Fourth Sunday of Advent

We’ve been using a booklet of Henri Nouwen meditations this Advent. He often counsels that we stay in the moment, and today, the fourth Sunday of Advent, Greyhound is doing their bit to keep me where I am both mentally and physically by cancelling bus service to Worcester due to snow. (I am in no hurry to ride on icy roads after my Christmas wreck last year.)

Christmas caroling

Today we celebrated the season by Christmas carolling at a local nursing home and at the homes of neighbors and friends.

Advent wreath Advent panel

I also wanted to share photos of a homemade Advent wreath and a sort of “Advent board” tracing the lineage of Jesus, based on a design by legendary Catholic Worker artist Ade Bethune.

Hope you all have a wonderful, safe week!

508 #96: The local green economy

This week: the 508 Christmas Spectacular! The panel is Julius Jones and Mr. Brendan Melican. Theme song: “If I Had One Christmas Wish.” Words by Bruce “Snow Ghost” Russell, music by Mike Benedetti.


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Buddha Hut buffet Saturday; Stone Soup party Friday; Winter Mystery Band signups happening now.

The NYT is not selling the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. Top suggestions for the T&G: stop running the internet poll on the front page, because you’re deceiving people who don’t realize it’s a phony poll, and you look bad to people who know what’s going on; create an RSS feed for Worcester news; make use of the <title> element so it will be easier to Google T&G articles; add features to the comment system to filter out noise.

Julius, who helps run the Regional Environmental Council’s gardening program, talks about the local green economy, or lack thereof.

Holiday gift guide:

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Nicole has posted an experimental Virtual Assignment Desk; Jeff Barnard highlights Bill Randell’s reporting on low-income housing financing.

You should wear a hat to stay warm! I’m told Lutheran Social Services has classes for recent immigrants to help them dress appropriately for the (bad) weather.

Second Sunday of Advent

Our homemade Advent wreath

Here’s a picture of the Advent wreath we made this week. We colored white candles with melted crayons (my friend is a master at this), melted them to a piece of cardboard, put that on a tray, and covered it with evergreen branches from the tree in the backyard. I think it looks great.

We’ve been marking Advent with readings from the Henri Nouwen booklet. Today for the first time we also used the Bishops’s prayers. I was surprised to see that as part of your Advent ceremony they ask you to visit a website. Makes me feel less silly about blogging my second Sunday of Advent.

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My friends have the Advent doodad pictured above in their kitchen. Day by day, you hang figures from the pegs. No idea what this is called.

508 #95: Barnraising

508 is a show about Worcester. This week’s panel is Scott Guzman, Heather Mackenzie, Drew Wilson, and Brendan Melican.


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This week is the 10th anniversary of the Cold Storage Fire (photos). Brendan explains the city maintaining its current tax structure.

There’s an “energy barnraising” weatherization event at the Woo Church, 911 Main St, Worcester, Saturday, December 5th, 11-5pm.

Drew points out that Al Gore is finally speaking out against factory farming. Mike and Drew will be doing some vegan outreach at the local colleges.

Spectrum Health has a peer recovery center at 25 Pleasant St; also a Twitter feed. Mike asks Nicole to post a virtual assignment list.

She has been looking into, among other things, relations between Holy Cross students and their neighbors. This discussion has recently escalated. We need Holy Cross students to invite us to some parties so we can report on them.

Mark Lund has revived theater at Becker; they have some free plays this weekend. There’s an art fest at Union Station Sunday; Seah will be debuting a three-decker tee shirt that sounds like this season’s smash holiday gift.

Advent 2009

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the four-week period of preparation for Christmas.

Advent isn’t as project-oriented as Lent, but there are many more popular rituals to mark this season. Notably, each Sunday you light candles around a wreath while praying. Today we light a purple candle, next week two, the next week we add a pink candle, then another purple, finally lighting all four plus a white candle for Christmas.

If there are children in the house, you probably have an Advent calendar with little pieces of candy attached to each day, a clever incentive for the children to remind you of the daily Advent prayer. The U.S. Bishops’ Advent website contains a simulated calendar with prayers instead of snacks.

Every year I also like caroling with friends and watching It’s a Wonderful Life with Bruce; one of my goals this Advent is to integrate them into these daily and weekly practices.

Most of all, this year I’m looking forward to sharing these traditions with a non-Catholic Christian friend who knows very little about this stuff, and hoping to gain a deeper appreciation of Advent in so sharing.

Scrooge and the Jobless Recovery

Engraving by C.E. BrockEbenezer Scrooge was a businessman whose single employee, Bob Cratchit, a married father of four, worked for starvation wages. In the opening pages of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, we learn that Scrooge believes he is overtaxed by the government and “cannot afford to make others merry.” He doesn’t see himself as a miser, but as a victim of a bad economy. When Cratchit makes even the most modest suggestion of better working conditions (an extra lump of coal on the fire, a single day off a year), Scrooge threatens him with unemployment.

On November 6, 2009, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the unemployment rate had climbed to 10.2%, representing 16.4 million Americans, double the number of jobless when the recession began in December 2007. The government also reported that an additional 808,000 people had become “discouraged workers,” those “not looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them.” Perhaps most alarming in terms of race relations and future prospects, the unemployment rates for blacks was 15.4% and 25.7% for all teenagers.
Continue reading “Scrooge and the Jobless Recovery”

508 #94: Journalism

508 is a show about Worcester. This week, we talk with legendary Telegram & Gazette columnist Jim Dempsey and his WPI class about the state of Worcester journalism and whether bloggers can help.

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Two possible inspirations for Worcester amateurs: the NYT’s Virtual Assignment Desk, Clay Shirky’s “Let a thousand flowers bloom”

Patty Angevine and other Thanksgiving items

Patty AngevineNice profile of local Catholic Worker and awesome person Patty Angevine in the Telegram and Gazette. Among other things, she co-founded the great soup kitchen at St. John’s. (Note that it’s rarer than you might think for Catholic Workers, like Patty, to work professionally in social services.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Michael Iafrate makes the case against Thanksgiving, then admits:

. . . I am not about to be so politically smug that I would simply refuse to participate in my own family’s traditions.

Me neither. I love celebrating a fall feast with family, and I love celebrating a utopia in which natives and immigrants could co-exist. I’d embrace a chance to have a more honest celebration without giving up the joy.

Don’t forget that the day after Thanksgiving is Buy Nothing Day. I’ll be doing my bit to “keep the Christ in Christmas” by keeping myself out of the mall. For a great example of a joyous Buy Nothing Day, see Mark Dixon’s 49 Hours at Wal-Mart.

Worcester Police on Twitter

The WPD’s Twitter feed makes me wonder when we’ll see our first Worcester crime blogger. Seems like anyone could gather quite a bit of info with a computer, police scanner, and telephone.

“Shaping a Local Green Economy” in Worcester

Last night there was a forum on “Shaping a Local Green Economy” at Clark University in Worcester.

People experimenting with Worcester green initiatives, along with institutional players, spoke briefly about their work. The keynote speaker was Omar Freilla of the Bronx-based Green Worker Cooperatives.

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My video of the event was only so-so, so I’m posting the audio of the Worcester speakers here for anyone curious about the range of local green things happening.

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The Worcester speakers were:

  • Joel Fontaine, Worcester’s Director of Planning and Regulatory Services. Worcester has “adopted the state’s first climate action plan.”
  • Stephen O’Neil of the Worcester Regional Transit Authority. The bus system is seeking ISO 14001 certification of their Environmental Management System.
  • Patricia Feraud, Toxic Soil Busters Co-op. TSB, part of the Worcester Roots Project, is a youth-led project that tests lawns for lead contamination and deals with the problem when they find it.
  • Julius Jones of the Regional Environmental Council. Julius works on projects that manage community gardens and teach young people how to grow and sell food in their neighborhoods. The “overall vision is to have community gardens within walking distance of anybody that wants one.”
  • Jill Dagilis of the Worcester Community Action Council. WCAC would like to “reduce and eliminate the reliance on fuel assistance” by increased weatherization.
  • Clark Provost David Angel. Clark is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 20% below 1995 levels by 2010, and to be “climate-neutral by 2030.”
  • Mary Knittle of Quinsigamond Community College. QCC will have a regional training center for clean energy jobs.
  • Stacie Brimmage and Ashey Trull of the Worcester Energy Barnraisers. At their events, people learn weatherizing by joining dozens of others in weatherizing a local building. (I made a short video of their last event.)
  • Stephen Healy of the Worcester Green Jobs Coalition.
  • Sarah Assefa of the EMPOWER Energy Cooperative. EMPOWER is a business that plans to make biodiesel out of local waste vegetable oil.