Logical Flaws of the Christmas TV Special

Ah, Christmas.  Gathering together with family and friends.  Getting in some last minute shopping.  Baking cookies.  And of course, watching those favorite Christmas television specials and movies.

Lovely, isn't it?

But logical...no.

I've watched many Christmas movies this year.  And don't get me wrong, I LOVE them.  But I have realized that there are a lot of obvious plot failings that just make you wonder if the characters in the movie have any capacity for logical thought whatsoever.

Let's explore a few, shall we?

The Movie: Home Alone

The Plot: A large family flies to Paris for the holidays, but their youngest son, Kevin, gets left behind.  Panicked, the mother tries to get back home to her son, while Kevin busies himself protecting the home from marauding burglars.

The Problem: As soon as the family gets to Paris, the flood the payphone area (hey, remember payphones?)  and frantically call everyone they know - neighbors, family, and especially the police, who they urge to go over to the house to check on Kevin.  The problem: they DON'T CALL KEVIN at their own house!  If we're still back in the days of payphones, we're also back in the days of tape answering machines, which means that the parents could have called the house, called out to Kevin via the answering machine to answer the phone, made sure he was okay, and then told him to go to a friend's house for the holidays.  Problem solved.  Of course, then the family's house would have been ransacked by the burglars, so perhaps their negligence of common telephone procedure is fortuitous after all.  And anyway, the movie would be way shorter if Kevin just went over to a friend's house for the holidays.

The Movie: Alvin and the Chipmunk's Christmas Special

The Plot: Everyone's favorite troupe of singing rodents is preparing for a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall.  But Alvin, swept up in a moment of Christmas spirit, has given away his prized harmonica to a sick little boy. Whatever is a chipmunk to do?

The Problem: Alvin, Simon, and Theodore go through a great deal of energy to hide the fact that Alvin has given away his harmonica from Dave, the (human) band manager.  This comes, in movie time, only a day after Dave chastised Alvin for being too selfish during the holidays, and urging him to be more generous and giving.  If anything, Dave would be thrilled that Alvin has given his harmonica away to a child in need.  But the even bigger problem is this - if the Chipmunks have sold out a show at Carnegie Hall, they should have more than enough money for Alvin to buy a new harmonica...unless, of course, Dave is running some sort of embezzlement scheme to keep all the profits to himself.  Maybe that's why they were reluctant to tell him about the missing harmonica.

The Movie: The Santa Clause

The Plot: Scott Calvin and his son awake early one Christmas morning to find that Santa has fallen off their roof and lays unconscious in their front yard.  Looking for ID, they find a card that says to put on the Santa suit if anything should happen to the man wearing it.  Because six year olds can convince their parents to do pretty much anything around Christmas time, Scott acquiesces, and soon finds that in so doing he has agreed to become the new Santa Claus.

The Problem: I've been led to believe by all these Christmas movies that the North Pole is a place of great joy, love, and merriment.  And yet, somehow, when Scott and his son arrive at the North Pole after being brought their by the reindeer, NONE of the elves seem particularly put out that the other Santa is, umm, dead.  Yeah.  DEAD.  Most of the elves don't seem to care, or even notice, that there's a new Santa Claus.  The most emotion that we get out of any of the elves is from Bernard, the head elf, who seems more annoyed at having to train a new Santa than sad that the other one has reached an untimely death by way of roof-fall.  Makes you wonder if the elves secretly had it out for Santa all along.

The Movie: Basically Every Christmas Movie Ever

The Plot: Is Santa real?  Parents say no, children say yes.  Children ultimately win, and parents are surprised to discover that Santa Claus is, in fact, real. 

The Problem: The parents say Santa isn't real.  But, Santa is real, and Santa brings very real presents that appear under the tree or by the fireplace on Christmas morning.  Presumably, Santa has been doing this for years.  The question is this: why, but why, wouldn't the parents notice that there were presents at Christmas morning that were not purchased by anyone in the family?  Are we to assume that every set of parents has such poor communication that each spouse assumes the other has bought the unexpected gifts, and doesn't question their sudden existence?  You would think that parents would have to believe in Santa if only to have an explanation for the arrival of new gifts on Christmas morning.


So unless you're just a cotton headed ninny muggins, grab yourself some cocoa and put on your thinking caps, and engage in some good-natured intellectual critique of your favorite Christmas movies.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

On Being Known

"Who are you?"

That's a question I've been sort of struggling with over the last few weeks.  Not in an earth-shattering life crisis way, but in an existential musing sort of way.  I think it has to do with the juxtaposition of being "known" and being "unknown" that has become a theme in my life the last few months.  But more on that later.

Almost two years ago, on a different blog, I wrote a post about how I think that people's identities are made up as a composite of their life experiences - and how even the most insignificant circumstance can ultimately affect some future moment.  Experiences like the places you go, and the things you study, and the activities you engage in.  Who you are doesn't just appear one day out of nowhere; it's a delicately crafted combination of every part of your life up until the present.

Lately, I've been thinking about this notion of a "composite identity" from a different angle.  I've been thinking about how relationships with other people affect not only who you are, but how you perceive yourself.

I've been living in Nashville for seven months...and even though that's a long time, I still feel relatively unknown.  I know my coworkers fairly well, obviously, and they know me (as well as someone can know somebody after seven months), otherwise my relationships are slim.  I have one college friend who lives in the area, and I've met some new friends through her, but by and large I am an "unknown" here.  And lately, I've been struggling with that a lot.

The thing about being "unknown" is that people are still in the process of forming their opinions about me.  And that's fine.  It takes awhile to get to know someone.  But lately, I've been finding over and over that people, for whatever reason, are forming opinions about me that I just don't understand.  They're finding me to be "arrogant" and "haughty."  They're finding me to be "closed minded."  They have "grave concerns" about me.

Why?

I literally have no idea.

Now, probably, I shouldn't pay too much attention to these sorts of comments, because I've known myself for 24 and a half years and therefore know that I am neither arrogant nor haughty, am especially not closed minded, and that there's no real reason for anyone to have grave concerns about me.  If someone who barely knows me thinks such things, that's no reason to take their opinion seriously.

But it still bugs me, you know?  No one likes to be perceived in a negative manner.

Anyway, back to the point at hand.  Being unknown is like this constant weight on my shoulders here.  There's no sense of security, no assurance that I "belong" or that I will succeed.  I guess those are all things that come with the territory of moving to a new place and starting a new job.  But it still wears me down.

Here's the thing though - over the last couple months, I've had a ton of old friends and family come and visit me.  And each time, I find myself laughing more than I've laughed in weeks, smiling broader than I ever smile, and feeling more free to be myself than I ever do under normal circumstances.  And I think it's because these are the people that know me.  These are the people who have made me who I am - the people who know my flaws, and still believe in me.

More and more, I'm finding the power of relationships with other people to be incredibly sustaining.  It's such a beautiful thing to be known.  I don't mean "known" in the prideful way of being recognized as being somebody - I just mean being known.

I mean that moment when you see an old friend for the first time in years.

I mean being that table that's annoying all the other patrons in a restaurant because you're laughing so loudly.

I mean jokingly trying to stuff a friend into your car trunk so they won't leave, and having passerby think an actual crime is being committed.

I mean snagging three or four hours out of a "just passing through."

I mean driving an hour and a half just to have lunch.

I mean the hugs where you don't want to let go.

I'm so thankful for all of the opportunities I've had to get together with the people who truly know me over the last few months, especially when I've been struggling so much with feeling unknown in my present life.  I'm thankful for the friends who have come deliberately for overnight visits, and for the friends who took a few hours out of a drive to get together even though they were en route someplace else.

So to Amy, Whitney, Laurie, Sydney, Genny, Lauren, Erin, Laura, Jessica, Mom, Dad, Hannah, Brandon, and Miranda - thank you.  You guys brought sunshine into my life over the last seven months, and I'm so thankful for all of you.  It's friends like you that help me to keep blazing headfirst into the unknown, safe in the knowledge that I am known, and I am loved.

Group Photo: Revisited

In view of yesterday's sweeping declaration to blog more, it may seem like what I'm about to do is a cop-out.  But, I just happened upon an old post that I wrote that seemed to have such immediate relevance to my life, and bore such similarity to what a friend and I have been talking about lately, that it seems necessary for it to resurface.  Moreover, it talks about a week of my life that, I now realize, would profoundly shape my vocation as a children's pastor.

And so, in lieu of writing a new post tonight, I challenge you to reread one of my old posts.  Because, even though I wrote it myself, I still found it thought-provoking and inspiring when I reread it two years later.

"Group Photo" - July 2010

So I was looking at a group picture, and I thought of something.

Do you ever have those moments where you’re not really thinking about much at all, and then you see something totally ordinary that you’ve seen several times before, but this time it inspires some oddly inspiring thought that is just as profound as it is obvious? And then you sort of wonder why you never thought of it before?

Yeah. This was one of those moments.

The picture in question was of about 30 people or so (myself included), a mixture of adults and children all posed and pleasant looking, smiling at the camera; a picture taken at the end of church camp about a week and a half ago, although it feels longer. Church camp has a way of setting itself apart from the usual span of time, I think…you start to think that it’s everyday stuff to have eleven year olds hopped up on sweet tea as your breakfast/lunch/dinner companions and to dance around to silly camp songs even though you’re well past the silly-camp-song age; after doing all this for a week or so you sort of forget that the real world doesn’t include that kind of stuff. It becomes a memory so quickly that it feels like forever ago even if it just happened a couple weeks ago.

But that’s not the point, and not the profound thought. That’s just some other thought that ended up having some mild profundity involved.

The point is that at some point in the week, all thirty of us made it a point to all put on the same bright red t-shirt, lined ourselves up in rows, and take a picture, so that back in the real world we can all look at that picture from time to time and say to ourselves, “Hey, that sure was a crazy week, wasn’t it?”

And that’s what I generally thought when I looked at that picture. But this time I saw it, I had a whole other thought.

“Who are these people? And how in the world did I end up in this picture with them?”

Now I don’t mean that on a simple sense…because, simply speaking, these are coworkers and churchgoers and children from the church where I’m working this summer, and the reason I’m in the picture with them is naturally because I was a counselor for the week and people take pictures of such things. But that’s not what I mean.

Working at church camp, you get to know the kids (if you’re a good counselor, at least). And as I was glancing at this picture, my eyes happened to fall on a camper who I knew had a particularly sad past and difficult story. But there she was in the picture, smiling and looking pretty much the same as all the rest of us. And then, as I glanced through the rest of the picture, it just kind of hit me that everyone in the picture had a story: had their own past, their own struggles, their own ideas about the world, their own ideas about God, their own everything, really. I don’t really know where most of these kids come from, and I clearly have no idea where they’re going. But there we all are. It was like lines were shooting out of every kid and off the screen, a bunch of 3-D timelines telling life stories that I only knew the surface of, a bunch of different life paths that happened to converge at this one place this one time in the basement of this one lodge of this one retreat center in this one forest in this one region of this one state of this one country of this one continent in this one world.

Whoa.

I think that a lot of the times when I look at group pictures, my eyes naturally gravitate to me. You know, I’m familiar with me, so I’m relatively easy for me to spot. And I might think something along the lines of “hmm, not a good hair moment” or something equally self-centered, and then flip on to the next photo that so-and-so tagged of me from such-and-such a recent adventure that was deemed worthy of a Facebook album.

But there are 30 other people in that picture. How in the world can I only focus on me?

But we do that, right? We all do. 

We all kind of just focus on ourselves, bopping along on our own little timelines. And more often than not, we tend to think about how other people bump into OUR timeline and how they affect US, instead of stopping to think that maybe we’re the one who bumped into their timelines. We get so caught up in how other people are affecting our lives that we forget that we are equally affecting theirs. 

It’s like a car accident. Each person in each car will tell you that the other person hit THEM, but bystanders will say that two cars hit EACH OTHER.

We’re so self-centered. We don’t always see how we’re affecting people, but we can see clearly how other people are getting in our way, or (if we’re lucky) how other people are helping us out. It’s too bad, really, because I think God probably causes these timeline intersections for a reason…it’s too bad that we’re not usually paying attention, you know?

What’s even weirder about that picture I was telling you about is the ridiculous number of things that had to happen in my life to get me there. How I wouldn’t have known about this internship if my Dad hadn’t happened across a posting for it at work and forwarded it to me. And how I wouldn’t have accepted it if I hadn’t first turned down the opportunity to spend a year doing missions work in Europe in favor of going to seminary in the fall (an option that would have kept me in St. Louis raising support all summer). And really, how I wouldn’t have thought that a church internship sounded interesting at all if my life hadn’t intersected with the lives of a few key friends back in my freshman year of college who got me back on track with God. And how I wouldn’t have met those friends if I hadn’t gone through recruitment on a whim and pledged AOII, and started going to Cru with the girls I met. And how even then, I might not have ended up as close with one of those key friends if we hadn’t happened to be placed in this random Asian Art History class that one of the student leaders of Cru also happened to be in. And how none of that would have happened at all if I hadn’t wound up at Transylvania. And how I would never have gone to Transylvania if I hadn’t gotten rejected by the school I’d applied to early-decision (and how one of those key friends had the same story). And how I wouldn’t even have considered Transylvania if we hadn’t happened to see a sign for it as we were happening to drive through Lexington because my Dad happened to have to take a test at the seminary he’d been taking online classes at, which, oh yeah, happened to be just 30 minutes down the road from the place where God would work miracles in my life over the span of a 4-year education. 

A lot had to happen for me to end up in this group picture. A lot of intersections to get to this one intersection in the woods of northern Missouri, frozen in the form of a lot of smiling faces popping out of a lot of bright red t-shirts.

I wonder what sort of intersections everyone else had to cross to get there, you know? And I wonder why, in God’s grand and overwhelming plan of all of human existence, He had to get us there together.

Because you know He had a reason.

Maybe that’s how we should think about interactions with people. As planned occurrences and opportunities for awesome things to occur…or as do-or-die interactions that might just end up changing the course of someone’s life entirely, so vital to God’s plan that He HAD to get you or me and that other random person together for some amount of time. Because that meeting, that intersection, was

just 

that 

important.

So what do you think? Do you think that your life has an effect on other people? Do you think that our friendship, or the fact that we’re friendly enough to be Facebook friends, has some sort of reasoning behind it? Do you think there was a point to our meeting when we did, and our parting when we did? Do you think there’s a reason some doors open while others close, a reason why some friends last forever and some fade into memories of the past? How will our meeting, our interaction, affect the rest of our lives, and how will the interactions we have today, tomorrow, and the next day affect the rest of the world? 

Kind of makes you look at group pictures differently…

A Sweeping Declaration

Sometimes you set out to start blogging again, because you know your life is on the precipice for great adventure, and your hopefulness about a new life path gives you a great desire record it in writing.

Sometimes, you set out to start blogging again, because you know it's good for your soul to write on a regular basis.

Sometimes, you set out to start blogging again, because your friends and family tell you how much they miss reading your carefree witticisms and insightful commentary on life, the universe, and everything.

And sometimes, you set out to start blogging again, write three posts, and abandon the project for 5 months, despite your grand arsenal of reasons to be blogging.

So let me make a sweeping declaration, a grand announcement and sacred vow of things to come.

The blog will be written.

The posts will be read.

And I, Celia, shall blog once more.

Coming soon to an internet near you.