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Sunset in South Dakota
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Retail has been destroying me over the last few weeks. I have found my free time to be either short or unsatisfying. The difference between individual days have become less and less noticeable. Overall, things have been very very busy for me. My employer has been giving me a lot of hours, and they haven’t been life-friendly ones.

So that’s why updates have been non-existent. However, I’ve been able to get some time to do some more photo conversion and can present to you another batch of vacation photos. However, I’d first like to present the annual family photo card, with multiple quality options.

If you’re not planning on printing the image, I suggest that you do not click on and download the Print Quality image. It’s too big for casual viewers to wait to finish downloading. The image isn’t good enough for you to spend all that time waiting. Click on one of the smaller file sizes.

Here are the latest converted vacation images. Enjoy. Please ignore my mistake of not making all the rows even, leaving the last row to only two images instead of three. It bugs me and probably nobody else, but I’m far too tired to work on evening it up. I’m not perfect, and I’ll just have to accept that.

So I took an online personality test (some Briggs-Meyer thing, or something like that) and it judged me to be the accountant type: the type of person in the background. It said I was the type to make things work, just not in a leadership position. Which makes sense to me. What doesn’t make sense to me is what a customer said to me a while ago, during a phone conversation.

Hello? What are your timings? Oh? Nine AM to nine PM? So you’re already openeded?”

That didn’t make sense. But customers often don’t. Just like the customer who, while watching me put her CD in her take-home packaging, asked me if the CD was included in the order. I hope you realize what joy I am experiencing printing photos of screaming children sitting on a sweaty old man dressed in red pajamas for parents who see children as a nuisance and not a blessing.

The whole Christmas thing confounds me now. I used to find the holiday exciting, since I couldn’t afford buying things for myself. The items I was to receive were far greater than any amount of money I had. However, as I’ve grown older, I’ve been able to match what others had budgeted for me, making the whole process a little silly. If I make a wish list and hope the items get purchased, and my recipient does the same, why do we bother? Why not just buy items we want, and not give?

But my lack of excitement for Christmas goes beyond the greed, and into the history of the holiday itself. My family stopped decorating a Christmas tree some time ago, because we discovered the tree was a symbol for a false god once worshiped a long time ago. We didn’t want to be honoring a tradition that wasn’t Biblical. Yet, in our recent reading of the Israelites trials with settling into their land, I’ve come to realize how much we are like them, and their constant slipping back into idol worship.

While reading the passages, I have found myself despairing over the Israelite tendency to revert to the worship of idols from neighboring cities or peoples. I kept wondering how they could do such a thing, when they have God – Jehovah – on their side. But then I realized I was doing the same thing, and it gave me pause. Christmas was originally the practice of Tammuz, as I mentioned a long time ago in a post far, far away. Basically, the tree decoration and other items like the Yule log were all symbols and traditions carried down from the worship of Tammuz. So my family threw that all away. Now we’re left with giving gifts to each other and celebrating Jesus’ birth.

But is that really what we’re doing? The Israelites would throw aside the false god and use the idol as a symbol for Jehovah. This would still be frowned upon by God. Yet are we not doing the same thing by not throwing aside everything about Christmas? Why celebrate Jesus’ birth on that day, when there is evidence that He was born in the spring? Are we fooling ourselves? Are we just worshiping idols while claiming it’s Jehovah, just like the Israelites did?

It’s something that I’m still stewing over: while I could throw aside Christmas without much thought (I actually would be relieved, because working and shopping for gifts is hard), it did make the winter so much easier to manage when I was younger. Winter months can be quite a drag: visiting family, worshiping together, and getting gifts we couldn’t afford made the snow seem a little less cold, the days a little more manageable.

But I’m rambling, and by now you’re probably wondering why you didn’t just stop at the pictures. Perhaps you should have. I’m wondering if I should have, because it’s getting quite early in the morning, and I have to get to work by 11 AM. Goodniming (that’s both goodnight and good morning combined, since it’s a little of both for me).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 2:25 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.