Our world is at war. Every year the forces of dark grind away. Every year the Lord of the Armies of Light, Santa Claus by name, sallies forth and reverses much or all of their inroads.

The deadliest weapon in the arsenal of Light is their mirth. Their laughter slays. They are fiercely, immensely jolly.

The Castles of Christmas are their unbreachable redoubt. They return there every year to regroup and rest where they cannot be touched.

It is said that the castles have one weakness. If ever the merry laughter ceases, the walls will be breached.

But it hasn’t happened yet. Because Santa Claus and the other men of Christmas have a secret.

They know that at the heart of the Castles, there is a land where a Child is in a manger under a starry sky. And that land can never be breached. There is no weakness, no trick, no eventuality, that can take that refuge away.

When the reverses are piling up and the War of Christmas is going grim, Santa and his men begin to think about the great surprise that the dark will have when they breach the Castles, and the hilarious anticipation of that surprise makes them break out in great ringing laughter.

The boy is father to the man. In honor of the feast of St. Stephen’s, here is Bruce C. at his drollest. I laughed, and not just because a few weeks ago in choir I was bellowing out “Good people all, this ChristmasTIDE” because damn the wrecker who published our choral music with it spelled “time.” Or because I remembered last year the same choir director, bless her longsuffering heart, trying to hide her grin while I gave a harangue on where the comma should be in “God rest ye merry, gentlemen.” Or the year before that . . .

Anyway, read the whole thing. If you don’t laugh, a pox on you and no wassail.

I have been thinking a lot about the Church’s recent announcement about expanding the youth’s responsibilities in the temples.

[Editor’s note: Priests in the Aaronic Priesthood will now perform baptisms for the dead and act as witnesses for the baptisms.  Young women who have limited-use (non-endowed) temple recommends can perform the matronly roles in assisting with temple baptisms.]

Of course, my first thought was about my three teenagers. They have been very involved in temple and family history work since our temple was dedicated this year. But with this change, all of the sudden my 17-year-old son seemed more priestly. And the two others seemed to straighten up a little when they heard it. I read this gem in Ether yesterday, and I am sure it is connected somehow: “We know that thou art able to show forth great power, which looks small unto the understanding of men.” I think our youngsters are finding great power in small-looking things.

-from FoJG JRL-in-AZ

Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? or naked, and clothed thee?

Joseph and Mary would not have asked this question.  They knew when they had done this for Jesus.  They did it in Bethlehem.

Jesus’ helplessness as a little baby made their care for him meaningful.

And because what is done to any is as if done to Christ–“inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these my brethren,” he says, and he experiences all of our woes and, I believe, our joys alongside us–our care for our own little children is meaningful to Him also.

People who act need things and people to be acted upon in order for their actions to be meaningful.  These can be the helpless, like infants.  At the other end of the scale, the fully adult and fully divine risen Jesus, full of power, is also someone to be acted upon.  All our actions act upon him, therefore all our acts our meaningful.

It is interesting that our lives seem to go full circle.  The most helpless and the most powerful both occupy something of a similar role in our lives.

“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom.”

“Jesus, Lord at his birth.”

“For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

Enjoy these goodies. (more…)

Once upon a time there was a kingdom so orderly that its laws and institutions had all sorts of branchings and variations, like a healthy, growing tree.

One of those odd little variations was the Christmas King. (more…)

I’m laying on the couch when my toddler asks if she can lay down by me.

“Sure.”  Pause.  “Do you want a story?”

“Yeah!”

I start in on Aladdin’s Lamp.  I am at the part where the evil uncle magician has taken Aladdin out into the wilderness, where they find a crack opening in the ground.  “And at the bottom of the crack they saw a gate . . .”

“No, a penguin!”

“What!  Why?”

“Because the crack!  The crack!  And they’re hunting the penguin and she has a mommy penguin and the mommy penguin gives her crackers!”

. . . .

Then my young school age son asks me if I know about the Chief Judge Holiday.  I don’t.  It’s Christmas, he tells me.

Again, “what!  Why?”

“Santa Claus, Dad! I thought you knew that!”

Next time I get my kids’ brains wired, I’m not just hiring just some guy.

This week in Sunday School we talked about the life of Christ. It was a remarkable lesson, as any discussion of His life should be. In the course of our discussion, we read two of my favorite passages of scripture: Alma 7:10-13 and Mosiah 3:5-8. As we talked about everything that the Savior did for us during His life, a thought occurred to me that has come to me before but is worth repeating. We often talk of Jesus’ sacrifice at Gethsemane and Golgotha – He voluntarily suffered and died for us. But His sacrifice was and is far greater than His death. He faced choices every day, just like we do – how to spend His time, how to react to individuals (some hostile, some curious, some penitent, etc.), what to say, how to respond to temptation and disappointment and pain. The list goes on forever. All the choices that we make, and more, were presented to Him. And He chose to exercise His agency in each of those choices to live a stainless, perfect life. Now THAT is a sacrifice. Far greater than dying for something – living for it first.

-Guest post from Friend of the JG JRL-in-AZ

This morning on the radio they were talking about the year’s most frequent Google searches. It was said that the most searched person was Matt Lauer, which prompted my internal question “Who’s Matt Lauer?” And though quick use of an internet search engine would indeed educate me, I have a hunch that I would prefer remaining ignorant.

I had a dream last night.

The Dream

In the dream, there was a residence school for the extremely gifted run at the highest levels of society.   Generals and CEOs and Senators were all involved in or interested in the school in one way or another.  The school included teenagers and young adults and even some adults.  K through Postpostdoc.

The most unusual feature of the school was that students would abruptly become “sane.” (more…)

In the Anthropological Time Machine, you can only communicate with other times and only to the extent the knowledge won’t change history.  Motto:–“At least you will know.”  A surprisingly large number of people are still able to use it.

A man from our time was chatting with a man from 20,000 A.D.  (more…)

I went out in the dark to bring in some more pecan logs for the fire.  I heard an owl hoot.  I hadn’t heard it before.  It must be newly arrived in the pecan orchard.

I don’t know the word for the emotion I felt.  But I felt something.  The deep texture of reality touched me.

And I thought that modernism tried to simplify and strip down life to a few abstractions and universal principles.  It was the era of “machines for living,” which inevitably means eliminating complexity and texture and variation to make the management task easier.

Which was unsatisfying.

So the next phase was post-modernism, where we added back variation and texture and complexity, but only at the user choice.  Whereas life was supposed to be a machine before, now it was a machine with lots and lots of user options, or as the insanity increased, maybe even without the underlying machine–user options all the way down.

Modernism is simple conceptual games like Pong.  Post-modernism is the modern gamer market, where you can modify your character in innumerable ways, preselect all sorts of options, and download various skins and music to taste.

But postmodernism is all just you.

Which is unsatisfying.

I did not opt for the owl hoot.  The smell of the pecan smoke I did not create and could not have imagined, and neither the chill in the air, or the stars.

Housecarls at Hastings

God is first described as a father and second as a king.  We could stand to be more patriarchal than we are, but we at least have experience of fatherhood and take God’s fatherhood seriously. Small r-republicans that we are, we ignore exploring His monarchy.

Let’s fix that.

We in the Church are an elite group who are oath-bound to God and to each other.  We live a stricter rule than most Christians.  The God to whom we have pledged everything in return gives us magnificent gifts and in certain places marvelous titles of power.  He calls us his noble and great ones and has sworn fellowship with us.  Because of us, he also promises the same to our ancestors and our descendants.

We are God’s housecarls, we are his warband.  He has ennobled us, us and our whole lines.

From Scott Alexander’s review of Inadequate Equilibria:

Or, to take a ridiculous example from the text that will obviously never happen:

Suppose that there’s a magical tower that only people with IQs of at least 100 and some amount of conscientiousness can enter, and this magical tower slices four years off your lifespan. The natural next thing that happens is that employers start to prefer prospective employees who have proved they can enter the tower, and employers offer these employees higher salaries, or even make entering the tower a condition of being employed at all. The natural next thing that happens is that employers start to demand that prospective employees show a certificate saying that they’ve been inside the tower. This makes everyone want to go to the tower, which enables somebody to set up a fence around the tower and charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to let people in.

Now, fortunately, after Tower One is established and has been running for a while, somebody tries to set up a competing magical tower, Tower Two, that also drains four years of life but charges less money to enter. Unfortunately, there’s a subtle way in which this competing Tower Two is hampered by the same kind of lock-in that prevents a jump from [Facebook to a competing social network]. Initially, all of the smartest people headed to Tower One. Since Tower One had limited room, it started discriminating further among its entrants, only taking the ones that have IQs above the minimum, or who are good at athletics or have rich parents or something. So when Tower Two comes along, the employers still prefer employees from Tower One, which has a more famous reputation. So the smartest people still prefer to apply to Tower One, even though it costs more money. This stabilizes Tower One’s reputation as being the place where the smartest people go.

In other words, the signaling equilibrium is a two-factor market in which the stable point, Tower One, is cemented in place by the individually best choices of two different parts of the system. Employers prefer Tower One because it’s where the smartest people go. Smart employees prefer Tower One because employers will pay them more for going there. If you try dissenting from the system unilaterally, without everyone switching at the same time, then as an employer you end up hiring the less-qualified people from Tower Two, or as an employee, you end up with lower salary offers after you go to Tower Two. So the system is stable as a matter of individual incentives, and stays in place. If you try to set up a cheaper alternative to the whole Tower system, the default thing that happens to you is that people who couldn’t handle the Towers try to go through your new system, and it acquires a reputation for non-prestigious weirdness and incompetence.

Sometimes the towers take more than four years off your life.  Sometimes they destroy your chance for family.

Some towers offer a devilish bargain when you walk in the door.  They will give you your four years of life back–but you have to agree to drink and drug until you can tolerate strangers having sex with you. But this isn’t wildly recognized as a devilish bargain because the devil is clever.  He doesn’t offer it as a bargain at all.  Instead, there is a cultural expectation that anesthetizing yourself like a whore to let your body be used like a whore is the exciting part of Tower Time.  It is as if there were a widespread notion that the best part of receiving riches and power from the devil was the chance to offload your soul.

There are a few niche towers where in exchange for not losing four years of your life you get marriage and maybe a first child.  These are viewed as retrograde and oppressive.

There is a rumor that there used to be a mythic tower where you didn’t lose four years of life if you sought beauty and wisdom.  The employers don’t like the rumor, because if there were another reason to go to the Towers other than getting a good job,  you couldn’t count on Tower alums having the proper careerist mindset.  The Towers hate the rumors as a vampire hates garlic.