So I’ve been reading some articles and blog posts in regard to the celebration of Christmas, as I am sometimes wont to do this time of year.

Many of you reading this may know that my immediate family has condemned Christmas as pagan and therefore does not celebrate. No festivities, no decorations, no christmas trees, nothing. In many ways I am glad for this as it gave me the opportunity to examine why we did not. I thoroughly evaluated the celebration of Church holidays, in particular Christmas. I came at it from many angles such as, should the Church be celebrating holidays other than the Lord’s Day, should we celebrate Christmas or is it a pagan holiday? I came to the conclusion that Christmas indeed should be celebrated. We should be joyful! If on no other grounds than this… we, God’s chosen people, of all people have cause to celebrate. We are the elect of God, we are his people, why should we do nothing while the pagans celebrate? The pagans bring out their “seasons greetings” and happy holidays” but we should celebrate CHRISTMAS! We celebrate the coming of our Saviour to the world, we celebrate his life and death for us. We should celebrate because the victory belongs to Christ, this world belongs to our Lord and we should celebrate that victory, not with silly tales of Santa Clause and reindeer, which is a diversion from the truth of the victory of Christ our Lord! It doesn’t matter what the roots of the day are, we can find something pagan that happened on every day of the year, so instead of letting the pagans have the day, we claim it in the name of the Lord as we do every day.

But there is something more thought provoking here that I came across and it made me think. I’ve been in a few different circles of thought in my lifetime. But at this point in my life I am proud to be a part of the reformed worldview. Now, everything has advantages and disadvantages. Everyone has weaknesses and strongpoints. And I think weaknesses and strongpoints come pre-wrapped in schools of thought as well, and the reformed school of thought is no exception.

And I believe in the reformed world that we sometimes have this little problem of wanting to be radical and different for the sake of being radical and different. And I can’t say that I have always escaped this tendency either. We absolutely revel in our radicalness. And, there is a place to be radical and different, we do after all desire reform, and that means being different sometimes. But our differentness should have a purpose and reason behind it, and not just any old reason either. When we as Christians are different or radical, it should be because we have the word of God behind us.

We are called to be a Holy (set apart) people, and this is why we are often seen as radical. And I applaud and endorse many of the “radical” notions within the reformed community such as Covenant Renewal Worship, Patriarchal Leadership of the home, Family Worship etc. All of these things are often seen as radical and often we are accused of being in a cult. No problem.

But, there is a tendency to be different for the sake of being different, and then we try to throw biblical justification in as an afterthought, and it just ruins the whole show! I believe holidays fall in this category for many reformed folk. But wait, the Bible actually does talk about Holidays doesn’t it? And it didn’t tell us to

Make certain though celebratest no holiday not defined in the New Testament. Make sure thou feastest not, except to partake of the Lord’s Supper. Be certain that ye celebrate nothing for I the Lord thy God am a Grinch, desiring that my people be dour and sour and that above all they celebrate not the victory of Christ in the world where he rules and reigns with a rod of iron.

No no no, we are commanded to REJOICE! (Psalm 32:11, Psalm 33:1 Psalm 35:9 Philippians 4:4… and the list could go on forever).

And then also we are told not to condemn either way the celebrating of some days above others, or not celebrating. (Romans 14:5-6)

And throwing all other arguments aside, why should we not have special focus this time of year on the coming of our Lord to this world? Why should we not celebrate that which is right and good! And isn’t it interesting that all the non-Christians are worried about this holiday? This is one of the main holidays that are attacked.

So to that I say to all you Christians, go forth and have a MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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Here are a couple of articles I was reading:

http://jeffreyjmeyers.blogspot.com/2007/11/christmas-time-is-here-again.html

http://jeffreyjmeyers.blogspot.com/2007/11/is-christmas-christian-part-ii.html

http://www.hornes.org/theologia/mark-horne/celebrating-a-calvinist-christmas-with-a-clear-conscience

First, a video of our trebuchet…

And now the pictures:

Isn’t he cute?

He wasn’t sure if he liked the hat.

Setting up the Trebuchet.

The winning team and trebuchet.

The winning team is vain enough for more than one picture.

In our outfits.

Allen liked the pumpkins.

Allen finally got tired of the hat.

Yes, this is a post about Apple’s newest OS for their Macintosh computer, and that OS is code named Leopard.

Leopard, or OS 10.5 is the 6th installment of Mac OS X, and yes I am running that Operating system on my MacBook Pro right now. You see, I decided to be safe and sensible this time around, having bought the last upgrade, Tiger, the day it came out… and getting a little burned by it, I decided to wait a little while and let all the developers get their apps up to snuff and even for Apple to get an update or two out there… HA!

So…

I made it to a whole six days before my Apple fanboy geekness won me back over to reason and I rushed to the Apple store to drink my cool-aid pick up my copy of Leopard.

While the upgrade to Tiger was a very bumpy ride in terms of compatibility with existing apps and drivers of which most were broken, I must say this seems to be a much smoother upgrade. Only two apps have been broken so far, and both developers have promised upgrades within the month.

So on to the wonderfulness that is Leopard!

Right out of the box and into the installation screen, you can tell OS X is feeling much more refined these days. It’s just a feeling of… grown-upness. I don’t quite know how to put my finger on it. The installation options were a bit more streamlined and intuitive, and the graphics were great, even on just the OS installer.

So after having made a disk image clone of my Tiger installation so that in case of emergency I could re-image my hard drive right back to it’s previous working state, I inserted the Leopard DVD and booted into the installer.

I opted for a wipe and clean install, there’s just something about starting completely fresh… so at 3:10 in the afternoon the installer started doing it’s thing.

At 3:28 it automatically rebooted.

At 3:33 I was looking at my brand new shiny desktop. I was amazed as this seemed much faster than a Tiger install. Very Impressive!

Now let me ramble randomly about this OS.

So, I LOVE stacks! What a brilliant idea! It makes my life that much easier.

Having To Dos and Notes Integrated into Mail is also awesome, now if only I could sync those properly with my iPhone (uhh, hello Apple, are you reading???)

Spaces is such a beautiful thing. I had never seen Virtual Desktops done right until now. It is intuitive and easy to use, and WELL INTEGRATED!!! The level of integration is what makes it work so well IMO.

All the nice new little visual enhancements are nice, subtle little things like new animations in iChat when accepting a chat invitation, the nice and completely smooth, no jitter, spaces transitions, all these little things just feel so refined. This is definitely the most refined version of OS X yet.

But let me tell you one of the features I have been looking forward to most. That is TIME MACHINE! What a life saver. I backed up manually for a long time, then I tried using DeJaVu for a while, but I was less than impressed. So clunky and un-reliable. I moved on to try many different various automated means of backup but was never satisfied with any of them. But Time Machine, ahhhhh, what a beauty. It saves whole system, and incremental backups all at once, keeps tabs on everything, doesn’t slow down the system at all, is very easy to use and set up, and best of all it just WORKS! Time Machine alone was worth the money.

Spotlight is FAST! Blazing fast. It worked fine before in Tiger, but it’s plain snappy now in Leopard. It’s very nice. For that matter (and I’m not making this up) my Laptop is noticeably faster all around with Leopard. I’m going to attribute that to the fully 64 bit architecture.

As to peoples complaints about the visual changes in Leopard, what a bunch of whiners. The barely translucent menu bar is beautiful in my opinion, and I LOVE the 3d dock. I certainly didn’t have a complaint about the dock even to start with, but using Tiger on the computers at work, then coming back to my Laptop, Leopard is just so much more visually appealing.

Well, I can’t think of anything else to say about Leopard right now so I guess I’ll quit boring the pants off of all 2 of my readers…