Giving and receiving gifts can be juicy and joyful, and make us lots richer in what matters. I think the best gift-giving keeps us living within our means and grounded in our values. Climate change is driven by overconsumption, and research indicates that more stuff doesn't even increase our happiness. But more and better relationships do. A cool ...
Just Don’t Do It
I imagine now that it's two days before Christmas, you might be bracing yourself for a final trip to a store to buy one more gift (more…)
How Readers Break The Rules At Christmas
Diamond-Cut Life is about more joy and less stuff. It's written by a mostly joyful person (me) who feeds her happiness by putting people, nature and God ahead of buying more stuff. That's a fairly subversive thing to do and promote these days. It breaks the culture's unspoken rules that we've got to consume a ...
How To Break The Rules At Christmas
The holidays are full of traditions and rules, some spoken and some unspoken. But change, which we might call rule-breaking, is always an option. While we don't all celebrate Christmas, most people in the world celebrate some kind of winter holiday (the word holiday was originally holy day). I celebrate Christmas because I'm a liberal Christian, but (more…)
Christmas As Community (Not Stuff)
As a child, I confess I found Christmas gifts wildly exciting. (Maybe I was a pre-diamond-cut version of myself?) As an adult, though, human beings are my steady focus of excitement. Our Christmas Eve last night was (more…)
Diamond-Cut Christmas Shopping
It's early Tuesday morning, Christmas is Sunday, and I have Christmas gifts to buy. "What a last-minute shopper!" my carpool partner Cory grinned last night on the ride home. "This is on time," I returned indignantly. (more…)
Christmas Wreaths And Slowing Down
Are you feeling at all hectic or pressured as Christmas approaches? As if the holiday season is so fast-paced and demanding you'd maybe rather skip all this? Let me tell you the story behind Christmas wreaths, the kind I have on my front door. It's actually the only Christmas decoration we have. (And I don't ...
Born For This
Approaching midnight at my church's candlelight Christmas Eve service last night, after we had worked our way through the birth-of-Christ story with scripture readings and a goodly assortment of carols, we sang a final song that contained this lyric: Now ye hear of endless bliss / Jesus Christ was born for this! Those words thrummed that ...
Winter Solstice And The Unconquered Sun And Son
The first part of this piece I posted last year, on the 2008 winter solstice. The rest of it I added for 2009. Today is winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. In the days long before fossil fuels routinely lit our nights, winter solstice was celebrated as the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun. Imagine how ...
Happy Birthday to the Unconquered Sun
Today is winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. In the days before fossil fuels routinely lit our nights, winter solstice was celebrated as the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun. Imagine how vulnerable our long-ago human ancestors were as the days grew colder, darker and shorter. They struggled to protect themselves from the bitter elements; ...
