Merry Christmas!

Hope all the P&C readers out there had a good Christmas.

I’m sure there’s a technical term for how the viewer separates the artwork from the background. I love taking creche photos in part because the background is so often completely inappropriate, and occasionally accidentally appropriate. Here, NO TRESPASSING and BEWARE OF THE DOG are a “No room at the inn” for our time.

Christmas morning, I vowed to my little brother that any time I see a celebrity in a setting where greeting that celebrity is at all appropriate, I will greet that celebrity. (Stories like “I could have talked with Stephen Hawking this one time” or “I could have talked with Ted Turner this one time” are nothing but frustrating.) And who was at Christmas mass but Michael “Catholic Anarchy” Iafrate. I’m still not sure how two anarchist-sympathizing Catholic bloggers emerged from the same generation in a single West Virginian parish, much less how they did this without meeting before. Well, I greeted him, and now we have met.

At this parish, they’re adjusting to the changes in the mass with elegant pew cards from the hilariously-named AndWithYourSpirit.com. (“And with your spirit” being the phrase nobody remembers to say.)

My most memorable mass this Advent was one Saturday at dusk at St. Andrew’s in Worcester, when there was a local power outage. Below, the lector reads with the aid of a pen light. As you would expect, much was made of “waiting for light in darkness.”

2011 overall was an amazing year in my spiritual life, but Advent was a time of stress and distraction. One last thing I should have blogged earlier was Christmas caroling with the Catholic Worker community. This year, 25 of us visited nursing homes, Christmas parties, and unsuspecting neighbors.

Mike: Bruce, did you see that joke on the whiteboard? “What did one angel say to the other angel?” “HALO THERE!”

Bruce: Ha ha ha!

Justin (ten seconds later): Bruce, did you see that joke on the whiteboard?

Bruce: Yeah. It went over my head.