The Nativity according to my 4 year old boys, word for word

Mommy, you know, when we celebrate Christmas, we don’t celebrate the birth of Santa Claus, or the reindeers' birthday. We celebrate the birthday of baby Jesus.
Baby Jesus was a very famous man when he growed up. He was born in a pile of hay. He was born in the ball of hay because there were too many other people sleeping in the regular beds. They walked to the farm where the ball of hay was. There was also donkey carrying a lady who was full of heaven. Heaven is the place where God lives. The donkey had a dream: he dreamed that he was carrying a castle and a sailboat and a rose, and a lady full of heaven. And there were angels standing all around the flower, the rose and the donkey. They knocked on the doors but no one was there and then they finally found a cave to go in and then the man whispered to the donkey ‘come come donkey’, and then they heard the crying inside and when they saw it, it was baby Jesus. All the animal watched baby Jesus being born. Baby Jesus, when he was a grown up, wrote a book that was called the Bible.

The Nativity according to Lowan and Kaelen Hansel. December 16 2009.

Thanksgiving is dead

The quintessential American holiday, the great celebration of thanks for our land’s generous bounty is no longer. Yes, Thanksgiving is dead. Its pitiful corpse revealed itself to me on Sunday, in our local grocery store. I had popped out briefly to pick up a few staples, when at the height of Church chucking- out time, I inadvertently found myself surrounded by hundreds of Sunday-best clad shoppers simultaneously rushing to fill their grocery carts to the brim, with the makings of their upcoming feast. Always curious to see what other people put in their baskets, keen to image the post grocery shopping sequel to a person’s life, I took a peek in my fellow shoppers’ carts. It is then that I witnessed the evidence with badly concealed horror: The beautiful feast had died a painful death at the soft, manicured hand of the American housewife. It was left to drown in a vat of Campell’s condensed cream of celery, canned jellied cranberry sauce, choking on stove-top stuffing mix. Its spirit starved, looking at pasty mounds of 49 cts a pound, enzyme-injected turkeys and hot-pink spiral cut hams. Its aroma vanished under miles of shrink-wrapped, massively produced fruit-free pies. And thanks to the embalming virtues of America’s favorite whipped topping, the great American feast has finally been laid to rest, forever preserved under a sweet white fluffy shroud of corn syrup, wax and condom lube (Polysorbate 60).