’s the same way with Christmas tree needles. They have this way of clinging to the carpet as though they’ve been bathed in Super Glue. Then you have the very real possibility of the tree falling over and destroying your ornaments and spilling water everywhere. To say nothing of the ever-present fire risk posed by putting live electrical wires on a piece of dying wood that is rapidly drying out, inside of your house. When you think about it, there really is no logical reason to keep buying a real tree. We talked it over with our kids, ages 6 through 12, and surprisingly, they were in agreement that we should go fake this year. Children can cling to tradition like 90-year-old Baptists so I figured this was the right decision. It was the right decision, and yet … something inside of me was disquieted. It felt like I was betraying … something.”

A heart-warming story to read.

Nick Kristof’s Humanitarian Gift Guide: “So what would your aunt prefer as a holiday gift — another Mariah Carey CD, or the knowledge that she’s sending a little girl in Haiti to school for a year?”

Mona Charen on an antidote to commercialization: “The challenge for parents who don’t want to spoil their children is to inculcate gratitude. When kids get an opportunity to share with the less fortunate, they cannot help but be aware of their own good fortune. We have taken new, wrapped presents to a women’s shelter — though, to my disappointment, we were asked to remove the wrapping before the presents could be offered to the kids (a lamentable sign of the times, perhaps). And while we weren’t serenaded by angelic towheads — we didn’t even get to see the recipients — we did accomplish the basic mission.”

Good story about caring for family.

How do you measure a university’s value? “The sluggish economy and rising costs of college have only intensified questions about whether expensive, prestigious colleges make any difference. Do their graduates make more money? Get into better professional programs? Make better connections? And are they more satisfied with their lives, or at least with their work?” This is a good article, but the most important value is not what an education does for you but what it does to you.

Speaking of education — mental health is an increasing concern: “Stony Brook is typical of American colleges and universities these days, where national surveys show that nearly half of the students who visit counseling centers are coping with serious mental illness, more than double the rate a decade ago. More students take psychiatric medication, and there are more emergencies requiring immediate action.”

Words of the Year.

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