Little Obama

There's a lot of consternation in the liberal community that Barack Obama isn't making the most liberal of choices as he populates his cabinet and plans his inauguration. My friend Lucia has a great article that spawned me to think:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucia-brawley/is-there-method-to-this-r_b_152189.html

I don't think the concerns are invalid, but I think maybe people need to think differently about their relationship to the President-Elect.

Rather than thinking of him as someone you'd hired to redo your kitchen, and now you're pissed because he put in the wrong tile and scratched up your sink, I think it might be more apt to think about him as your son.

We put our everything into our children, our love, our dreams, our time, but when it is time for them to become grown-ups, we have to let them follow their own path and make their own choices, even if they cause us pain. We can (and should) let them know how we feel, but we have to support them and trust that we did our best and made the right choices in preparing them for the big show.

So feel free to let Obama know how you feel, but maybe try to have a little patience to let him live his life and do what he thinks needs to be done. If you voted for Obama, you gave him a vote of confidence. Let's keep that confidence as long as we can.

Lamenting Xmas Glitz?

Several of my friends who are practicing Christians were lamenting the commercialism and materialism of Christmas. But I think that without those elements, Christmas wouldn't be the major holiday that it is.

It's a complicated holiday -- when the early Christians first celebrated Jesus' birth, they appropriated the Roman Saturnalia (more similar to Carnival/Mardi Gras), though the two had nothing in common -- it was a marketing ploy to get the pagans to join.

Then you throw in Santa Claus, St. Nicholas, who is the patron saint of pawn shops -- the three balls represent three bags of gold that he anonymously gave to a man so the man wouldn't have to sell his three daughters -- whose day was celebrated by giving gifts, and became part of the Christmas celebration when the Catholic Church was trying to woo his worshipers into joining them.

So the Christmas we have today is popular because it was designed to be popular. Maybe as a Christian, the best way to think about it is that its incarnation (glitz and all) is a way to get people excited about the season and interest them in the story of Jesus' birth and his teachings.