RLL Ep.41: Christmas Eve 2020

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You're listening to Radio Luke's Lucid. I'm your host, Steve Matthews. Thanks for joining me for episode 41, Christmas Eve 2020.
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Well, it's hard to believe, once again, it's here we find ourselves at Christmas time. You know, the years, they seem to go faster and faster.
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I think the longer that I'm around, it seems like it was only a few days ago that we were celebrating Christmas a year ago.
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But here we are once again in 2020. You know, this Christmas, of course, has been a little bit strange for probably a lot of us.
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You know, with all the COVID restrictions out there, you know, it makes it harder to go to church or to travel to be with loved ones and friends, family.
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And, you know, even for me, I mean, I've always gone to a Christmas Eve service. And this year, you know, with all the
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COVID stuff, I ended up not going to a service.
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And I thought, well, what better way to spend Christmas Eve, to celebrate Christmas Eve than to, you know, do a podcast, spend a little bit of time with my friends on a podcast.
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So welcome to the program tonight. I'm glad you're here. And I hope that you find this, that you get something out of this here this evening.
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You know, I hesitated a little bit to do this program. And the reason being, of course, I'm a
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Calvinist. I'm a Reformed believer. And I know that there are some people in the Reformed community who don't believe that Christmas is something that we ought to celebrate.
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You know, they certainly believe in the birth of Christ and the incarnation and all the doctrines of Christ.
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They certainly believe those things. They just don't think that celebrating Christmas is something that's appropriate. And, you know,
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I'm not here to argue about that here tonight. I think certainly theological argumentation is worthwhile.
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I do think there is warrant in the Scriptures for celebrating Christmas. I don't believe that it's sinful to do so.
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And as I said, I'm not here to argue about that tonight. I'm just here to do a program and talk with you a few things about Christmas, some things that I love about Christmas.
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And, of course, one of those is just talking about the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
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And we'll do that as we go through the program here. But maybe before we dive into some of the doctrine here,
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I want to just tell you, maybe talk a little bit about maybe some things that I do love about Christmas. And maybe some of these things seem maybe a little bit silly,
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I don't know, but they're things that I do enjoy. And I think probably a lot of people enjoy these too. One of the things
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I was thinking about as far as Christmas goes is, of course, Christmas lights. And I think one of the things that inspired me to think about that a little bit is,
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I have a neighbor here who has a pretty big light display.
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And I'm thinking, maybe if you remember, there's that scene in, I think it's National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, where at the end, you know, they plug in the big light display at the
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Griswold house, you know, and it lights up, and it takes down the power grid and the whole city. Well, they're kind of working on a kind of take down the power grid light display.
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My neighbors are here. And it maybe isn't quite to that point yet.
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But I think it's getting there. It seems like it gets a little bit bigger every year. So I don't know, maybe in the next few years, we'll see the power grid go down because of the
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Christmas light display. Well, anyway, so yeah. And the funny thing is,
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I say, I really do like Christmas lights. Just sometimes I'll go out, I'll take a walk in the evening, and I go by, and you know, it always puts a smile on my face.
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It really does, you know. And you know, that's a good thing. That's not a bad thing at all.
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And I'm not going to complain about that. You know, especially like if you live here where I do.
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I mean, I live in Cincinnati. And winters here, well, they're not as severe as they are some places.
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I had a friend of mine from North Dakota, and she used to insist that we didn't have winter here. And of course, she was from North Dakota.
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So, well, I can see her point. You know, in North Dakota, they get some mighty cold winters, and they get a lot of snow.
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We don't get anything like that here. And you know, we don't have some of the really severe winter weather in Cincinnati as some other parts of the country get.
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Like if you get up into, even along the Great Lakes, like you get up around Cleveland or, you know, other cities around the
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Great Lakes, they get lake effect snow. And what it is is a lot of moisture in the air due to the, you know, the large lakes up there.
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And that kind of feeds into these snowstorms, and it tends to amplify it.
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And they can get some pretty massive snows. I remember, oh, it was a year or two back, there was this giant snow they had in Erie, Pennsylvania, which is on Lake Erie.
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And I think I remember reading something in the paper where they got, I want to say, five feet of snow over a period of about 24 hours or some insane thing like that.
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And I had a client. I have a job. I talk to people around the country. And one of my clients actually lived and worked in Erie, Pennsylvania.
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I was talking to her, and she was back at work. This was only like a day or two later. And I asked her, I said, how is it that you can be back at work after you just got five or,
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I don't know, maybe six feet of snow, some crazy thing like that? And she says, oh, you know, we get this stuff all the time. You know, we're used to it.
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You know, like it was nothing. You know, like we get five or six inches here in Cincinnati and stuff shuts down.
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It really does. And but, you know, just talking about, you know, the winters in Cincinnati, I mean, we say we don't get massive amounts of snow.
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We do get some snow. You know, it can get cold, but not as cold, maybe necessarily some other places.
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I mean, we can have days where it gets below zero, but those are exceptional. You know, that's not typical. Usually what we get here in Cincinnati are these long, dark gray days.
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And, you know, the clouds will come in and you have this sort of low, solid gray cloud ceiling.
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And it'll just be that way all day. And it might be that way days and days at a time. And it seems like weeks and weeks at a time.
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You start getting that in December, and then you get into January and February, and it seems like you hardly ever see the sun.
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And I think maybe of all the things I don't like about winter, I don't like all the darkness.
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You know, it seems like the sun just goes away. Of course, you know, the sun comes up and sets later in the winter, obviously.
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But I say it's more than just that. When you add to that the cloud cover, it just gets, it can be kind of dreary in a lot of ways.
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And how does that tie into Christmas lights? Well, you know, you walk around a neighborhood and you go by this yard here, and everything's dark, but then this yard is lit up.
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And, you know, it brings a cheer to my heart. It brings a joy to my heart.
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And I enjoy seeing that. So I don't, you know, I'm never going to complain about somebody putting up Christmas lights, even if they put up a lot of them.
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So yeah, I do like the Christmas lights. And there was a Christmas light display here in Cincinnati a number of years ago.
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It's kind interesting. There was this, this is about 15 years ago. And people, I remember, I think it's maybe somebody at work or somewhere,
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I got sent this link to this Christmas light display. And what it was, it was this house, and it had a soundtrack to it.
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They had used some kind of computer control to synchronize the lights on the house, the light display on the house, to a tune, to a song by a
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Trans -Siberian Orchestra called Wizards of Winter. And if you don't know that tune,
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Wizards of Winter, it's, the way I would describe it to you, it's kind of like a cross between Tchaikovsky and Metallica, which
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I know sounds kind of weird, but it actually works pretty well. And it's, what they did is they would play this soundtrack, it's about a three or four minute song, and they would computer sync these lights on the house and in the yard to dance and change and do things to the music.
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And it was an amazing video. I mean, it's hands down the single best home light, home
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Christmas lights display I've ever seen. And that was 15 years ago. I still haven't seen anything I thought was as good as what that was.
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It was very, very well done. And in fact, it was even used on some advertisers, some national advertisements.
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And I think it's actually, you can actually find the video. It's out there on YouTube. And it's endorsed by the
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Trans -Siberian Orchestra. It's like the official Christmas lights display for the Trans -Siberian Orchestra for this particular song.
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So it's impressed a lot of people. And what I thought was really interesting about it is after this link had been passed around,
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I watched it, and we were talking with some people. And a friend of mine said, well, you know, that's right here. Wow, it is?
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Yeah, it's right here in Cincinnati. It's in a Cincinnati neighborhood. It's probably about 20 minutes or so from my house. So I remember we drove up, and I saw this thing.
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And you would drive by, and they actually had a radio station that would play the tune,
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Wizards of Winter. So you'd tune your radio to it, and you'd drive by, and you'd see the lights go through their cycle.
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And it was pretty amazing. There were cars lined up all over the place. I don't know, they may not have been really super popular with their neighbors because of all the traffic it generated.
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But it was a really, really impressive light display. And like I say, the video, it's actually still out there on YouTube.
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I'm going to go ahead and put a link to that in the show notes. And I think you might enjoy watching that if you haven't seen it.
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Because like I say, even 15 years later, it's still the single best home light display that I've ever seen.
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So yeah, I do like Christmas lights. That's one thing that I like about Christmas.
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Another thing that always amazes me about Christmas is how
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Christian ideas, Christian thought will show up in places that you would never see at any other time of year.
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I remember a few years ago, I was up at the grocery store here, and they were playing Christmas tunes over the store sound system.
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Usually it's Muzak or something like this, but it was December and they were playing Christmas tunes. I can't remember what song it was.
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It may have been Hark the Herald Angels Sing, I don't recall. But you're sitting here going through the grocery aisle, and you're hearing these lyrics, born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth,
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Hark the Herald Angels Sing, glory to the newborn king. I'm thinking, this is that grocery store, and I'm sitting here listening to these amazing lyrics.
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And I'm thinking to myself, the people listening to this, do they really understand? Do you get what you're listening to?
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This is the greatest stuff you could ever hear. And I mean, you would never hear that any other time of year.
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But during Christmas, people, and I'm talking here about people who are unbelievers, they will still listen to this stuff.
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And they do so in most cases without any real complaint. It's interesting how people, even if they're not necessarily
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Christians, they seem to enjoy that type of thing.
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And I've wondered how many times maybe people have come to believe the gospel, just casually and things like that.
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I mean, it's an interesting thought. And I don't have any way of knowing that.
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But it's fascinating, though, how some really profound Christian ideas can find their ways in places that you don't even expect, even the grocery aisle, even a business maybe that's not necessarily a
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Christian business, but it's just going about doing its thing. And all of a sudden, this shows up on the store sound system.
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So that's pretty amazing. Now, I also have, I have to admit, I do like Christmas movies.
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There are some really classic out there. And if you had to press me, if you had to say, well,
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Steve, Steve, what's the favorite Christmas movie you have? What do you like the best?
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And I guess if I had to say, there would be one. And the one I really love is
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A Charlie Brown Christmas. A Charlie Brown Christmas. Yeah, it's a cartoon.
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And there's so much great stuff about that. It debuted in 1965. And in preparation for the podcast today,
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I was just doing a little bit of research. And I came across an article from back in 2016.
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And this is in New York Magazine. And it has a headline.
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It's got a title here. It's called How A Charlie Brown Christmas Almost Wasn't. And this is dated
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November 16, 2016. And I'll just read the first paragraph here. It says, quote, soon millions of American families will come together to celebrate the holidays and passive aggressively debate whether the country has just been saved or destroyed.
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This was just after Donald Trump was elected back in 2016. I suppose that's what they're referring to.
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Continuing with that quote, for many one annual ritual will provide a welcome distraction.
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Watching a depressed child get berated and mocked relentlessly. A Charlie Brown Christmas based on the
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Peanuts comic strip has aired every December for the last 50 years, longer than any other holiday program besides Rudolph the
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Red Nosed Reindeer. For last year's anniversary, President Obama called a special one of the country's most beloved traditions.
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Well, you know, oddly enough, there's not a lot that I would agree with on on Barack Obama. But yeah,
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I think I would agree with that. And let's read a little bit more here. It says
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Lee Mendelsohn, who produced a Charlie Brown Christmas, thinks this message might be particularly relevant this year, with at least half the population feeling like someone pulled the football away.
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These people identify with Charlie Brown, maybe more than ever, ever after this election season. He keeps fighting back and keeps enduring,
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Mendelsohn says. If we ever have to fight polling at so many levels, this is it. Well, maybe I wouldn't quite put it that way.
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I think maybe Lee Mendelsohn's politics may be a little bit different from mine, but I'm not going to sit here and, like I say, and argue about this.
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But anyway, when you read through this article, there's actually some pretty interesting stuff.
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And it talks about how the Christmas special came to be. And let me read this part for you.
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He says, quote, what most people don't realize is that the holiday classic, the Charlie Brown Christmas, barely made it into production and was almost buried forever.
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In 1965, no one believed that Charles Schultz's story of an underdog sticking to his principles in the face of constant bullying would make for good
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TV. The show originally sprang from a failed documentary Mendelsohn had tried to make about Schultz.
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No networks had wanted it. But after Charlie Brown and the gang were featured on the cover of Time magazine,
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Coca -Cola's ad agency, McCann Erickson, got the idea for a holiday special and approached
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Mendelsohn. Desperate after his documentary imploded, he lied and told the agent that, in fact, he and Schultz had discussed such a project.
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He called Schultz and told him they'd sold a Charlie Brown Christmas. Schultz said, what's that?
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Mendelsohn recalls. And I said, it's something you're going to write tomorrow. And it continues.
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Mendelsohn rang animator Bill Melendez, who had helped animate a two minute segment in the never aired documentary.
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The three met in Schultz's office in Sebastopol, California. Schultz wanted the show to focus on the childhood stress of putting on a
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Christmas play. Mendelsohn had just read The Fir Tree by Hans Christian Andersen and suggested the story include a tree that is sad and misunderstood as Charlie Brown.
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They cranked out an outline and put it in the Western Union shipment to Atlanta. Several days later, the agency told him they had a short six months to deliver the animated special.
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Halfway through production, when the team was still working with black and white illustrations, a mechanic executive,
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Mendelsohn is almost certain it was Neil Reagan, the older brother of President Ronald Reagan, showed up in Sebastopol to check on the progress.
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He was put off by the slow pacing of the story. Mendelsohn, Melendez, and Schultz assured him it would be better once there was music and color.
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The executive said he wouldn't tell the agency what he thought, because if he did, he was sure they would cancel the show. So this thing's getting off to a rather inauspicious start.
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I guess a little bit like Charlie Brown himself. Let me, the story continues here, so I'll keep reading this.
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For the music, the team had corded up and coming jazz musician Vince Giraldi, whose castor fate to the wind seemed to strike the same balance of somber enlightenment and childlike buoyancy that Schultz achieved in his comic.
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But when they played the introduction song as the children skated on a frozen pond, Mendelsohn realized it was way too slow and solemn.
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It was missing something. He sat down at his kitchen table and wrote out the words to Christmastime is here on an envelope.
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Giraldi enlisted the children's choir of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in San Rafael, California to sing the lyrics.
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Lyrics or not, the CBS executives didn't think jazz belonged in a cartoon. Now that's an interesting idea.
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Maybe a lot of people do know this, but maybe some people don't. The soundtrack to a
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Charlie Brown Christmas special is just classic. A number of years ago, I guess this was about 20 years back,
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I worked in a music store for a while. And one of the hottest selling
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Christmas CDs that we had was a Charlie Brown Christmas special.
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I worked over there at, it was Borders Books, Borders Books of Music, fairly close to here.
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And it was, you know, back in the day, back in the day, I think it was the best book and music store in Cincinnati.
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I really do. One of the things I always loved about Borders is that they didn't just carry
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New York Times bestsellers. I mean, yeah, they carried that stuff. They carried a lot of the big, you know, the commercial stuff that you would expect maybe a chain bookstore to carry, but they had a deeper catalog.
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They really did. And you could find all kinds of books and music there that you couldn't get anywhere else.
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And of course, this was really before online shopping had taken off. This was in the late 90s, early 2000s. So, you know,
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Amazon was out there, but it wasn't what it is today. And, you know, generally when people bought books and music, they still went to a bricks and mortar store and bought them.
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And I think their selection there was just outstanding. There were some just great people that worked there.
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And I mean, that was, honestly, if I had to pick one job that I really loved doing, maybe more than any other, that was the best job
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I ever had. And, you know, and the funny thing about that, you know, working at was a friend that I met there that worked at the same department, a fellow named
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Darian. And he and I, you know, we eventually left the job there after a while.
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And then we ended up several years later, we ended up working at another place together doing 401k work.
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And we were both at that job for a number of years and we went our separate ways. And then about three years ago,
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I got my current job with my current employer and I walk in the door and who do I see? I see Darian there.
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And so Darian and I, this was our third job together. But we started out together at Borders Books and Music over there at Tri -County about 20 years ago.
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And that's, I guess, actually 21 years ago. I think it was 99 when I started there anyway. I think Darian had been there a little bit before I had, but it was in 99 when
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I was working there. And I was going to school at a time. I was kind of doing a work school thing and that was my job to at least make a little bit of money on the side while I was in school.
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So anyway, what kind of brought that up and what made me think about that is when
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I was working in the music store there, one of the hottest sellers was a
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Charlie Brown Christmas. And I didn't even know that that had been released on CD, but I mean, people would just buy that like crazy.
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And you know what? You can't always say, well, because something sells a lot that it's good. There's a lot of really garbage out there that sells a lot.
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In this particular case, a Charlie Brown Christmas, the soundtrack CD, great stuff.
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And if you like Christmas music, if you don't have that, get it. I can't recommend it to you strong enough.
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It's absolutely one of my favorite Christmas albums that there is. Really good stuff. And like I say, it's jazz.
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And as the said, you know, lyrics are not CBS executives didn't think jazz belonged in a cartoon. Well, you know, it kind of,
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I can see why they would say that, you know, it's easy to kind of sit here in, you know, 50 some years later and say, well, boy, you know, you guys really blew it.
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But yeah, you try to put yourself in a position of a TV executive that doesn't jazz maybe in a cartoon about Christmas.
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How does that work anyway? Well, it does. And I'm not going to try to argue it too much here, but just check it out and listen to it.
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It's a, I love that album and I throw it on, throw it on all the time, even sometimes when it's not
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Christmas. So anyway, let's continue with a New York magazine article here.
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Lyrics are not the CBS executives didn't think jazz belonged in a cartoon. They also challenged
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Schultz's decision to use untrained children instead of professional adult voice actors.
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They especially couldn't understand why children would use such big words. Lucy quote, we all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket.
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It's run by a big Eastern syndicate, you know, Charlie Brown. Don't think of it as dust.
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Think of it as maybe the soil of some great past civilization, maybe the soil of ancient Babylon. It staggers the imagination, maybe carrying soil that was trod upon by Solomon or even
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Nebuchadnezzar. This despite the fact for about 15 years, Peanuts characters had spoken with advanced vocabularies.
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Yeah, Peanuts is actually pretty sophisticated in a lot of ways. And that's certainly not aimed at, it's the kind of thing that not only can kids enjoy it, but I think adults can as well.
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And the article continues here. Schultz even got pushed back from his own team. Mendelsohn suggested a laugh track would save the show and Schultz responded by standing up and walking out of the room.
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When Schultz, a Sunday school teacher, so the man Charles Schultz who wrote the Peanuts series,
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Peanuts cartoon, he was a Christian. And when Schultz, a Sunday school teacher, said Linus should recite from the gospel of Luke, Mendelsohn and Melendez protested.
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We looked at each other and said, well, there goes our careers right down the drain, Mendelsohn recalls.
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Nobody had ever animated anything from the Bible before and we knew it probably wouldn't work. We were flabbergasted by it.
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And this is one of the things that just really made a lot of people, even back in 1965, uncomfortable.
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They thought, well, you know, and there is, there's this scene kind of toward the end about maybe, you know, three quarters or four fifths of the way through where Linus does.
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He reads from the gospel of Luke and he reads the portion about, you know, about the birth of Christ and he reads from the
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King James Bible and this, this is in this Christmas special and I think it maybe made a few people maybe a little bit uncomfortable.
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Reading, continuing with the article of New York Magazine, of course, now Mendelsohn realized that Linus' segment probably made the entire project work.
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That 10 -year -old kid who recited that speech from the Bible is as good as any scene from Hamlet, he says. When CBS finally saw the finished project, they were sure it was doomed.
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It was still too slow. There was no action. The kids weren't polished. The jazz didn't belong. The general reaction was one of disappointment.
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That didn't really translate as well as we thought it would. Former CBS executive Fred Silverman said in a 2015 short documentary,
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The Making of a Charlie Brown Christmas, there are specific negative comments about the music, the piano music, some of the voicing, which sounded kind of amateurish.
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But Coca -Cola had already bankrolled the program and it was listed in TV guides. CBS had to air the show, but the execs were certain it would flop, never to run again.
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Mendelsohn thought he had killed Charlie Brown. When a Charlie Brown Christmas aired at 7 30 p .m.
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Eastern Time on December 9, 1965, half of American TV viewers tuned in. The reviews were outstanding.
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Washington Post TV critic Lawrence Lart wrote, good old Charlie Brown, a natural born loser, finally turned up a winner.
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CBS immediately ordered four more specials. The show won a Peabody, an Emmy award. In the end,
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Schultz, Mendelsohn, and Melendez wound up making about 50 penis programs together, most of them for CBS.
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We did whatever we wanted to do, Mendelsohn said. In our business, that's craziness. We did one on cancer.
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We did one on war. We were just given a free ticket for half the century and tried to honor that by being entertaining, but also being important and educational.
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The only person who wasn't surprised was Schultz. The cartoonist was plagued by depression and self -doubt his entire life, but he always had confidence in his characters and their stories.
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He believed everyone knew what it was like to fail despite doing everything right. We hear about authors who write best about what they know,
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Steinbeck wrote about the West. Hemingway wrote about, well, everywhere, says Mendelsohn. Schultz jumped ahead in school, so he was always the youngest, and he endured a lot of bullying.
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He felt a lot of loneliness, and I think that was the bedrock of his whole philosophy. Schultz's message of perseverance in the face of dejection always resonated with American audiences and reminded that we should keep kicking no matter how many times they pull the ball away.
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If that sentiment happens to be particularly relevant this year, Mendelsohn is pleased. Hopefully, he says, this positive program will be soothing in a time of uncertainty.
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Well, I would say this, it advanced the calendar four years, and I think we probably have more uncertainty now than what we did then.
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But, you know, of course, what's the great thing is the
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Gospel of Jesus Christ, of course, that is our comfort. And when we talk about the Gospel, of course, we have to talk about the
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Incarnation, we have to talk about the birth of Christ. And that, of course, is what the
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Charlie Brown Christmas focused on, it was focused on the birth of Christ. So, yeah, the
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Charlie Brown Christmas special is certainly, you know, I say, if you had to push me and say, what's your absolute favorite
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Christmas movie? Well, I'd have to tell you it's that. You know, historically speaking, there have been some significant events that have taken place on Christmas, on or around Christmas.
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For instance, if in American history, George Washington crossed the Delaware River on Christmas night in 1776, and he successfully attacked the
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Hessian troops that were stationed at Trenton, New Jersey. So, you know, he won a victory, and overall, probably in the war effort, the
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American Revolution, maybe it wasn't the most significant battle of all, but it was a chance for George Washington to kind of show his chops as a commander, and a chance for the
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American army to prove that it could actually win a battle, because there are a lot of people who didn't think they could. This was very early on in the war, and you know, the
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Americans were kind of the ragtag army, you know, there were a bunch of militiamen, and they were going up against the regular
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British army, and they weren't doing very well. And this was an opportunity for the
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American army to show that it could pull off a successful operation. And that was, they actually crossed the river, it was on the evening of December 25th, the attack on the
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Hessian troops in Trenton took place on the morning of the 26th.
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Another noteworthy event, and this is actually also war -related, was the famous Christmas Truce in World War II.
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And this is something maybe you've heard about, there's an article that I happened to find that had some interesting things in it.
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It's found, it's from the Guardian, and let's see, that was dated back
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December 23rd, 2015. And the headline says, Soldier's Letters Bring First World War Christmas Truce to Life.
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Private Frederick Davies of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers wrote home about life on the
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Western Front, in correspondence donated to the Imperial War Museum. And let's read a little bit of this particular article.
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A poignant description of British and German soldiers sharing meager rations across No Man's Land during the famous 1914
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Christmas Day Truce of the First World War is contained in a newly revealed collection of letters.
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Frederick James Davies, a private in the 2nd Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers, wrote home about giving cigs, jam, and corned beef to the frontline enemy during the celebrated impromptu ceasefire, which saw some soldiers play football.
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Davies, from Lampeter, Wales, told his mother how both Germans and British soldiers climbed out of their trenches in Northern France to exchange gifts and messages of goodwill.
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He had a good chat with the Germans on Christmas Day, he wrote, in letters recently donated to the Imperial War Museum.
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They were only 50 yards from us in the trenches. They came out and we went to meet them. We shook hands with them, he wrote.
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They also gave us cigars, but they didn't have much food. I think they're hard up for it.
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They were fed up with the war. He described coming out of the trenches, since Sunday, for a few days rest, it's nice to have a night's sleep from the wet, but we still sleep in our clothes, but I'm happy through it all.
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It's no use being otherwise, he added. Don't you worry about me. You buck up till I come home before signing off.
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From your loving son, Fred. So yeah, this is some letters from a soldier who was actually there at the
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Christmas truce. That's a famous thing. And like I said, sometimes it seems that Christmas has a way of,
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I don't know, when you say soften people's hearts, I don't know if that's, maybe that is the right word for it, but I think it's a time when perhaps people maybe look a little bit more kindly on others than at other times of year.
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And I don't think that that's a bad thing at all. So that's another thing that I do love about Christmas.
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So that was another significant event. The Washington Crossing in Delaware. You had the famous 1914
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Christmas truce between the Germans.
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It was mostly the British troops. I was reading and I found an article. I was going to see if I can find it here.
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I thought that I saved it. They said that in the areas where it was the
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French and the Germans going on opposite sides, that there really wasn't a lot of, that that really didn't take place, but it was in the areas where the
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Germans and the British, and in particular Saxon regiments, they said, who were,
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I guess, kind of drove some of that. And I guess a lot of them spoke English because they'd worked in Great Britain before the war.
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And so that helped the soldiers communicate, even though a lot of the British didn't speak German. I guess a good number of the
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German soldiers spoke English, so they were able to talk. And like I say, they exchanged gifts, it sounds like, and played some football, or I guess as Americans might say, soccer.
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But yeah, that was a kind of an amazing event. And when
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I was reading that Encyclopedia Britannica article, which I don't have here, unfortunately, in front of me, I know that they were talking, but even a lot of the soldiers were amazed at this because they didn't expect to see that happen.
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Well, that was about all I wanted to cover here in terms of some things I love about Christmas.
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I guess I could go on and on about that, but I think that that's sufficient. What I thought I'd do here is maybe go ahead and close just by, well, we'll do like what
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Linus did in the Charlie Brown Christmas special, read from the Gospel of Luke. And I'm going to be reading from the
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King James Bible. This is Luke chapter two. I'm not sure how far I'm going to go with this, but let's go ahead and read from this.
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I think that'll be a good way to close. And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
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And this taxing was first made when Serenius was governor of Syria, and all went to be taxed, every one to his own city.
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And Joseph also went up from Galilee out of the city of Nazareth, unto Judea, unto the city of David, which is called
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Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child.
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And so it was that while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.
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And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the
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Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them,
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Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a
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Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you. You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
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And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.
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And it came to pass that as the angels were gone away into heaven, the shepherds said to one another,
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Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.
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And they came with haste, and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.
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And all they that heard it wondered at those things which are told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
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And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them."
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That's the reading of God's word. So that is, you know, as Linus said in the
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Charlie Brown Christmas special, that really is what Christmas is all about, this amazing, miraculous birth of our
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Lord and of our Savior. And, you know, I think that, you know, it's so much like Christ.
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You think about, you know, this particular time of year, and as I said, you know, some of the weather, at least if you are where I am now,
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I have a friend of mine who lives in Australia, and he's a good brother in Christ.
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And in Australia, of course, they're just kicking off summer, it's just the start of summer down there. Not that they really have serious winter down there, not even like we do have here in Cincinnati.
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But, you know, this time of year, it's dark, it's kind of dreary out, and yet into this season that's so dark, you have the light of Christ come, you have the light of Christmas and the time that we celebrate
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His birth. And, you know, even as Christ came into the world that night in Bethlehem so very long ago, even so,
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I think, you know, in our own day, you know, the light of Christ shines forth in Christmas. You know, when we celebrate
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Him, when we praise His name, we thank God for sending the gift of His Son, Emmanuel, God with us.
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And that's a worthy thing to celebrate and to praise and to remember.
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So that's a thought that I wanted to leave you with here. And that's about all I have here for this evening. I want to say thanks so much for listening.
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I really do appreciate that. I wish you and your family a very merry and blessed