Cartoon of Santa chasing his sleigh. The caption reads, “Thanks to a joy ride, Christmas was nearly canceled!”
I don’t know why Santa would trust those elves. They always looked a little too mischievous for my taste.
Google is helping Santa Claus this year. Apparently, you can track where he’s at using Santa’s Dashboard.
I hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas. And if you hear a clatter on your rooftop, it may be those crazy elves taking a joy ride!
Cartoon of a boy at a fast food restaurant. He asks a worker, “My dad hates gift cards. Can you wrap up a hamburger in festive paper and a bow?
Our children are assaulted with a flood of commercials this time of year. They have seen so many toy commercials, they could probably quote them back to you verbatim. What do you do when everything around your children screams greed and you want to teach them to be giving?
My local paper had a great article by Kathy Schwartz entitled 10 Perfect Gifts Parents Can Give. That got me thinking about ways parents and teachers can teach how to be giving.
Here are seven easy tips:
Try some of these techniques to get the focus off of the gift-getting and onto being generous.
Cartoon of a boy in a shepherd costume and a teacher. The boy says, “You call this a Christmas play? There is no playground and you’re putting us to work!”
I am a big fan of A Charlie Brown Christmas. We’re the same age. We both came to this world in 1965. I’ve been in my share of Christmas plays and they always seemed as chaotic as the one Charlie Brown is directing. And I’ve always been tempted to break out of character and just dance in the middle of the play.
Christmas plays are hard work because you have to act A LOT when you’re in one. You have to pretend that boy who you know is a practical joker is Joseph. You have to pretend the girl who kicked you in the shins during recess is Mary. Then YOU have to pretend you are somber and just seen a platoon of angels when you know full well it was the Smith triplets in bath robes.
Christmas plays are also hard work because we can’t get our head around the notion God came to Earth as a baby to a poor family and was born in a barn. Lets face it. If we were God, WE wouldn’t want to be born in a barn and we’d want more than some smelly shepherds to visit us that first night.
Those Christmas plays are just hard work!
Bethlehem scene with a big sign that says, “See the newborn king here!”
There’s a song/skit I love from Stan Freburg called Green Christmas.
In the skit, it talks about how Christmas is marketed mercilessly. Let’s face it. Most Christmas marketing is just cheesy. Any time you take a meaningful story and use it to sell something, it doesn’t come across as genuine.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that because, well, I don’t want to be cheesy. I like content marketing because it adds value more than sells. But where do you draw the line? When does content marketing become cheesy? When it becomes about the product instead of the customer, I suppose.
Still, that can be difficult to discern when there is a sales quota.
Cartoon of a man in a santa suit and a grumpy businessman. The businessman says, “The office is in the holiday spirit. At least it is as soon as I leave it.”
I saw a production of A Christmas Carol last night. It had me thinking of what a modern-day Scrooge would look like. I know there are plenty around modern offices. I admit I haven’t decorated my cubicle or began shouting, “Ho, ho, ho!” yet.
There’s something about the crass commercialism part of Christmas that makes us feel uncomfortable. We take a religious holiday and make it a make-or-break buying bonanza. Even if our office depends upon this commercialism, it makes us feel uncomfortable, doesn’t it. O the avarice!
