Noun:  titivation -  sprucing up; making decorative additions to

Noun:  fashion -  Something, such as a garment, that is in the current mode

Noun:  frippery -  1. Pretentious, showy finery. 2. Pretentious elegance; ostentation. 3. Something trivial or nonessential.

 Women’s interest with clothes and appearance starts young…and seems to be hard-wired ( for most, but not all females).  For my three year old, it looks like dressing and re-dressing the paper dolls from this book. 

But it also looks like playing dress-up, or doing her own hair.

The visual reference to Harry Potter is accidental, though not regretted.

And a bunch of her make-up activity is about figuring out who she is and who mommy is.  Personally, I have little idea how I’m going to explain to her that it was fine for her to wear lipstick at two, though not at twelve. 

But ultimately, even if DD(3) becomes the Coco Chanel of the 21st century, what she needs to understand is that while all of this is fun stuff (and it may even be a career), life is about so much more.  Life is this rich tapestry of our relationship with God and with all these other people that have been made in His image.

 1 Peter 3:3-4  It is not fancy hair, gold jewelry, or fine clothes that should make you beautiful. No, your beauty should come from within you—the beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit that will never be destroyed and is very precious to God.

1Timothy 2:8-10 Since prayer is at the bottom of all this, what I want mostly is for men to pray—not shaking angry fists at enemies but raising holy hands to God. And I want women to get in there with the men in humility before God, not primping before a mirror or chasing the latest fashions but doing something beautiful for God and becoming beautiful doing it.

If one takes 1 Peter 3 and 1 Timothy 2 out of the context of the whole counsel of God, then one could say that women should never wear jewelry; their clothes should be frumpy and of poor quality; and their hair should be boring.  But that completely misses the point of the passage.  Also, the ‘gentle and quiet spirit’  in the 1 Peter passage doesn’t mean that women aren’t feisty,  fun, or adventurous.  It means that they know who they are in the Lord…which is a lot of fancy religious talk for saying that they know who’s God and who’s not…and how precious and valuable that relationship is. 

The 1Peter passage is from the New Century Version

The 1Timothy passage is from The Message

I like how Janet Pratt once explained Easter Eggs to her daughter.  They are part of the way we celebrate Easter; but Easter or Resurrection Day isn’t about Easter eggs.  And just like balloons and birthday cake are the way we celebrate someone’s birthday, they aren’t the reason we celbrate a person’s birthday.

Resurrection Day Egg Hunt at Gram’s House

 The thrill of the hunt…

Kate and her cousins play in Gram’s stream.

Last Fall I saw most of part 1 of Zeitgeist the movie. Now I enjoy things which encourage discussing subjects that are not usually discussed. So I’ll give it over to the movie for accomplishing that.  For those of you who don’t know, part 1 of Zeitgeist is an anti-Christian treatise which basically says Jesus didn’t even exist and that He was modelled after Horus, one of the Egyptian gods. There’s a lot to address here, and I’m a WAHM so discussing even what I’ve seen is likely to take a very long time. But why not, God is all-powerful and I’m willing to bet that He’d like to give me the energy boost I need.

Today however, I just want to grab one of the low-hanging fruit…the easy stuff. Why is it easy? Well, the film makes an almost air-tight argument…if they are telling the truth and representing the facts accurately. But they aren’t, and there are some statements that are just too pathetic to let go.

I’m going to summarize here instead of quoting most of the time because of time.

Per the film, one of the reasons to believe that Jesus never existed is His birth date, December 25th.  Per the film, that date is shared by Horus, Attis of Phyrigia, Krishna of India, Dionysus of Greece, Mithra of Persia, and others. Or is it? Excuse me, but I’m pretty sure I learned (in church) by the age of 10 that the church chose December 25th in order to entice Roman pagans to convert to Christianity and to assure pagans that a cold-turkey abandonment of the winter festival was not a prerequisite to accepting Christ.  The New Testament does not give a date for the birth of Jesus.

Now for those of you who say that the Eastern Church has always celebrated Christ’s birth on January 6th — I’m just not sure that that’s true.   I’ve also read in the older Julian calendar — a precursor of what is used as the religious calendar in Eastern Churches– January 6 corresponds to December 24 on our modern calendar.  I don’t know.

Now, this next bit I take from Wikipedia (verbatim except for the part in orange).  And  while one should not take Wikipedia completely at it’s word, the quality of this citation’s references assures me.

 Around AD 200, Clement of Alexandriawrote that a group in Egypt celebrated the nativity on Pachon 25.[3] This corresponds to May 20.[20] Tertullian (d. 220) does not mention Christmas as a major feast day in the Church of Roman Africa.[3]In Chronographai, a reference work published in 221, Sextus Julius Africanus suggested that Jesus was conceived on the spring equinox.[21] The equinox was March 25 on the Roman calendar, so this implied a birth in December.[22]De Pascha Computus, a calendar of feasts produced in 243, gives March 28 as the date of the nativity.[23] In 245, the theologian Origen of Alexandria stated that, “only sinners (like Pharaoh and Herod)” celebrated their birthdays.[24] In 303, Christian writer Arnobius  [who died c 330] ridiculed the idea of celebrating the birthdays of gods, which suggests that Christmas was not yet a feast at this time.[3] 

In fact, the earliest known reference to the Christian celebration of Christmas on December 25th is found in the Chronography of 354 [AKA Calendar of Filocalus], a manuscript compiled in Rome in AD 354.

I could go on about people who use straw men to argue their points, but perhaps another day…