A Carpe Diem Snapshot:
The girls got their wish granted and enjoyed a white Christmas. It's a good thing they Carpe Diemed and went out to play in the snow because now the landscape is grey and dreary. What a difference the sun makes to our experience of the day and our perception of the passage of time. These past two days the sun has been so hidden behind a blanket of dark clouds that both the sunrise and sunset were non events, which is why I'm posting a photo from the last sunny moment we experienced. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Liturgical: Feast of the Holy Family
Today is the Fifth Day in the Octave of Christmas.
Scripture tells us practically nothing about the first years and the boyhood of the Child Jesus. All we know are the facts of the sojourn in Egypt, the return to Nazareth, and the incidents that occurred when the twelve-year-old boy accompanied his parents to Jerusalem. In her liturgy the Church hurries over this period of Christ's life with equal brevity. The general breakdown of the family, however, at the end of the past century and at the beginning of our own, prompted the popes, especially the far-sighted Leo XIII, to promote the observance of this feast with the hope that it might instill into Christian families something of the faithful love and the devoted attachment that characterize the family of Nazareth. The primary purpose of the Church in instituting and promoting this feast is to present the Holy Family as the model and exemplar of all Christian families.
—Excerpted from With Christ Through the Year, Rev. Bernard Strasser, O.S.B.
Fr Plant's Homily today: They found him in the temple
Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon: Freeing your family for God
Sanctoral: Saint Thomas Becket, England +1170
Human: Celebrating the Feast of the Holy Family
The Writer's Almanac edition today.
Natural: Heliophobia
Fear of sun/sunshine (there's none of this is Michigan right now!)
Italian: Essere in gamba (to be very capable)
Quote: “Waste time with your children,
so that they can realise, that love is always free.” --Pope Francis
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