Jazzed for Christmas

This year I am so jazzed for Christmas!!

Most years I feel under-whelmed at this point in the holiday calendar; I love to start the holiday craziness a little later than what is now popular. Around December 12th I decorate the house and do the bulk of my Christmas shopping. I begin to listen to Christmas music in earnest around that time, and attempt to  make cookies, too. I basically self-immerse in it all.

 And if it snows? Forget it - I'll be the first one to make a snow angel in the yard.

This  year, I'm feeling that beloved holiday spirit early. I am excited for the Masses at church and the Christmas carols to come. I have also decided to do the following to usher in my interior celebration:

1. Although news-watching is a part of my job, I will limit the amount of time I watch bad news on television. The world is crazy, and we'd better get used to it. Seek out the good.

2. I will go to Adoration once a week - this quiet chapel time where your thoughts expand in the silence and yet are more focused, too.

3. I will pick a way our family can give that is meaningful - and as Mom, drag them to do it. That's the American way.

4. When my boys were little, I used to make tea and sit in front of our creche at night after they were tucked in, contemplating, imagining, and generally being blissed-out on a fact that my human brain can't even begin to totally take in - a loving God sent a Son He so loved into this poor world, and that Son for a time walked the earth among us.

I will try to have a few of those quiet times alone in the dining room again this year.

I would like to thank the Simons, the Lewises, and Pam Koner of Family to Family for helping me remember what is important; it was an honor to write their story. Check it out, below:

http://www.lifezette.com/momzette/from-one-family-to-another/

I hope you, too,find your way to a meaningful, super-connected Christmas or Hannukah celebration. I hope you have those moments of seeing how loved you, in your imperfection and striving, really are.

And I hope the shivery light-bulb moments of true understanding come to you as we ready our homes for this most joyous of times.

T hank you for reading. :-) God bless!

Campus Craziness - Don't Attend Victimology University!

College craziness - kids needing safe spaces, apologies, the re-writing of history, and the list goes on, and on...so read on http://www.lifezette.com/momzette/college-campus-craziness/

Have a great weekend, stay safe, and talk to your kids about staying grounded in an increasingly bizarre world.

Don't Spoil Your Teen!

Are you raising a great teen or a self-centered wreck? Read this cautionary tale. Our kids are our greatest work - so lets keep up the work  to have them turn out right - good citizens and adults capable of caring for themselves, as well as others.

http://www.lifezette.com/momzette/spoiled-teens-tune-out/

Happy Monday!

Michelle Obama - don't bother with punctuation - that's not cool!

Click here to read all about Michelle Obama
s new social media sharing initiative - where you should forget grammar and keep content "raw."
What???

The Last Game in the Old Stadium at ENMU

I am taking a trip next week that I am so excited about I have a case of the butterflies. Something on the horizon that is so special, it's as if  my whole system can''t wait to go. I am going back to my college town - Portales, N.M.

 A small dusty town nestled in the southeast corner of the state, next week-end Portales will be my Paris or London.

I live thousands of miles from where I went to college. In what was a blip in an otherwise smooth experience of east-coast-ness, at 17 I left home and traveled from Maryland to New Mexico for higher learning with a side of desert sunsets. It was a culture shock, an adventure waiting to be had, and a savior to a perpetually restless personality - a trait that would continue, in ever-lessening frequency, for a lifetime. 

Restlessness is not cool; it does not make one mysterious in that good way once you're a grown-up. It is a fatiguing, sometimes frustrating need to always see more than what you are seeing; do more than you are doing. It has been a lifelong lesson in appreciation of the now, to mostly overcome restlessness.

I live an ordinary life and am happily immersed in my work as a journalist and the day-to-day of family with a husband and three sons - the last of whom is now 16, the other two well into adulthood and thriving on their own. Now is a good time to take a breath and look back,shading my eyes and scanning the horizon like an archaeologist looking for clues to answer the question: how did this place, put firmly in the past years ago, become so formative to who I am now?

 I am travelling back to the place I've only been once since I left, to see the last football game in the old stadium at ENMU before it is torn down to make way for a new one. I am meeting some old friends back there, and rushing time - that robber, that albatross - will briefly stand still.

After I left school I never looked back and never went back - one of the hallmarks of restlessness. Actually I did go back once, when I was in Arizona with my husband and "popped over" alone to New Mexico for two nights. During that trip, I walked my campus as a grown woman, I let two freshmen excitedly give me the tour I went on 30 years prior as a teen, and I had lunch with the town sheriff (by accident; he was reading the paper and offered me a section; one thing led to another.)

I can't wait to see faces I haven't seen in years (and may have to struggle for the name that goes with them.) I'm not a particularly rabid football fan, so I'll talk through most of the game. (And I have a crazy fear of mascots - anything in a costume with a fully enclosed head - but that's for another post.)

I can't wait to feel the New Mexico air, have a real burrito or chimmichanga, and see faces that are now a bit more lined, topped with gray, perhaps, and the dearer for it. I am ready to time-travel.

Houston, commence the countdown.

And there's this...one of my LifeZette articles on FOX News.com.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/10/15/coddled-kids-crumble-colleges-see-big-lack-resilience-among-stud

Have a great week-end. Get a little restless.

Pope Francis comes to America

Why has the Pope come to the U.S? Is he wary of America? Is he also a political force? What does he want to let us know about what is important in life?

Click here to learn more.

 Enjoy Cuba, Pope Francis!

A Child with Downs syndrome joins the family

Click here to read about an inspiring American family that I am privileged to get to know in relating their story. The video within the story is amazing, too.

90% of babies with Down syndrome are aborted. This is effectively the genocide of a population. Read the article the get the facts on these special people, who may one day disappear from society, as well as a big dose of inspiration.

Life is meant to be lived fully; enjoy what it brings to you, in the way in which it is brought.

Happy Friday. :-)

Queen Elizabeth is Britain's Longest-reigning Monarch

Tomorrow, Queen Elizabeth becomes Britain's longest-reigning monarch. I, for one, love the Queen.

Britain and I have a complicated relationship; I adore her, and she is not aware that I exist. How I long to walk (hopefully through a light mist) beneath the Tower of London; how I'd love to have tea or a pint where theologian and scholar C.S. Lewis met with his crowd, The Inklings. I'd love to ride a horse along a craggy shoreline (any craggy shoreline will do), and I'd love to tickle a palace guard to see if they can keep a stiff upper lip.

Click here to read about the Queen Mum's continuing majesty. I will be here, hoping I can soon go there.

Mother Theresa, we miss you...

Happy Labor Day weekend! Hopefully anyone reading this is doing so because they are taking a break and relaxing a bit. Like many of my friends, I will be in various hockey rinks arund the Boston area.

I was on Laura Ingraham's radio show yesterday talking about the new "babywearing" rage, and also about an inspirational barber from Iowa who offers kids a free haircut if they will read to him. Good stuff, I hope - funny and inspiring. Even though there are a lot of bad/scary stories in the news, there's a lot of good stuff, too -- and that;s what LifeZette is interested in covering.

And lastly, a piece today about Mother Theresa. We often remember Princess Diana's passing, but we lost another important figure around that time - a humanitarian who is on her way to sainthood in the Catholic church.

Click here to read about this inspiring woman, whose legacy continues today.

Katrina 10 Years Later - A Hero Remembers

Click here to read about Lt. General Honore, who was tasked by the Bush Administration with taking hold of the disaster.

 And I loved that he called me "Darlin'" when we talked.    :-)

Modern-day Schindler Rescues Girls from ISIS

Click here to read about a modern-day Oskar Schindler who is raising money to rescue girls from hellish existence as ISIS sex slaves.

Not a fun story,but this is the world. or a slice of it, at least...