Ten Reasons Why Christmas Should Start Now

I love Christmas. I will save all of my effusions of why I love Christmas for a later time. For now I will just list the (very logical) reasons why the Christmas season should already be swelling in all of your hearts as it is in mine.

1.      Thanksgiving and Christmas are both wrapped up in the “Holiday Season”. The expectation and preparation of the holidays are all part of the season. Do you prepare for Thanksgiving the day before? I don’t think so.

2.      Disneyland starts their Christmas music, Christmas decorations, and Christmas parade on the second Friday of November. This year Christmas began at Disneyland on November 8^th. That seems like a perfectly reasonable time to start playing Christmas tunes and feeling more love for mankind.

3.      Costco, Hallmark, Michaels, the Dollar Tree, and I am sure many other stores (these are the ones I have seen with my own eyes) start selling all of their Christmas merchandise after Halloween.

4.      If you begin thinking about Christmas now, you actually have time to buy all of your gifts without cramming your shopping in the week before Christmas with all of the other holiday crazies (although I confess, I love the hustle and bustle of the stores at Christmas). But when you have seventeen people in your immediate family, and five in your husband’s, plus several other miscellaneous individuals, the more time to shop for the multitude the better.

5.      Thanksgiving does not have its own music. However many Christmas song were originally written for Thanksgiving or touch on the topic, but are all wrapped up together with Christmas music. Therefore the separation between Thanksgiving and Christmas is blurred and Christmas music should be blasting out of your speakers in November.

6.      Starbucks starts using their beautiful red Christmas cups in the first week of November. AND starts serving the delicious and wonderful Christmas beverage Crème Brule Latte.

7.      How are you going to fit in all of the parties and the baking and shopping and laughing and enjoying in ONE MONTH? You will end up overlooking making cookies for your neighbor, skipping so and so’s party, and forgetting your nephew’s gift. Don’t do that. Don’t be that person.

8.      Santa takes his royal seat in many malls after Halloween.

9.      You will be watching way too many movies in December if you wait to watch all of the awesome Christmas movies till after Thanksgiving. It’s a Wonderful Life, Christmas Carol, Miracle on 34^th Street, White Christmas… just to name a few. You don’t want to be stuck in front of the tube all December when you are supposed to be enjoying family and good cheer. Word to the wise, start watching those delightful Christmas classics now.

10.  It is the happiest, most love-filled, exciting, beautiful, fattening, most wonderful time of the year. Why would we try to cram all of the wonderfulness into three and a half tiny weeks?

So I will be the first to tell you. MERRY CHRISTMAS!

This is the Real Life

You ever have one of those days where you open your eyes and life just feels great? You are happy to work out, happy to clean, happy to work. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping… too far? Well you know the kind of wonderful life-is-so-great kind of day. 

Yeah, so today was not that day. 

In fact, everything about it was all wrong. I should have stayed in bed all day and not have bothered with all of the busyness that is so essential to this earthly life. Cozy up with a good book and a pitcher of hot cocoa. That would have been the ticket. 

Alas, it could not be. Life just gets in the way. 

Don’t worry, this is still my jolly little life, even if my tone is a little more sullen this evening. I just thought it might be fun to change things up a little. This is all part of this wonderful thing we call life. To let off a little steam here are a few inexplicable things that drive me absolutely crazy. For no reason. They just do.

1.       When I am walking on a busy side walk and the person in front of me suddenly stops. Doesn’t even slow down. Just stops like he is the only person in the world… I confess I have wished for a giant candy cane (or some sort of not too harmless weapon) to bonk over heads. Rage. Inexplicable rage.

2.       When people use double negatives. This does not enrage me…. Merely a severe dislike. Why do they do it? It does not even make sense.

3.       When my drink is messed up at a coffee shop and they are running around too much to fix it for me… oh you don’t mess with a girl’s coffee.

Hmmm… well that’s all I have for now. And I feel better. Imagine that.

A Magical November

November at Disneyland... the beginning of the most wonderful time of the year.

I thought it would be appropriate to participate in Disney wordless Wednesday because I visited the magical place this very week. I arrived with the excited expectation of the holiday cheer that would await me there.

Tink has begun sprinkling her Christmas fairy dust all around the park. But she will not be finished until this Friday when Christmas begins at Disneyland in all its glory. I love Christmas, and I love Disneyland. The two combined is just...truly magical.

The tree will be up, small world will be shining, and the Christmas parade will be in full swing come this Friday. And that is the day the Christmas season begins for me as well.

But I will not get ahead of myself. These are the early November shots of the magical Kingdom, when the jollification of of the season is only beginning to unfold.

Super Fun (and easy) Dinner Party Idea

Every Saturday night in our home is “build your own pizza” night. Yeah, happens. We exercise and try to eat right throughout the week… and then Saturday comes and its carb city. And even after I am laying like a beached whale with crumbs on my cheeks and marinara on my fingertips, I have no regrets. 

We were having a dinner party last weekend and instead of giving up our ritual, we decided to let a few others be part of our sacred pizza building experience. 

What a fun and (relatively) easy dinner party idea. I made an ample amount of dough (some whole wheat) so that everyone could have their own individual pizza. An assortment of vegetables and a few different meats, marinara BBQ sauce, and of course cheese, and I was all ready for the company to arrive. 

It was as much fun as any game to have everyone sit around the table with their individual crusts as we built our different masterpieces. 

The only difficulty was trying to fit everyone’s pizzas in the oven at the same time so that we could eat together. Poor Cory had to wait fifteen minutes while we indulged.

Homemade pizza. Both fun and delicious. Give it a try.

How to be an Awesome Parent Part 2

For those of you who are interested in my little ramblings on parenting, and have read my introduction, and part one, here are my next three points. This is where it gets a little bit tougher...

4. What do you do on Sundays?

My parents proclaim the importance of being in church every Sunday to everyone. What, you mean every Sunday? Yes, with the exception of some very rare or extreme cases, every Sunday. If we are out of town, we visit another church, but usually we will be in our own church every Sunday.

Growing up in this fashion, at a young age I understood the importance of church. I was not given an option to stay home. And slowly, as I got older, it was engrained into my mind so much that I had a conviction about missing church. Even as young as twelve or thirteen, if us kids had opportunities to go away for the weekend with friends, my parents would let us decide. Because they had taught us so well, and had such confidence in our character, they would leave the decision up to us. We would choose to go to church.

In addition to this at a young age we were all serving in church. This is an essential part to raising kids that will serve God. Whether it is helping to clean, set up chairs, be on the worship team or youth leaders, we all had our part.

Some people might think that this is a little overboard on the discipline of being in church every Sunday. But this was a critical move in my mom and dad’s parenting technique. It taught us at a young age consistency and discipline. In addition to this it encouraged us to put God first in our lives.

Don’t give me the, “well that worked for you, but it doesn’t mean it will work for me” crap stuff. God honors faithfulness. He honors those who honor him. These are very simple, straight forward, don’t have to be a genius to figure out, principles.

5. Do Not Be Over Wicked, Neither Be Over Wise. Discovering the balance

In my family my dad sometimes calls himself ‘captain carnal’ and my mom, ‘holy mother’. Although these names aren’t entirely true, they are a very good example of the balance that exists in my family. We are a good, strong, Christian family. But at the same time we don’t ask God to help us decide what we should eat for dinner.

This balance is a very difficult one for Christian families to achieve. It is absolutely necessary that you do not sway too much towards the ‘wicked’ side. But at the same time, if parents are too strict about religious expectations, it will cause their children to rebel. I have seen so many families who have had the idea of the ‘model Christian family’ but the children weren’t following what their parents believed.

It is different in every home. But what it comes down to is, don’t freak out about the little things that are not really “holy” but not harmful either. As parents you have to trust that you are giving your kids the principles they need for a strong Christian foundation, and then you have to let them make their own decisions. If you did your job right, they will make the right decision. And additionally, if you did your job right, you will not be worried, stressed out parents.

6. “We are Dunns”

Sometimes in the world people are so afraid of being different. They kind of want to blend in in the crowd and sneak through life without drawing attention to themselves.

Not so in our home. Since we were going to be different than the world anyway, my parents told us from the beginning so that we didn’t hear it from some rude kid on the block. They told us that we were Dunns, we were raised to be different than the rest of the world. And on top of that to be proud of it.

We were taught to be examples to others. We were taught that we upheld a higher standard than the rest of the world. We were Dunns, therefore we didn’t date every other person. We were Dunns, therefore we didn’t go to see rated R movies. Little things like this, as we were growing up established our characters individually so that we could form our own opinions and make our own decisions about what we felt was right and wrong. 

Any ideas? Thoughts? Comments? Advice? Leave them below!

A Different Society

October has closed and so has our perusal of “The Old Curiosity Shop”. I will not spoil anything for those who are behind or who have not yet taken it upon themselves to read that great work; just know that reading it was an incredible journey. 

While writing this book Dickens said, “I am breaking my heart over this story… I can’t bear to finish it.” Now that I have finished reading this masterpiece I feel I can empathize with his pain. I am breaking my heart over the portrayal of these characters. I could not imagine creating them, writing their suffering, penning their character, thoughts, dreams, hopes and fears, into the reality that exists on the page.  

Dickens depiction of the goodness of mankind is beautiful, sobering, and encouraging all at once. It makes one feel something akin to despair to look at how far humanity has fallen since then. Where is the decency, honesty, and goodness that is so profoundly displayed in the youth of this work? 

But the feeling of hopelessness that is brought about by the comparisons of the two societies cannot stay long. Dickens points to the hope before the closing of the story in a quote that was so poignant and beautiful that, in the midst of my tears, I had to take a moment to jot it down. 

“In the destroyer’s steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path become a way of light to Heaven.” This is a wonderful way to demonstrate that which the devil tries to destroy, the Lord can turn around for good.

Happy endings abound in this story, but not without a faint underlying feeling of tragedy. It was the perfect combination which strikes a nerve at the reader’s heart, leaving one with the desire to go and be that light to Heaven in this dark world.