Why Christ and Santa Both Fit in Christmas

Last week I knocked on my dad's door and walked in as we do almost every Sunday. This time, though, I heard Parker from inside say in his most excited voice, "It's Santa!!!" Unfortunately, it wasn't Santa. But I wondered, with children's focus on Santa at this time of year, how can we reconcile Santa and all his commercialism with the real reason for Christmas, the birth of the Savior.

I know, I know, Christmas is all about giving gifts, just as those who visited the manger bore gifts for the Christ Child.

I'm thinking, though, that Christmas is about children. Although we prepare gifts for our friends, family, and spouses, it's finding the perfect gift for a child that brings us the most joy. It's seeing the excited expressions on the faces of children when they visit Santa that we hope for. It's taking in the big smiles on the faces of children as they gather around the tree on Christmas morning to discover the gifts they have been given that makes getting up at 4 a.m. on Black Friday and all the other pre-Christmas shopping worthwhile.

There is something magical about children themselves that brings us a particular joy when we can make them happy. What is it that's particular about children?

There's a Christmas carol called "Mary Did You Know" that extols, "Mary did you know...that your baby boy...is Lord of all creation?" There's a line that says, "When you kiss your little baby, you kiss the face of God."

I think this applies to all children. Of course, Jesus is the Christ, the God of this world, and that's what this carol is illustrating, but I believe that when children are born they have just left the presence of God and bring His special spirit. I couldn't help feeling this last Sunday when I saw KC Fisher holding his baby, and I just had to touch the baby's forehead. Someone asked if I did that for good luck. I said, "No, just hoping for some goodness to rub off." I can't help looking at a baby and wondering if he or she remembers heaven. Sometimes it seems babies do.

Jesus said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for such is the kingdom of God."

"And he commanded them that their little children should be brought...and Jesus stood in the midst...(and) he commanded the multitude that they should kneel down upon the ground...and he himself knelt upon the earth; and behold he prayed unto the Father..."

Children are certainly held in high esteem by Jesus Christ and our Father in Heaven. Christmas is about celebrating the birth of Christ. It's also about turning our focus to children, and returning some of the joy to them that they give to us as a gift every day of the year.

Day-After-Black-Friday Getaway

The is one of two connected blog posts. The first post actually follows this one, if you're a chronological kind of person.

Randy and I spent Black Friday exploring coal-mining ghost towns near Helper, Utah, on Friday. On Saturday we headed up Nine Mile Canyon, which is 45 miles long, beginning at Wellington, Utah. I've been here once before, and you can see my blog from that trip here.
Nine Mile Canyon has a lot of interesting rock formations, old cabins and ranches, and other scenery, as well as more petroglyphs than anywhere else in North America. There are about 1,000 sites with more than 10,000 individual depictions. The petroglyphs were left primarily by the Fremont Indians about 1,000 years ago. Archeologists also think Ute Indians left their art on the walls as late as the 1800s.

This is Hog's Head Rock or Balanced Rock. Take your pick. I couldn't get it to tip over.

I'm not doing these pictures in order, so don't try to follow them on the actual road. This is the remains of a Fremont village, which is up a pretty steep but short hike from the road near the end of Nine Mile Canyon.

There was also supposed to be a picture of a buffalo and a big hunt somewhere around here. We hiked all over this mountain looking for them.

This is the valley looking southwest (I think) from the Fremont village.

This grain mill is under a protected rock overhang near the Fremont village remains. These indentations look like footprints, but if they were footprints, someone would have had to dance in place many, many hours with stone shoes to grind these pockets into this rock.

We finally found The Great Hunt mural farther down the road. This picture is famous. Archeologists think this depicts a mountain goat hunt in November or December, the only time of year the male, female, and young goats would all be in one place at the same time. There are three hunters with bows and arrows.

Here's one of the great archeologists at The Great Hunt mural, also called the Cottonwood Panel.

This is the big buffalo we were looking for. It turned out to be on the other side of the road between the Fremont village and The Great Hunt mural.

These rows of dots are a repeating pattern throughout the canyon. Since we didn't have anyone to explain what each of these petroglyphs means, I will make up my own meanings and explain them to you. These dots are rows of corn ready for harvest as seen from an airplane or the space shuttle.

This is Pancho Villa. He wasn't around 1,000 years ago, I don't think, but all these pictures aren't that old. Some are from the 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s.

These mountain goats and the coil are Fremont etchings. I'm guessing William Carroll of Vernal left his mark more recently, say 1888.

This is the turkey that the U.S. president pardoned. He showed his thanks by eating two horses, a hunter with funny hair, and a gazelle. The dove on the left is a recent addition.

This is a mountain goat with a very big mouth. He's ready to eat the turkey that ate the two horses, the hunter with the funny hair, and the gazelle. Or he just got his nosed pierced.

Randy bought this 2002 Olympic torch on eBay for $1,200 recently. Did you say, "Why?" I don't know. But we found a 1,000-year-old Fremont petroglyph that is very close in design. Randy may look a bit frightened, but consider he's pretty high up a rock wall, standing on a narrow ledge. The artist fell off the ledge just before he etched the bottom two Olympic rings.

The scorpion on the left threw a lasso around a reindeer on Christmas eve and ruined the holiday for the Fremonts that year.

This is a rattle snake coiled and ready to strike.

This famous salamander with fireworks shooting out of his brains was great entertainment during the summer festival.

It wasn't uncommon for Martians to visit the Fremonts to swap stories about how experiments on their visitors turned out.

Paul McCartney is actually much older than previously believed. This is a depiction of the guitar he used when he entertained the Fremonts in 1064.

The dirt road up Nine Mile Canyon is very well maintained, because there is a lot of natural gas drilling in these mountains, and this road services them along with this natural gas compression plant.

Black Friday Getaway

I can't think of a better way to spend the day after Thanksgiving than getting away from all the stores and the Black Friday shoppers. So Randy and I headed to Carbon County to see what kind of ghost towns we could find.

Helper is not a ghost town. It's just the first stop on the way to Spring Canyon. Helper was once a railroad town, serving all the coal mines in the area. Today, it's one of the surviving coal-mining towns with an old-fashioned downtown.

This miner statue is actually in the downtown district. And he's Paul Bunyon tall.

Spring Canyon, just west of Helper, has the largest concentration of ghost towns in Utah, all former coal-company towns. We tried to keep track of which town was which, but our map didn't seem to match marker posts on the road, so I'll just call the whole place Spring Canyon, the name of what I think was the largest town. This is the Mutual Store (Mutual is one of the towns) in the upper part of the canyon.

Inside the store.

An outside corner of the Mutual Store.

The last of the homes was abandoned in the 1960s.

These homes or dormitories near the bottom of the canyon were built of brick and stucco.

The Spring Canyon bathhouse, where the miners changed their clothes.

The Mutual Store.

Notice the coal in the mortar of some buildings.

The bathhouse.
This mural on an inside wall looks like Mt. Fuji or some other volcanic mountain.

It doesn't take long for the sagebrush to take over.

Possibly a living room.

McDonald's.

A patch of area near the bathhouse had been recently burned.

This truck hasn't run in many years, I'm sure.

That was Friday.

Friday night we stayed at the National 9 in Wellington. Two funny things happened. First, I called Google 411 to get the number for the motel to check on rates. I called about four times, each time enunciating "Utah" more clearly and slowly than the previously time, but the pleasant recorded lady kept saying, "Ok, Wellington, New Zealand."

The other incident wasn't so funny. Actually, it was, well, read on. We drove through Price looking for a place to eat that wasn't a chain and found the Silver Steakhouse. So we ate there. Prime rib was the $15 special and the cheapest meal on the menu, so I had that. It was just okay. Back in the motel room we decided we wanted a piece of pie. We walked to the motel's cafe, but it had closed 15 minutes earlier at 8 p.m., so we walked to the gas station across the street to get a Hostess fruit pie. That seemed depressing, so we decided to go to Wellington's only other restaurant, the Cowboy Steakhouse. It's a large uninviting brick building with no windows and looks like a large bar or jailhouse. But we just wanted pie, so we figured we couldn't go too wrong. It had to be better than a Hostess fruit pie.

Inside was a bar but also a good-size restaurant with several tables and a nice fire in the fireplace. We asked for pie. Sorry. No pie. Just banana foster (with rum sauce). So they hadn't made their full transition from a bar to a restaurant. The foster came with a scoop of ice cream, and we could get just the ice cream, so we opted for that. We were the only customers.

A woman sitting at the bar came and sat by us and started talking. I think she was the owner's wife, and I think she'd been testing the bar's fare nightly for the past 50 years. At least she had on this night. She asked where we ate dinner, and she scoffed and chastised us when we told her. "Why would you eat there? You shoulda come here." Skilled with the use of many colorful words, she visited with us the whole time, while we ate our $4 scoop of vanilla ice cream with Hershey's chocolate sauce. She told us how people from Wellington hate people from Salt Lake, and hate people who come down here and take pictures and then pass laws made for Salt Lake but that Wellington gets stuck with. She also told us that if we wanted to see anything in Nine Mile Canyon we needed an old timer to show us around. Then she told us we had to come back for breakfast and we had to order a breakfast burrito.

Finally, we brain-freezed our ice cream down, and she went back to the bar and told the other workers that we were coming back the next morning for a breakfast burrito, as if we would ever cross that threshold again. On the way out I heard the server say, "It's just nice to have a couple of people in here." What would have been nice is a Hostess cherry pie at the Sinclair station.

My Favorite Holiday, My Favorite Meal

Thanksgiving 2009.

The water's ready

And the black (finger) olives.

The green olives.

Some Jello salad with pecans.

Can't have Thanksgiving without the cranberry jelly.

My favorite, pearl onions.

My other favorite, in-turkey stuffing.

Enough mashed potatoes to make three Close Encounters of the Third Kind sequels.

And Janet's beautiful turkey. Sara's green beans, Heather's sweet potatoes, Lion House rolls, all Janet's pies (pumpkin, mince meat, banana cream, lemon meringue) didn't make the pictures. I'm forgetting other food and the people who prepared it. Sorry. I enjoyed it all.

The kitchen help.

Thanksgiving is TODAY? I thought it was tomorrow. (Actually, Parker had the croup and couldn't come.

Guest Number One.

Guest Number Two.

Guest Number Three.

Guest Number Four. There were other guests, but these were the cutest.

And we're ready to eat.

This was a very nice Thanksgiving. I'm most thankful for this family (including the ones who couldn't join us).