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In preparation for a Practicing A Christ-Centered Christmas adult elective class, our family watched and discussed an A&E Biography Video on Santa Claus (Borrowed from our local public library). Tag-line: Some know him as St. Nick. Others call him Father Christmas. By whatever name you may know him, he has come to personify the holiday spirit. This well developed piece is an excellent vehicle for conversation with one's family regarding St. Nicholas, his role in the Church, and how we ended up with Santa Claus.

When you consider the legacy you're leaving among family, friends, neighbors, and beyond, don't forget among all the gifts, good cheer, and acts of kindness to underline the true meaning of the times in which we live and the traditions we celebrate as the Christ child speaks to the past and look to the future.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully. -- Flannery O’Connor, Writing Short Stories in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

A worldview, even when it is half unconscious and unarticulated, functions like a compass or a road map.  It orients us in the world at large, gives us a sense of what is up and what is down, what is right and what is wrong in the confusion of events and phenomena that confronts us.  Our worldview shapes, to a significant degree, the way we assess the events, issues, and structures of our civilization and our times.  It allows us to "place" or "situate" the various phenomena that come into our purview. -- Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained