Most people love to revisit certain stories at Christmastime. In fact, my friend Dennis E. Powell revisits a beloved Christmas story of his in this week’s the View from Mudsock Heights column, which struck me as I had been thinking a great deal about revisited stories this week thanks to what had occupied my time ahead of Christmas. We need to hear stories told and told again; they give meaning and shape how we understand life.
Was it the pandemic? Or has society’s decline increased in velocity? Or is it just me? Christmas is close, but it doesn’t feel like it. Some of that has to do with the pandemic, I suppose, at least around here. The vague sense of being under siege remains, and the Christmas music doesn’t seem to have returned to stores, broadcasts, and elsewhere.
The Zippy Crew wraps up the year with time spent on things Christmasy, advancements in AI technology, one more look at politics for the year, musings on the 2023 Cardinals season and a look at the intersection of grace and works in the Bible.
One week before Christmas 2021, I went out my front door to find an unexpected UPS envelope from my church’s bank tucked under my door mat. Unbeknownst to me as I picked it up, that envelope was about to make the leadup to the busiest week in the church year a lot more “interesting.” US Bank had closed our only account and with it, cut us off from funds and the ability to receive donations.
During Advent, we all excitedly look towards celebrating Jesus’s birth. However, suddenly it is December 26 and the world resets to its ordinary preoccupations. That’s what is wonderful about observing the Twelve Days of Christmas: it helps us keep reflecting on God’s grace and the miracle of Christmas after the busyness of Christmas Day is past. Tim Butler has prepared a free devotional booklet for these next twelve days.
The Zippy Crew takes you over the river and through the woods with a review of a fantastic new Nat “King” Cole Christmas album, sharing of Christmas memories and reflections on the upcoming 12 Days of Christmas. Also, Special Guest Jim Krenning joins us for a preview of an adventure through the Psalms in the New Year.
So. We’re three days from Christmas. These last couple of years the holiday, like everything else, has gotten a bit deflated as two presidents and a lot of medical bureaucrats, liking the feel of unexpected power, have succumbed to the irresistible compulsion to do something, whether it was advisable or not. The effects were troubling to some people more than they were to me, because for a number of years now I’ve enjoyed low-key Christmas celebrations.
The boys are back and this time they are joined by special guest Deborah Allinder Lee for an action packed episode exploring creativity, liturgy and Advent. Also on this podcasting excursion: the official Zippy review of Taylor Swift’s newly released album, “Red (Taylor’s Version).”
George McEvoy always had the best stories. He was a reporter at the old Fort Lauderdale News the same time I was. Though while most us thought of ourselves as young reporters on our way up, George already had enjoyed (mostly) a rich and colorful career. He’d been a police reporter at the New York Daily Mirror alongside the likes of Walter Winchell and his circle had included Damon Runyon. When The Mirror closed down, George moved to Phoenix, where he was a reporter, of course, and where he met his wife, Ruthie. After a while, Fort Lauderdale became his home.
Nice notes having arrived about my reminiscence last week, I thought I’d continue with some family traditions that were once common but that seem now to have all but disappeared, and some community ones which in many places have suffered the same fate.