For those of you who are Carrie Vaughn fans, you should know that when I went to my local Borders this evening I found about 12 copies of KITTY AND THE SILVER BULLET on the shelf.  Needless to say, I bought one of them.  So keep an eye out – they may have arrived near you, too.    

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an advance-shelved copy of Carol Berg’s BREATH AND BONE, which I’ve been waiting for since May, even though the store inventory said they had one on hand this morning. I hope somebody bought it, because if they lost it I’m going to be quite sad. Also saw the mass market binding of FLESH AND SPIRIT, which looks very slick. I’ll try again in a week or so for BREATH AND BONE.

We got one of our Christmas cards returned with a wrong address. :( I’ll have to double-check that and try to send it again. Oops.

I got Aubrey’s Christmas card in the mail today – very funny. Matt and I both laughed. Good times.

It’s reading time!

Merry Christmas – I know I didn’t get the greetings out for the first day of Christmas, but the second’s not bad, all things considered.    

We had a lovely day yesterday, and I hope you did too, whether or not you celebrated it as a holy day. Though really, most Christians celebrate the religious aspect of Christmas on the 24th. Isn’t that odd? Especially as there’s no biblical basis for the idea that Jesus was born at night. But we like to think of it that way, because of all the carols.

Just like we like to think of the 12 days of Christmas as the ones leading up to the Big Day, when in fact, religiously, the 12 days of Christmas are the 12 days between December 25th and January 6th, commonly known as Epiphany in the liturgical church. But I suppose there aren’t many of those around any more, either.

Epiphany is the representative day when the wise men presented Jesus with their three gifts (again, no indication of how many wise men there were, but we like to think it’s three because there were three gifts), which represent his three roles: gold was a gift for a king; frankincense was used by priests in their religious offerings; and myrrh was more commonly a funeral gift, used for embalming – an indication of his role as sacrifice for the sins of humanity. A precursor of his death. Great gift for a child, eh?

The 12 days of Christmas lead up to the gift-giving, which reveal and represent Christ’s threefold purpose.

Funny how we, as a society, forget things like that, isn’t it? It’s such a fun song, though.