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30
Dec
2021
Thursday December 30, 2021
There should be a day for celebrating lost causes.
My little hummingbird didn’t survive the cold snap after Christmas. She showed up here after all the other hummingbirds had migrated south. I assume that the “atmospheric river” swept her up from the coast and dumped her in an Okanagan winter.
I had not bothered taking down my sugar-syrup feeders when all the other hummingbirds had fled south. So there she was, one day in December.
Temperatures dropped to minus-6 Celsius. And still she came back, every day.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: hummingbirds, cold, St. Jude
28
Thursday December 23, 2021
I call myself a Christian (though I’m sure some would consider me a humanist at best, an atheist at worst). Certainly, I come from a Christian tradition. And Christian tradition has asserted, for centuries, that God was born as a human baby. We call him Jesus. Other cultures call him Jesu, or Yeshua, or some name that I don’t know.
Think about the sheer audacity of that claim. God became human! God didn’t just pretend to become human. God didn’t put on a human mask and go around in disguise. God became a human. A very specific historical human.
The Incarnation makes my faith much simpler. If I want to know what God is like, I need only look at Jesus.
Tags: God, Christmas, Jesus, Incarnation
22
Sunday December 19, 2021
I had trouble doing my Christmas decorating this year.
Last year, I found the bins of Christmas decorations Joan had put away in our basement the Christmas before. I set them up as I remembered what she had done.
This year, though, I couldn’t remember all the details anymore.
This Christmas, I realize, I’m not decorating for her. I can now only decorate for me.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Christmas, Blue Christmas, lonely
Thursday December 16, 2021
A few years ago, my daughter invited three temporary Jamaican workers for Christmas dinner.
As the oldest male in the family, I got to carve the Christmas turkey. Of course, I served the guests first. “White meat or dark meat?” I asked.
The three women looked at each other. Then one of them ventured, “Dark.”
The other two agreed.
When plates were emptying, I offered seconds. This time, all three of the Jamaican women asked for white meat.
It turned out that they had made an assumption. They thought that references to white and dark related to their skin colour, not the meat.
Tags: racism, Prejudice
Sunday December 12, 2021
Things were just starting to get back to normal. Restaurants and drive-ins were open again. Sports events could have fans in the stands. People trapped in Canada for the last 18 months were booking flights to exotic locations.
And then the Omigod variant appeared. (Sorry, the OmiCRON variant). Some old rules were re-instated. Some new rules were imposed.
Suddenly, a return to “normal” -- whatever that is – looked a lot farther away.
I suggest that we’re kidding ourselves if we expect that the world is ever going to go back to whatever we once considered normal.
On a personal note, I know that, since my wife’s death last year, going back to any former “normal” is impossible.
Tags: normal, Omicron, mutations