Good Grief!

Firstly, to all who read via some sort of feed: you might have received a notification for a post that does not yet exist. I titled  a post, meant to click "Save Now" and clicked "Publish Post" instead. Well, now you know an idea forming in my head! Stay tuned; actual post to come later.

Happy third week of Advent! Here's Linus explaining what Christmas is all about to Charlie Brown:

 


and where I learned all my super cool dance moves:




Did you know Starbucks is selling the Peanuts' Christmas songs cd? I don't know how I feel about that, but I might buy it anyways!

Happy feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe!

Today is one of the most culturally recognizable images of Our Lady. She appeared to a peasant, St. Juan Diego (whose feast day was this past Thursday, the day she appeared to him - December 9, 1531). When Juan Diegeo told the Bishop, the Bishop asked for a sign. Our Lady gave him roses, but when Juan Diego opened up his cloak to reveal the roses, this image was there instead. The Bishop had prayed for help converting the Aztecs, and this miraculous image and the story of Our Lady helped convert millions of Aztecs from their pagan religion to Christianity.

And from OLG's Wikipedia entry:

"The iconography of the Virgin is impeccably Catholic: Miguel Sanchez, the author of the 1648 tract Imagen de la Virgen María, described her as the Woman of the Apocalypse from the New Testament's Revelation 12:1, "clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars," and she is also described as a representation of the Immaculate Conception. Yet despite this orthodoxy the image also had a hidden layer of coded messages for the indigenous people of Mexico which goes a considerable way towards explaining her popularity. Her blue-green mantle was the color reserved for the divine couple Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl; her belt is interpreted as a sign of pregnancy; and a cross-shaped image symbolizing the cosmos and called nahui-ollin is inscribed beneath the image's sash. She was called "mother of maguey," the source of the sacred beverage pulque, "the milk of the Virgin", and the rays of light surrounding her doubled as maguey spines."

Pax tecum!