SARAH S. writes:

At Christmastime one sees family members and occasionally a revelation occurs. My grandmother is quite old, no longer able to drive or live alone in her own home. She will not think of selling the property that has been hers and my late grandfather’s for over 40 years. But what has puzzled the family is that she will not consider returning there with another competent family member who can cook, drive, etc. (rather than staying with her various children for a few months at a time). Read More »

IT IS widely believed that Christmas is celebrated on December 25th because the holiday is an adaptation of popular pagan winter festivals. Two writers, The Catholic Knight  and Taylor Marshall, refute this theory, pointing out, among other things, that it is reasonable to assume that Christ, who was conceived on March 25th, was born on the 25th of December. The Catholic Knight writes:

I submit to you that everything you’ve heard about the supposed “Pagan origin” of Christmas is false. It is much hyperventilation over nothing really. Not only is it false, but it is based on such poor scholarship that it ought to be embarrassing to anyone who embraces it. Sadly, it would seem the whole modern world has embraced this error, a serious error, which ought to give us some pause.

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From The Nativity by Giotto

IN an essay on Christmas, the late Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira reflected on Mary’s initial reaction to the birth of Christ:

The iconography of the Renaissance completely deformed one aspect of Our Lord. It presented the Child Jesus as a foolish babe in order to give an idea of His purity. The artists of that period often presented Him as an inexpressive infant without showing any sign of His divine mentality. I cannot think that such a thing is true. On the contrary, I believe that everything we admire in Our Lord as a man – His goodness, balance, distinction, affability and strength, and especially His transcendence – was already manifest in the face and body of the Divine Infant.

THE MOST popular item on the Christmas wish lists of British children included in a recent survey was a sibling, according to The Telegraph. The tenth most popular request was for a father.

No doubt many children were disappointed when they found iPhones under the tree instead. The illegitimacy rate is about 50 percent in Britain and the average age of new mothers is 30. Asking for a normal family is sort of like asking for the moon, which was also included on some Christmas wish lists.

Santa Claus should get out of the toy and electronics business and start delivering brothers and sisters instead.

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THE IOWA Supreme Court has upheld a dentist’s decision to fire his assistant because she was highly attractive and wore tight, revealing clothing. The dentist claimed that working alongside the asssistant was a threat to his marriage.

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ROGER G. writes:

Ilana Mercer expresses what I have been feeling about the public grieving for the victims of Sandy Hook, but have not been able to put into words:

“The pornography of public grief in our country is almost as warped as the evil (not ill), mother-slaying, mass murderer responsible for the Sandy Hook carnage. There is very little dignity in the freaky spectacle of mass contagion – where members of the public turn professional mourners, flock to memorial happenings for victims they never knew …

“The victims of killer Adam Lanza have become a sideshow …. Tragedy is denuded of any dignity, reduced to a showy public affair…”

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Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins in A Doll's House

Henrik Ibsen

HENRIK IBSEN’S famous play A Doll’s House, which premiered in Copenhagen in 1879 and has been staged many thousands of times since, is a now classic statement of modern divorce. We will never know how many women have been inspired or encouraged to leave their husbands by Nora Helmer, Ibsen’s lovely and effervescent housewife who slams the door behind her when she leaves her home two days after Christmas, but we can assume that the immense popularity of this character in the ensuing years has had personal and grave consequences for some.

The play opens on Christmas Eve.

Nora Helmer returns to her comfortable and cozy Norwegian home after shopping for presents for her three children and her husband, Torvald. She is excited and happy. For the first time in years, she has felt free to spend at Christmastime. Her husband has a new job at a bank and, with this good fortune, they are likely to be comfortable for many years. Torvald is in the next room and soon comes out to greet her. He likes to tease her and call her his “little lark” and his “squirrel.” He finds his wife enchanting but also treats her like a child, a habit which she fully encourages. The moralistic Torvald is what people refer to today as a “control freak.” He even attempts to regulate what his wife eats. In contrast, Nora is sweet and charming. Read More »

JANE S. writes:

The best classical music station in the world, KDFC in San Francisco, has a special program every year for the holidays. Starting at noon on December 24th, they play Christmas music for 36 hours straight. They pause to announce the station every now and then but other than that, it is nonstop. I don’t think they repeat any of the selections. They play stuff you’ve never heard before, like medieval French Christmas carols and the like. It is absolutely out of this world. I just thought I’d pass that along, since it’s one of my favorite things.

Merry Christmas!

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

From my employer, SUNY Oswego, I receive only “holiday” greetings.  From my remote colleague at the University of Tehran, where I have supervised a dissertation, I receive honest-to-God Christmas greetings.  I have also received Christmas greetings from the student whose dissertation I oversaw.  She, like the colleague, is Muslim.  Truly the world is standing on its head.

IN THE ongoing discussion of antidepressants and violence, Zippy Catholic, who has also commented on the issue here, writes:

As for myself, although I’ve never been on psychotropic drugs, I’ve personally seen people who were not violent or suicidal become violent and suicidal on SSRI’s, and then lose those characteristics when carefully weaned off of them. Read More »

DON VINCENZO writes:

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Not content to destroy the armed forces of every Western nation, subvert all of the churches in every Western nation, shut down worthy boys’ and mens’ sports teams nationwide, and distort news reporting and entertainment everywhere by imposing their bizarre worldview and slate of grievances, feminists now train their sights on one of the few remaining institutions in the West that so far had seemed free of their depradations: the Church of Latter-Day Saints.

As The New York Times reports, Mormon women of the feminist persuasion are expressing their desire to change their church to be more accommodating of women by wearing pants to church.  Read More »

IN AN essay posted at Tradition in Action, the late Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira examined nativity scenes by 17th-century Portuguese artists. He wrote:

At a first glance, [a scene by the sculptor Joaquim Machado de Castro] might create an impression of disorder in some observers. We are accustomed to the disciplined and soulless crowds of large modern cities, the masses who file silently into movie theaters or grimly and hurriedly cross the streets when a traffic light or policeman’s whistle stops the flow of cars to let them pass. These crowds have become so soulless and standardized that at huge public gatherings they applaud as if they were one huge entity, in which the individual personalities were dissolved like drops of water in the ocean.

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OATH KEEPERS has offered to provide free self-defense and firearms training to school teachers and administrators. Stewart Rhodes, the organization’s founder, writes:

Children deserve to be defended. And the teachers and staff who are responsible for children during the school day deserve to know how to defend them – effectively, decisively, and at the very outset of an attack. And they deserve a fighting chance to defend themselves as well. It is not enough to tell them to sit tight and wait for the police to arrive. All too often, by the time the police get there, it is too late.

Teachers and school administrative staff need the tools and training to put a stop to the killing themselves.

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IN THIS previous entry on Adam Lanza, Perfesser Plum writes:

Take everything evil in human history, every iconic villain, every sin and character defect of our mournful species; squeeze them into one body and soul, and you get the modern mass killer of children in the guise of a young adult. Read More »

A READER from Hillsdale, Michigan sends a Christmas note. He writes:

It is a joy to be able to offer a contribution to The Thinking Housewife, a site which is itself a joy. Change is constant, but as a society we seem to have surrendered to change and lost the ability to retain those “permanent things” spoken of by Russell Kirk, instead descending into a nihilism worthy of Nietszche’s statement “without God, all things are possible.” The Thinking Housewife has been a journey back to normalcy, taking into account changing times, and a vehicle which regularly inspires me to recommend it to people.

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THE DISCUSSION of the role of psychotropic medications in the increased incidence of mass shootings continues. A reader cites this article by Peter R. Breggin in the International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine. [Note: Another reader takes strong exception to Breggin’s work. See below.] Breggin wrote:

All antidepressants cause mania and mania is an acknowledged adverse effect in the FDA-approved label of all antidepressants. Preda et al. [66] carried out a retrospective study of 533 psychiatric hospital admissions over a fourteen month period and found that 43 (8.1%) could be attributed to antidepressant- induced mania and/or psychosis. Read More »

TERRY MORRIS writes:

Everything you and your commenters have mentioned as factors in the Adam Lanza case all involve one, inescapable fact: parental neglect. All of it, including the drugs, the violent video game playing, and the issue of protecting him from negative consequences of his own misbehavior involve parental neglect.

As to the last in that list, watch a few documentaries about famous American serial killers and you will see that this is very common among them – their parents were always running interference for them everytime they got themselves into the slightest trouble with authorities as children, and even into adulthood. But I’m one of those no-nonsense kinds of parents who believe with all my being that even so-called “child safety locks” – those gadgets many, many parents mindlessly place on their lower cabinet doors to prohibit their children from getting into them – are, ultimately, psychologically damaging to children.

Jill Farris in the previous entry makes good points about Lanza’s upbringing that are worth repeating here: Read More »