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This one is going to be fun!  You can listen at 1060AM WQOM, at www.WQOM.org and at www.TheGoodCatholicLife.com.

trying to figure out why I can’t link to my Register piece.  Does this link work?

[This post ran on the Register about this time of year in 2011.]

*****

This year, we were bound and determined not to ruin the last few weeks of Advent with shopping.

This year, no sobbing in the aisles of Target as some undeserving jerk nabs the western hemisphere’s last remaining copy of Godzilla Unleashed for Wii. No tense evenings hunched over the computer as mom and dad show their love for their family by nearly coming to blows over whether or not one can trust the Amazon reviewers of the Li’l Cutie Maggot Farm Starter Kit.

No, this year, we were going to dispense with that foolishness, and keep Advent the way it ought to be: a holy season of quiet anticipation and preparation. We were, for once, going to choose the better part.

We accomplished this by cramming all of the shopping into the first couple of weeks of Advent.

I’m sorry, but you go ahead and find even modest presents and stocking stuffers for eight children without getting a little wrought up over it. It’s too late to turn into one of those nice families that doesn’t care a whit about material things. You don’t just suddenly tell a 9-year-old boy, “Son, you’ve been waiting all your life to be old enough to have your own MP3 player, much like the ones your older sisters unwrapped so gleefully last Christmas. But this year, we have a much better plan. Everyone’s going to get a biography of Blessed Ubalda the Dreary and a nearly new pair of socks, and some missionaries in Bangalore have promised to remember you at Matins!”

The truth is, I really don’t feel bad about making a big deal about presents—or, for that matter, about any of the sensuous foofarah that goes along with preparations for Christmas. I’m more or less at peace with the balance we’ve found between Mary and Martha, hymns and gingerbread, piety and pie. We try to make Advent a distinctly spiritual season, but a distinctly pleasant one: Every prayer comes with a cookie attached—because, darn it, cookies make us happy, and so does the Incarnation. That seems right to me, especially with so many little kids in the house. (The trick will be to make sure that our kids continue to spend Christmas with us when they get older, so I can continue to have cookies with my prayers.)

However, we do draw the line somewhere. This year, my husband and I spent a good 40 minutes online hunting down a specific action figure—which, I hasten to add, no one actually asked for—until we realized that maybe, just maybe, this particular gift wasn’t the most appropriate way to celebrate the birth of our Savior.

Oh, I have nothing against action figures in general. Actually, I do. The prices they charge for these shoddy little, poorly-painted hunks of plastic just designed to lose limbs and accessories and cause grief and heartache until they disappear entirely! They seems to me like the worst present ever. But the grit of my grousing has been gradually covered over, year by year, by the pearly nacre of inexplicable joy shining on the face of a kid who really, really, really wanted a three-inch representation of Indiana Jones, and who got a three-inch representation of Indiana Jones. I know happiness when I see it. I still don’t get it, but I’m willing to admit that, for some kids, an action figure is a Good Present.

Except for the one for which we came within inches of pressing “buy now” last night. It was this guy:

As you can see, it’s part of a play set for children. Just previous to the tasteful vignette depicted here, Ash has managed to scrape his face off the hot stove, whereon he was hurled by a team of malicious miniature Ash demons. After being impaled with a barbecue fork, Ash retaliates by swallowing one of the mini Ashes and the scalding him with a bellyful of boiling water. But! (and this is where the “play set for kids” part comes in) when he regains consciousness, he discovers that an entire new Ash—Evil Ash—is growing inside him, and, in a truly revolting and explicit scene of anguish, it begins to separate gruesomely from his body as it grows into a full-sized man.

After that, it gets kind of gross.

What’s that you say? You can’t believe that good Catholic parents would allow their children even to know about such a clearly demonic and horrifying movie, much less let them watch it, much less let them watch it often enough (twice!) that an innocent and malleable 9-year-old soul might actually consider such a gift to be desirable?

Yeah, well. How about I give you the address of those missionaries in Bangalore. Apparently they’re running a special this year, and you can get a whole novena said for the salvation of our family’s souls—half price!

You know what the worst part is? I lied. We’re only halfway done shopping. But still, we didn’t buy Evil Ash. And for a couple of primitive screwheads like us, I think that’s pretty good.

Enjoy listening to one of the most sublime musical accomplishments of the 21st century, which may or may not mesh well with your non-mocking, cynicism-shedding, satire-eschewing Adventy self:

Ahhhhhh.  Okay, now be good.

This post originally ran last year on the Register.

*****************

Happy Thanksgiving!  I know that many of you are very busy and/or really depressed today.  Some of you are alone, and many, many more of you desperately wish that you were.  So, rather than tax you with a challenging or insightful essay, I thought I’d take this opportunity to clean up my inbox and answer a few of the questions that people have asked me recently.

***

Dear Simcha,

By this time of day, I’m supposed to be basting the turkey for the fifth or sixth time so it will be golden and delicious in time for our Thanksgiving feast.  But I haven’t even defrosted it yet, because I spent all of yesterday watching Benny Hill and drinking the rum I bought to make rum raisin bread pudding.  (I also ate all the raisins, which is a separate problem.)  So now I have eleven guests coming in a matter of hours, and all I have to offer them is 22 pounds of solid turkey ice.  I can’t even get the bag off.  I think I may still actually be drunk.  I’m so ashamed.  What can I do?

Signed, Filled With Regret

Dear Filled With Regret,

Lucky for you, I’m an avid historian, so I can save your sorry hide with my expertise!  It’s a little known fact that turkeys aren’t even an authentic Thanksgiving main course, so it’s actually quite acceptable to serve something else.  Forget that boring old bird.  Instead, call yourself a purist and dish up what the original Pilgrims probably had for their main course:  a couple of juicy wild eagles.  If no eagles are available, swan is an acceptable substitute.  Just don’t forget the traditional eel-and-poopberry compote for a side dish.  And they drank hot tar from wooden cups.  Hope this helps, and bon appétit!  Or should I say (since French had not yet been invented in Pilgrim times), Huzzah!

***

Dear Simcha,

I’m eleven months old.  My mother is fairly useful, and I’ve gotten accustomed to her smell.  She can even be kind of funny sometimes, like with that noise she makes when I grab her lips and twist them around. But she has one really bad habit, and I don’t know if I can tolerate it anymore.

Sometimes, when I’m awake, she puts me down.  On the floor.  For minutes at a time.  She does this even though she knows perfectly well that the floor is a completely inappropriate and demeaning location for someone of my social standing (I basically run the household).  Also, it’s harder to bite her nose when she’s not holding me.  I’m at my wit’s end.  What do you suggest?

P.S.   Also, she sometimes tries to put socks on me.  Socks, in November!  How am I supposed to deal with this level of idiocy?

Signed, Benedicta

Dear Benedicta,

The main thing you need to keep in mind is that your mother really loves you and is trying her best, but that, because of the demands of her current schedule, she has the physical prowess and mental acuity of a damp Kleenex.  She knows, deep in her heart, that putting you down is the wrong thing to do, but she feels that she can’t help herself.

What she needs is someone to help snap her out of her pathetic, self-pitying state.  Have you tried screaming?  If that doesn’t work, have you tried screaming more?  I really think you should try screaming, followed by some more screaming.  Good luck!

P.S.  Don’t forget that thing you do, where you put your little head down and then look up with your big, brown eyes.  Once she reassembles herself from the puddle she instantly becomes when she meets your gaze, she will want to pick you up, because you are a cutie wootie wootie, oh yes you are, and Mama loves you very much, oh yes she does.

***

Dear Simcha,

We’re having relatives over for Thanksgiving.  We are polar opposites on just about every issue, and every other year, the feast quickly devolved into a screaming match, and everyone went home furious.  Grandmama has convinced us to patch things up and get together again this year.  We’ve already agreed not to talk about politics, but there are so many other divisive topics of conversation.  How can I be sure that we will have a peaceful and pleasant day?

Signed,
William Makepeace Crackery

Dear Bill,

Don’t underestimate the healing properties of just the right menu.  Here are a few recipes that might just do the trick, and will give you the happy, quiet holiday your battered soul needs.

***

Hey –

Leaving the office in a few minutes.  Will meet you at Mom’s.  Thanks for making all eleven kinds of pie.  It’s so much easier to choose which one I want when I can actually see them, you know?  Oh, some guy was selling puppies out of his trunk, so I picked up a few.  You’re so good with words — you can name the one with bowel problems.  See you soon!

love, D

Dear D,

>>The following address has permanent fatal errors:  simchafisher@gmail.com
(reason: 540 OY-001 (FEH0-GRR4-FU23)
In order to avoid being placed on a permanent block list, please reconfigure your message so that it includes no puppies, and more gin.

 

My second grader brought this book home

and I admit, I groaned and thought, “Glahhh, another modern twist on an old fairy tale.  Oh gosheroodie, I wonder if we will learn that being a princess is all about following your heart and being true to yourself? Or perhaps she will be liberated from patriarchonormative concepts of worth, and end up finding fulfillment in some nontypical career that doesn’t involve pretty dresses?”

Well, we didn’t, and she wasn’t!  I won’t give away the plot of The Princess and the Pig, but I really liked this book.  It’s a cute little switched-at-birth story involving an underappreciated baby and a very average pig, and everybody ends up getting more or less what they deserve.  Funny, brisk, and satisfying, and shouldn’t be overshadowed in the glut of princess and anti-princess books out there.  The illustrations were more interesting than the cover suggests, too.

The author, Jonathan Emmett, also wrote Ruby, In Her Own Time

which my husband and I both found unexpectedly moving.  It’s just about some parents who are worried about one of their ducklings, but it turns out she’s okay, just kind of weird.

Please, note, neither one of these books is a message delivery product disguised as a story.  They’re just good stories that happen to reflect something true.  Isn’t it funny how we snicker at Victorians for their bizarre, finger-wagging ways, but it’s harder and harder to find a  21st century children’s book that doesn’t have a very clear lesson you can sum up in one sentence (and it’s usually something both lame and false).

Now for the reminder!  The links above all have my special Amazon code embedded in them; which means if you buy these books, or any other Amazon product (book or otherwise) after getting to Amazon through one of my links, I will get a percentage of the profit.  Of course, I only recommend books or products that I actually think are good.

If you are doing some Christmas shopping through Amazon, please consider using my link! I have a permanent Amazon link on the right sidebar, under where it says

Subscribe by email to the blog…

I know some people are finding it hard to spot, so here is a screenshot of it. I am working on getting a flashier ad, but in the mean time, here is what I’ve got:

Thanks!

1.  Jen Fulwiler’s long-anticipated spiritual memoir, Something Other than God, is finally out! Well, it will be out in March, and available for pre-order in December. I love conversion stories, and Jen is such a clear, honest, compelling writer.  Here’s the cover, designed by John Herreid, who also did my book’s cover.

Can’t wait to read it!

 

2.  Rebecca Frech, author of Teaching in Your Tiara, has written a neat review of my book for Catholic Lane.  I was especially glad to hear from Rebecca because her immensely popular book is about homeschooling, and yet she does not treat me as a pariah for saying that, while some public schools are bad, there are others public schools where your kids can get a decent, non-soul-losing education.

I haven’t had a chance to read Rebecca’s book yet, but it sounds great — sensible and encouraging, funny and realistic.

 

3.  Something personal:  you may have noticed that I haven’t exactly written anything in a long, long time.  Just a lot of “Heyyyy, look at this neat thing” and “Boy, get a load of this.”  This is because I am feeling bad, and have been for a few months.  Can’t seem to shake it, and doing things like laundry and dishes are using up all the creative energy and ambition I can muster.  If you could say a quickie prayer for me (and my family, who of course bear the brunt of me feeling bad), I would be very grateful. Thanks.

for something to write about.  So far, this is what I got:

This is why I consider commercial boycotts to be largely a spiritual and symbolic exercise, at least at the personal level.  I refuse to buy anything with “Nestle” written on it, for instance, because of their repulsive treatment of third world babies; but I know the only difference it will make is if I consciously offer up the (miniscule) sacrifice that involves.

Anyway, I usually buy store brands of food — but aren’t those often made by the same corporations, and just packaged more cheaply?  Blah.  Education is a good thing; but I think we are fooling ourselves if we think we can keep our shopping baskets ritually pure.  If we avoid all taint as consumers, we will quickly starve.  When large groups of people band together and exert pressure on corporations, they can affect real change.  But it does not follow that a single, harried shopper who grabs a bag of Laffy Taffy is committing a sin against third world babies.

What makes sense to me is this:  pick a few causes that you feel really strongly about.  Make a firm decision to make the sacrifice so you can avoid supporting those particular evils. Stick to it.  And then just chill about the rest.

What do you think?  How do you handle being a principled consumer when your choices are not real choices?

Ha- this is funny.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz stumbles into the people-who-read-too-much mispronunciation of “misled”:

I recently ran into this myself, when I was recording my audiobook last weekend.  It seems that I use kind of a lot of words that I am not 100% sure how to pronounce.  (John Herried called this “Homeschooler’s Syndrome.”  Oh lawsy, there she goes again, attacking homeschoolers!!!1!)  It happened a few times, but the one I really struggled with was “minutiae.”   I asked the producer, and he didn’t know, either.  I think I ended up saying “my-NOO-shee-aye.”  I did my best to make it sound authoritative.

My kids all learned to read pretty early, and although I flogged them with phonics, they definitely got in some skimming habits.  One child who shall remain nameless was recently heard to make reference to “filling a lamp with kernose.”  My grandmother told me she once met a guy who thought “fatigued” was pronounced “fatty-gayed.”  He’d surely heard the word pronounced, but I guess he just somehow assumed all his life that there were two separate words, which both meant “tired.”

I just love it when little fissures of naivete are introduced into the professional world like this.  We’re all faking it, at one level or another.