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Gift Boxes Help Migrant Filipinos Keep Ties to Home (via the dubious biologist)

Whew, four posts in a row. While my wife was out doing some last-minute Christmas shopping, I was home doing some last-minute blogging. I have a few more things to write about but it’ll have to wait until the weekend’s festivities are over.

We’ll be zig-zagging across the Bay Area the next couple of days. Tomorrow Later, we’ll be at my sister’s place in Hayward, then we’ll be back in Fremont to celebrate the rest of Christmas Eve at my wife’s brother’s house. On Christmas Day, we will attend church service in Union City, then stop over at the pastor’s place in San Leandro, then head on out to Vallejo for the “extended family” get-together.

Have a Merry Christmas y’all!

In what is called “Operation Candle,” Muslim authorities in Indonesia are providing security to Christian churches in Jakarta during this Christmas season. It is part of the authorities’ goal “to move beyond physical security to include an ideological campaign against violent strains of Islam.”

During Christmas Eve 2000, “29 churches were bombed in an attack blamed on Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a group that has been linked to Al Qaeda.” Earlier this year, three Christian schoolgirls were beheaded by masked attackers in Sulawesi. Other events in 2005 include Islamist mobs closing down 40 unregistered Christian churches, and the Islamic scholars’ council issuing “edicts condemning pluralism and interfaith marriages.” These are acts that are threatening Indonesia’s reputation for “religious tolerance.”

Remember the kids’ “Peanuts” video from last year? Well, I uploaded it to Google Video last week and it’s now live! It got formatted funny though ’cause it’s got black space to the right and bottom of the video. I think it has to do with the fact that I submitted it as a .mov file instead of the preferred mpeg or mp4 format. I’ll fix it later.

Speaking of Peanuts, I was able to effortlessly record the Charlie Brown Christmas Special (1965) on ABC last Friday, thanks to our new Comcast DVR box. Yup, we got that instead of the Tivo box/service combo since we were alrady Comcast subscribers. We had TFC and GMA thru Comcast for a little while but my wife and I found that we were hardly watching them. So we thought of putting the $19.99 that we were paying to a more worthwhile service. We cancelled the Filipino channels and got the Comcast DVR service instead. Not only did we get the neat recording features (I now know what you Tivo users are raving about) for the same price but we also acquired a couple of dozen more channels.

So anyway, I had the kids watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special a couple of days later. They liked it and identified with it because they also had to practice and perform Christmas songs (just like the Peanuts characters) for church last Sunday. I liked how Linus quoted Luke 2:8-14 to state the true meaning of Christmas.

The decision by some megachurches to cancel Sunday services on Christmas Day was puzzling to say the least. Not surprisingly, it got the “kneejerks” (as I like to call them) at Metafilter on a ridicule roll. Then news came a couple of days ago that one of those Christmas Day Service-canceling pastors regretted his decision and is reinstating service this coming Sunday. He blogs about it here.