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From the Weekly Standard:

President Obama declares Hanukkah “an opportunity for people of all faiths to recognize the common aspirations we share.”

He made this comment in his statement on the Jewish holiday emailed to the press:

Michelle and I send our warmest wishes to all those celebrating Hanukkah around the world.

This Hanukkah season we remember the powerful story of the Maccabees who rose up to liberate their people from oppression. Upon discovering the desecration of their Temple, the believers found only enough oil to light the lamp for one night. And yet it lasted for eight.

Hanukkah is a time to celebrate the faith and customs of the Jewish people, but it is also an opportunity for people of all faiths to recognize the common aspirations we share. This holiday season, let us give thanks for the blessings we enjoy, and remain mindful of those who are suffering. And let us reaffirm our commitment to building a better, more complete world for all.

From our family to the Jewish Community around the world, Chag Sameach.

Big words from a guy who doesn’t seem to realize that, in the Hanukkah story, HE IS ANTIOCHUS.

Today’s book pick, an excellent choice for a Christmas present, is recommended by my sister, Sarah Johnson:

*****

The Story of Holly and Ivy

by Rumer Godden, illustrated by Barbara Cooney

 

Yes, this book does contain orphans and dolls, but no, it is not sappy.  Ivy is a girl who falls through the cracks of a community’s system of charity– she’s the only orphan at St. Agnes’s not to be invited to a patron’s home for Christmas.   She finds herself on a train bound for the Infants Home, the only place available to take her in. But in a moment of nothing-to-lose recklessness, she gets off at a different  stop– to look, she says, for her grandmother.  In the face of another child’s cruelty, she has insisted that this grandmother lives in Appleton, a name she remembers from somewhere.  So when she learns from fellow passengers that Appleton is a real place, she jumps at the chance that her grandmother, too, might be real.   She’s young enough to operate in that in-between world where fantasy and actuality are not distinct territories.  But what she finds in Appleton– the market in full swing on Christmas Eve– is a sensory feast:  

 

There were stalls of turkeys and geese, fruit stalls with oranges, apples, nuts, and tangerines that were like small oranges wrapped in silver paper .  .  . A woman was selling balloons and an old man was cooking hot chestnuts.  Men were shouting, the women had shopping bags and baskets, the children were running, everyone was buying or selling and laughing.  Ivy had spent all her life in St. Agnes’s; she had not seen a market before; and, “I won’t look for my grandmother yet,” said Ivy.

She doesn’t give up the quest, but neither does she pass up this chance to experience everything a market square has to offer.  She spends all the money in her pocket on chestnuts and tea and a blue balloon.  That’s one reason I say this story isn’t sappy:  Ivy isn’t an ideal designed to gratify our emotions;  she acts the way a real child might act.

The book is delicious, though, in the perfect weaving-together of its narrative strands, and it has the happiest ending you could ask for. It’s a Christmas story that doesn’t mention the Christ child, yet the mystery of the first Christmas pervades it in a natural, unobtrusive way.  Here’s an example:  after the market shuts down, Ivy finds shelter in a shed built against the back of a bakery; the oven’s heat, retained by the bricks, is enough to keep her warm through most of the night.  This image works beautifully in its own right;  only several hours after putting the book down did I recognize the echo of a child sheltered in Bethlehem, “house of bread.”

And not till even later did I see the deeper resonance of Mrs. Jones, the “grandmother” Ivy finds. The narrator tells us, “This is a story about wishing.”  What that statement finally means is that it’s a story of grace really given, in spite of being too good to hope for– like the grace promised in the prophecy from Isaiah:  “For it is written, ‘be glad, O barren woman, who bears no children; break forth and cry aloud, you who have no labor pains; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband.’” The sad Mrs. Jones and the lost, wandering Ivy turn out to be very apt representations of fallen mankind.   All the emotion of their fulfilled hope is present in the story, but in a quiet, subdued, and very English way.

The Story of Holly and Ivy  works wonderfully as a read-aloud for children as young as six.  The Viking Kestrel edition, with Barbara Cooney’s luminous illustrations, would make a terrific Christmas gift.

but I’ve just opened a CafePress store.

Check it out. 

T-shirts (including plus size and maternity), Dignerrieres, and even Dignaroos.  It’s all there.

For a little background on this tomfoolery, see

Pants:  A Manifesto

and

Pants Pass

and, just to show my heart’s in the right place, one more post which didn’t spawn any products at all:

WWMD

But really, overall, I’m so ashamed.  But on the other hand, do let me know if there’s another product you’d like to see!

Sorry for the bad link in the Register!  Click below for the advent chain:

Advent chains 2012

Guess what?  I’ve been putting a lot of old books on my 50 Books list, but today is different.  Today’s book is so new that you have to pre-order it.

AND, I wrote part of it!  Yes, inching my way slowly and angrily toward actually writing my own damn book, I was delighted when the strange and wonderful Ryan Charles Trusell of Labora Editions — YOU KNOW, THE ORA ET LABORA ET ZOMBIES GUY — asked me to join Dorian Speed, Dan Lord, and Brandon Vogt in writing short essays on the theme of Advent for a new “micropublishing” venture.  Naturally, I jumped at the chance to be involved in such a cool project with such cool people.

Here’s the cover for my contribution:

and here’s the official blurb for the whole set, which includes booklets from all four writers:

A subversive baby king, a lumbering grotesque, the empress of holiday traditions, and an epiphany on the day after Epiphany… All of this and more awaits readers inside the four slim volumes of the Labora Editions Adventhology. This new micropublishing adventure brings together four short pieces by four well-known Catholic bloggers, united by the common theme of the season of Advent and its culmination at Christmas. Each piece is published separately, as its own small booklet, of fine paper with a hand-printed softcover.

My dears, how much do you think a gorgeous hand-printed set of four original essays would cost you?  Well, nope!  It’s just $12 for the set, or you can buy each booklet separately for a mere $3.50.  This will make a lovely present, or (and you know this is a  high compliment from me) excellent bathroom reading.  Pre-order!  Shipping begins November 23.

Hoping to get some excerpts up tomorrow!  I’ve only read little bits of what Brandon, Dan, and Dorian wrote, so I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on this set.  Thanks to Ryan for including me, and for changing the cover at the last minutewithout breaking an apparent sweat, when I changed my mind and didn’t want to write about caterpillars after all!  Whew.

. . . Sed Noli Modo put up the interview she did with me a while back, for Catholic Speaker’s Month.  Check it out!

My son pointed out to me that it was 50 days until Christmas.  Being a cynical and mistrustful person, I didn’t believe him; but being an incredibly lazy person, I didn’t feel like turning my head forty degrees to the right to check the wall calendar.  I was also too lazy to open up the calculator on the desktop of the computer I’m sitting in front of.  I did, however, manage to Google “how many days  until christmas 2012″ and sure enough!  The little crumb is right.

So how’s about, for the next fifty days, I tell you about my favorite books. Fiction, non-fiction, art collections, poetry, picture books, board books, books you have been hunting for six days and then suddenly realize have been holding up the tippy end of the couch.  Books, books, books!

(illustration from Arnold Lobel’s Pigericks.  Argh, or possibly from Whiskers and Rhymes!  Sorry, I have to run out!  Both are great books, though)

If you care to buy one of them (or anything else from Amazon, as long as you click through the links on this blog), I will get a small percentage of the sale, which I have opted to receive in the form of Amazon credits, to prevent me from spending it all on Twinkies and gin.  Wait, do they sell gin on Amazon?  Probably not.  Which means I’ll be spending those credits on Christmas presents for the kids, to whom, in a rash moment, I promised that we would not be having an Imagination Christmas this year.

The first book is great for someone who wants to do some spiritual reading for Advent, but who doesn’t like doing spiritual reading:

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

It’s fiction, a sort of fantasy/thought experiment with a nod to the Divine Comedy.  The speaker finds himself in a dim and dismal land and nervously gets on line for a bus.  The bus turns out to be headed to Heaven, and everyone who gets off has a chance to stay there, if they wish.  We witness the ghosts (because Heaven is so bright and substantial, the bus passengers are flimsy and transparent, like smoke in that land.  Even the grass hurts their feet) meeting people they knew on Earth, who try to persuade them to give up whatever is holding them back from leaving their fatal sins behind.  Some do, and some do not.

So, this is good spiritual reading because Lewis hits home again and again as he exposes the foolishness and lies that we harbor in our hearts, leading us away from God.  But it’s eminently entertaining, easy to follow, fascinating, piercingly insightful, and moving.  And it’s short!  I would recommend this book for adults or for teenagers as young as 14 or 15.

I’m giving really short shrift to an unforgettable book.  What’s worse, I’ve used up about 30% of my book reviewer’s adjectives on the first day.  Oh well.

My husband — my HUSBAND! — make me take out the part about how, every time Obama goes down in the polls,  he does the Dutch Oven on Michelle.  But the rest stands.

In other news, don’t forget to enter the apron raffle!   Just $3!  Ends tomorrow!

In other news, happy anniversary to my husband.  Fifteen years with you is proof that God is good.

For Seven Quick Takes.  See if you can figure out which one got the shaft, minutewise.  (Hint:  all of them.)

1.  You guys.  We got cookies!

The generous and talented Kate Essenberg sent us dozens of completely gorgeous cookies.  I took pictures.  Adorable, hilarious pictures of the kids in various stages of astonishment and glee as they discovered what was in the box.  Well, after three days of running various diagnostics and patches and rewiring and whatnot, my husband has discerned that everything on our computer expired at the same time.  Or something.  So I can’t upload any pictures (and they probably kind of sucked anyway, to be honest, because we’ve been losing colors, one by one, on the monitor.  Everything is glowing in Radiation Sickness Peach right now).  So you will have to imagine these cookies, which are astonishing — full of delicately molded detail, some gilded, some glittery, and all sweet, tender and entirely delectable (which I wasn’t expecting, since they are so beautiful).

The kids paused for a moment in their wolfish devouring and asked why she sent them, and I said, “I guess she likes my writing.”  So they howled, “Well, KEEP WRITING, Mama!”

2.  I can talk with my mouth!  Also, if I have a microphone in one hand and a sheaf of notes in the other, I don’t nervously pick at my face and ears  in a way that fills the audience with revulsion.  So, I think my first official speaking gig went pretty well.  I spoke about forgiveness, and nobody visibly lost consciousness or lit themselves on fire to get out of hearing the whole thing.  If anyone who was at Murphy’s on the 25th has a copy of the video or audio recordings, could you let me know how I could get my hands on one?  I’m doing the same talk in Keene, NH, sometime in November, and would like to see what I need to work on (more enunciation, less pants-wetting, or what).  Many thanks to Fr. Jon Kalisch of St. Denis in Hanover for hosting so graciously!

Oh, ha, and this was funny: before the talk, Fr. Jon asked me what I most liked to write about.  I didn’t realized that he also asked my husband what I most liked to write about.  So when he introduced me, he said, “Simcha’s husband says that she enjoys writing essays that encourage people to be themselves.  And Simcha says she likes to talk about sex.”  And thus, I had the full attention of a roomful of college students drinking beer.

3.  I had the pleasure of meeting Dartmouth graduate Peter Blair, who is the editor ofFare Forward, A Christian Review of Ideas.  I left my copy in my husband’s car and keep remembering to get it only once he’s already left for work, so it’s been traveling around southern New England very busily for almost two weeks now without me.  But the bits I got to read were intriguing, and I love the idea of Christians (yes, including Catholics!) working together to produce something thoughtful and beautiful.  Check it out!

4.  Catechesis of the Good Shepherd!  If you have little kids and someone in your area offers Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, GO TO IT.  Commit identity theft to get on the waiting list for next year.  Do what you have to do.  We’ve only been to one session so far (it turns out that all the other parents got all fancy and showed up at the churchwhere it was being held, whereas we very reasonably spent our time hunting around the various buildings at the other church that we assumed it was probably at; and then after a while we went home.  So we missed the first one), but it is super duper.   It’s a Montessori-based program, and it is lovely.

5.  For the month of October, I’ll be posting at the Register only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, mostly so I can get caught up on my ebook (and probably audiobook), which is forthcoming, in the same way that the Parousia is forthcoming, like, okay, yes, eventually we all more or less believe that it will happen, but by no means would we be so presumptuous as to assume that we will see it in our lifetimes.  Humph.  So anyway, would you or would you not pay good money for an ebook called How’s Your Goop? And Other Burning Questions About Sex, Marriage, and NFP?  Or does the title need help?  I need help.

6.  Will is make you just shrivel up inside if I tell you about a craft that we did and it was fun?  Check one YES _____ NO ______

7.  We’re trying to think of something nice to do for our fifteenth anniversary.  We’ll probably go out to eat on the actual day, but we would like to do some kind of activity or day trip on the weekend, when we’ll “have” more “time.”  Bowling?  Canoeing?  Ping pong?  One anniversary, we tried to go to the adoration chapel and renew our vows, only to find that (a) it was closed, and (b) we couldn’t remember our vows.  But it was nice anyway.

On Tuesday, September 25th at 9:00, I’ll be at Murphy’s in Hanover, NH, for a widdle Theology on Tap.  I will be chatting about forgiveness — what it is, what it ain’t, how to get started, and maybe a little about what’s holding you back.  I will not be yelling at anyone.  Probably my husband and baby Benny will be there, if you want to buy them a beer.  I would love to meet anyone who’s going to be in the area!

Oh, and I just got the latest issue of Catholic Digest, wherin you can find “34 Pro-Life Family Activities,” invented by me (and we even actually do some of them at our house).