My Thoughts on Halloween

Halloween is a mostly secular holiday that has rather obscure origins. It is a strange amalgam of the pagan Celtic day Samhain and the Christian All Saint’s Day. As it exists today it is neither particularly pagan and certainly not Christian. It is a largely secular celebration that gives retail outlets another opportunity to make money. That is my opinion.

As a child growing up, Halloween meant dressing up in a mask or a costume and going from house to house in the neighborhood collecting candy. We only went to houses where we knew the people. We were encouraged to ALWAYS WITHOUT FAIL remember to say “Thank you.”

If you went trick or treating several years in a row you learned that some people always gave out the same treats, year after year. One house always had popcorn in a small brown paper bag with the top neatly folded and stapled twice to keep the popcorn from spilling out. The bottom of the bag alway had that dark spot where the oil had dripped down.

Another house we always stopped at always had Three Musketeers bars. I have always loved those and that house was a must do. Sometimes we’d get a candied apple and we always ended up with plenty of tootsie rolls and random hard candy.

It was a lot of fun and it was innocent. We’d even have a Halloween party at our school where invariably some Mom would send cupcakes for everybody. Who wouldn’t dig that?

As we got older somebody decided to spoil the fun. Rumors began to circulate that malevolent individuals were inserting razor blades into apples and injecting “dope” into the candy. Parents began to be more cautious. Hospitals began offering to X-Ray candy to make sure it was all free from “foreign objects.” (I always thought if you were the type who would go so far as to have candy x-rayed, why didn’t you just go to the store and buy some that you could be reasonably assured had not been tampered with.)

Halloween began to have a bad name. With the rise of modern-day evangelicalism, many began to reject Halloween and the celebration of as being un-Christian. Many churches began offering a Halloween alternative, a Harvest or Fall Festival. Stores even got in on the act. Entire shopping centers began to allow children to trick or treat there.

Because Halloween has some obscure pagan origins, and because the influence of Hollywood monster movies has permeated the secular celebration of it, Halloween has become viewed as being evil by many evangelical Christians.

For my part, I think that is a bit of an overreaction. But again that’s just my opinion. One of the dearest friends of our family does not celebrate Halloween as a matter of conviction. I have no problem with that and whole-heartedly support their decision.

I hesitate to bring this up, but it’s a lot like the Harry Potter debate. Quite a few intelligent, thinking, respectable people I know want nothing to do with Harry Potter due to the biblical prohibition of dabbling with sorcery. That’s fine with me and I don’t say they are wrong.  I however, believe that Harry Potter is merely a fictional universe created by a clever writer for the purposes of entertainment, not an apparatus to covertly guide the readers down a dark and sinister trail that must end with a wholesale embrace of the occult. (That’s what Freemasonry is for, not Harry Potter or Halloween).

See over the years I’ve heard people make the statement, “It’s not like it used to be.” Oh really!?! I’ve taken my kids trick or treating a few times and it’s exactly like it used to be. We only take our children to the houses of people we know (or their grandparents know). We encourage them to say thank you and we all have a good time doing it.

October 31 was also the Day that the Protestant Reformation officially began in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to the door of the All Saint’s Church. If you are a card-carrying Protestant as I am, then I suggest you combine the celebration of the Reformation with Halloween. Print out a copy of the 95 theses and under the cover of darkness (tape, not nail) them to the door of your local Catholic Church. You can commit a harmless prank and help correct wrong doctrine all at the same time.

School Days of Old – Episode 3

I have to wait until this weekend to take the example pictures for the next installment of How to Take Better Pictures so today I’m going to revisit School Days of Old again.

This time I was in the 7th grade at West Cleveland. Yes this was the same year as the infamous Super Bowl incident described in School Days of Old Episode 1. Now every now and again the school lined up a speaker for a school wide assembly. They were always extremely boring and would usually put even the teachers to sleep. (Sometimes we had animal shows which were good. They would show off a bunch of snakes, apes, and monkeys. Not a bad way to get out of having class.)

Back to the topic at hand. Let me put it this way, if you were given a choice between staying in class and diagramming sentences or going to hear the assembly speaker, the sentences would win out. It wouldn’t even be close.

One wonderful Friday afternoon, the school trotted out a particularly dull and uninteresting fellow. The long years since this happened have caused my memory to fail. I can’t remember what he was speaking about. Actually the very next day I doubt I remembered what he was speaking about. It was just that bad.

Seventh and eighth graders are 13, 14, or 15. Being a rural county there were also a hand full of eighth graders with full beards. I kind of suspected they were older than the rest of us. Probably a by-product of non-selective genetics. In a rural county there are plenty of people who seem in appearance and deed to be the off-spring of close kinfolk.

Once again, back to our story. At that age attention spans are not what they should be. Add to that a boring speaker and you have all the ingredients present for an afternoon of misbehaviour. Before long there were scattered whispers, students doing everything they could to stay amused. More time passed and soon half of the student population was openly ignoring the speaker by talking to friends in low whispers.

My intent here is not to paint the principal (not Mr. Padgett who was a character in Episode 2) in a sympathetic fashion since he is the villain of the story. But I do have to say I’m sure he was mightily embarrassed that his students were so openly ignoring his speaker to the point of wanton rudeness. And he had all weekend to stew about it.

Sometime the following Monday morning, the principal came on the intercom and expressed just how disappointed he was in his students for all the talking that went on in the assembly. In fact, his teachers had a rather lengthy list of names that they had turned over to him of students who were observed talking or misbehaving in some fashion. Now he was offering a choice. If you thought your name was on the list you could voluntarily come up to the office and receive your just reward (meaning a paddling). If you did not come to the office and your name was on the list, it would be a week’s suspension. Back then there was no in school detention. You had to stay home for a week.

I knowed (that’s Southern for “I knew”) that I was guilty. Less than thrilled to face the music, I chose the easier of the two paths. I went forward voluntarily as a guilty party. If I didn’t and received the suspension, when my parents learned of it, it would be “Katy Bar the Door”, whatever that means.

Students began streaming toward the office at the end of announcement. There was a line from the cafeteria to the office of students who were admitting guilt and waiting to receive their paddling. Hundreds of students. Maybe half the school. Maybe more.

After a wait of what seemed like an hour I made it into the principal’s office. To my surprise I did not see a list. There was no list. We had been had.

I am not excusing our behaviour as students. It was rude, it was disrespectful, and it was just plain wrong. But it was more wrong of the principal to fabricate his deceitful story. Seventh and eighth graders are not usually very mature. Our principal was a mature well-seasoned man who should have taken the moral high road. At the very least he should have actually had teachers take names or simply interrupt the assembly and call us down.

So what did we learn from this? Well the next assembly went much better. But we learned that ends can be achieved by deceit and dishonesty.

Finally even though I made the principal the villain of the story, aside from that he was a pretty good fellow. While this was a moral failure on his part, the truth is I have failed miserably in my life many times when given the opportunity to take the moral high ground. But you’ll never hear about those times here. Why? Cause it’s my blog!!

How to Take Better Pictures – Part 1

From time to time I have people ask for advice concerning taking pictures. I realized that even though a lot of the basics seem simple to me, that there is a whole world of folks out there who are just mystified by the whole concept of cameras and good photography. If you are one of those people then this post will be for you. If you are a Camel (and if you’re not sure if you are or not then you aren’t) move along; I have nothing to teach you.

The first and most obvious question I get is what camera is good. My answer is the one you have. You just have to realize that it has limitations. It will serve you well and give you excellent shots if you just understand that there are just certain things it cannot and should not be expected to do.

Now unless you are old school and still use a film camera, you probably own a pocket-size digital point and shoot that has a brand like Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Sony, Fuji, Casio, etc. All of these are well made and very capable little machines. But none of them will produce a great image straight out of camera (SOOC). My big professional DSLR will not produce it’s best image SOOC either. For that it needs to have a little basic photo editing done to it.

Now this sounds scary to a lot of people. For instance I use Adobe Photoshop CS4, Adobe Lightroom 2.5, Photomatix, and several other very nifty Photoshop plugins. Photoshop is the industry standard for image editing. It also has a learning curve so steep that it might be easier for a ‘Bama fan to quit being obnoxious than for the average person to master Photoshop.  I promise you I haven’t even come close to mastering it, but after several years of using it, I can do a lot of things.

Fortunately you don’t need Photoshop unless you are going for advanced photo editing. My suggestion is to use Google’s free and excellent software called Picasa. It is easy to use and even the most basic tools can make a tremendous difference in your images. Did I mention that it is free?

I’m gonna show you just how easy using Picasa really is. Here is an image I took about a year ago that is SOOC. Nothing has been done to it at all.

Notice that it looks underexposed. Now if you’re like me you see hundreds of these sorts of pictures everyday on Facebook. They’re dark, they’re in a nutshell just awful. But notice what happens to this image when I use the one click Auto-Contrast button in Picasa’ “Basic Fix” tab.

See how my beautiful wife just pops out of the image while the background stays dark? All that from one click in Picasa. So easy that even a ‘Bama fan should be able to do it with no problem.

One other thing I like to do is crop my pictures. You can do that in Picasa very easily too. I cropped it to an 8 x 10 format and included everything in the picture I thought was important. I didn’t feel like I needed everything and cropping in tighter would only improve this image. Take a look:

Some of the other thingsPicasa will do with one click is convert your images to B/W or sepia, add glow, sharpen, and saturation to your images. I’d play with some of this stuff because it’s a lot of fun, but one word of warning. An occasional picture which screams I’ve been manipulated is okay, but your goal is to make your images as realistic looking as possible so it’s best to avoid doing every image that way.

And I’ll end this on a note of caution. If you plan on sending off your digital image files to be printed, don’t downsize them. Leave them at full resolution. When you downsize them, the image drops out pixels and reduces your resolution. It’s okay to do for Facebook but for printing, be sure you don’t.

Next time I will discuss which lighting situations to avoid and which lighting situations to seek out.

My Daughter and the Fire Ants

Anyone who lives in the South (or most parts of it anyway) knows about fire ants. They are extremely pesky ants that often build large colonies where there are likely to be thousands of the little devils living at any particular time. If they bite you it feels like your flesh is on fire. Hence they are called fire ants. (That last bit of information was to benefit you that are not privileged to live in the South. We have a word for you, but I’m gonna be polite and not use it.)

Five or six years ago my daughter stood in a fire ant mound, unbeknownst to her. Within seconds, she had about a dozen bites. Fortunately she didn’t prove to be allergic to them so all was okay other than the screaming because she was in pain.

I used that opportunity to teach her about fire ants. I found a mound and got a long stick and prodded at the mound. Within seconds, hundreds of fire ants came rushing out. “See how quick they can come out,” I told her.

Now I am a little warped. Big surprise there huh? For some reason I got some sort of twisted pleasure from stirring up the fire ant colony. I think my daughter did too. So from time to time we would find a mound and get a long stick just to stir them up. Sometimes I would even kick at the mound to make it worse. Once the ants started swarming out of the mound we would retreat to a safe distance. We never got bit. Not even once. I even let my daughter stir them up sometimes under my supervision of course.

Several years ago Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore installed a monument to the Ten Commandments, inside the court building. Knowing a huge legal showdown was coming and that the monument would soon be forcibly removed, I took my daughter to see it. She took one look at it then asked me if we could go stir up some fire ants. That might be more fun. I can’t say I disagreed.

Flash forward to the present. We got word that my daughter had been misbehaving some in her third grade class. Most of it was for talking and passing notes, but one of the issues was the teacher caught her not once but twice jumping up and down on a fire ant mound. The teacher described her as jumping as high as she could, even pulling her legs up close to her body, then extending them as she was on the way down in order to exert maximum force against the fire ants.

I have to say. I am not happy she was doing that. In fact in many ways I am disappointed in her because she does know how dangerous they are and she also knows a dear sweet classmate of hers is highly allergic. But on the other hand the mental picture of her jumping up and down almost made me burst out laughing. Fortunately I didn’t because the teacher (who is a treasure of a lady that we deeply admire and respect) was very concerned and grieved over that incident.

I don’t think there is really a moral to this story. I blame myself to a certain extent. But I also have taught her that we don’t play the victim card. We are responsible for our own actions. I guess if I have a motive for writing this post it is an attempt to deal with my own conflicted feelings. I’m horrified and amused by it all at the same time. I guess that’s just one of those paradoxes of parenthood.

School Days of Old – Episode 2

I still don’t have much going on fit to blog about except I just got through reading Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. It was a waste of time. So I’m revisit my days back in school and tell about something that happened back in the day. Since this happened in early 1972, my memory is a little fuzzy on the details. Fear not though. I’m not going to let the facts stand in the way of a good story. See that’s part of the art of Southern story telling. You have to embellish a little.

As I mentioned it was early in 1972. I was in the sixth grade at the time and had the grand idea that I would start a special civic organization devoted to hating Donny Osmond. Why? I couldn’t stand him. That was reason enough. Thus the short lived Donny Osmond Haters Club was born.

Back in those days Donny was a polarizing figure. You either loved him or you hated him. There was no middle ground to stand on. A goodly number of girls counted themselves as Donny’s loyal fans. A goodly number, but not all. Quite a few girls found him to be repulsive. Thus it was easy enough to start the club and populate the membership rolls with avid Donny Osmond haters.

One classmate was a sympathizer but he found the concept of belonging to any sort of organization that existed to visit hate on another human being distasteful. Therefore he started his own version known as the Donny Osmond Dislikers Club. Same idea, just watered down and more goody-two-shoes. Needless to say his version failed to attract the widespread membership that my version did. Just something about if you are going to be a part of an organization dedicated to active loathing someone you don’t want to be in the watered down version.

Within days half of Lattimore Elementary School’s student population was a member. We even had officers. All went well and we were blissfully hating on Donny Osmond until some valuable club material fell into the hands of Mr. C.C. Padgett, our esteemed principal. Along with the membership list there also fell into his hands a sheet filled with anti-Donny Osmond propaganda. I’m sure most of it was very puerile. In fact my memory can only recall one of the points. It was: “Donny Osmond can’t even pee in a straight line.”

Now Mr. Padgett came into the lunch room and made a federal case out of it. He was very concerned about the list and some of the things that had been written against Donny Osmond. Mr. Padgett was not a fan, I’m sure. Growing up he seemed stern and harsh, but as I have aged I have come to the realization that he was merely an old school disciplinarian. He wanted order and he wanted what was best for the students. He was also a wonderful Christian man.

My name was at the top of the list owing to the fact that I had started the club. Later that day I found myself in Mr. Padgett’s office explaining myself. Of course I did not have a good explanation. I received a paddling and looking back it could have been worse, but my real punishment was to come later and linger for months.

Remember I said Mr. Padgett was a fine Christian man. Well he sang in our church choir as did my Dad. Both being tenors they normally sat beside one another in choir practice. Of course my parents were like many others during that time. The teacher and school authorities had their full support. Getting in trouble at school meant getting in trouble at home. I was never the type to confess my sins and get double.

Wednesday night choir practice rolled around and I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that Mr. Padgett would tell my Dad all the sordid details of the Donny Osmond Haters Club. Then Sunday morning church rolled around and I got that same sick feeling. This went on for months each time Wednesday night or Sunday morning rolled around. I just knew Mr. Padgett would spill the beans. How could he not?

But he never did. Bless his heart. I have always had respect for him for not getting me in more trouble. He died around 1988 or so and I finally was sure my secret had died with him. Of course I was in my 20s at the time he passed away and I was certain the statute of limitations had expired for that particular infraction. When I finally confessed to my parents after all those years, they merely laughed and said I had more than likely punished myself worse than they could have.

How do I feel about Donny Osmond now? Well my opinion has changed. I won’t say I am a fan and I certainly don’t agree with the false religion he embraces, but beyond that I admire the fact that he has been married to his wife for thirty years and has an unblemished reputation. That’s worthy of my respect!!!

I can think of several more school day misadventures so look for more episodes coming soon. Excelsior!!! as Stan Lee says.

School Days of Old

I haven’t been as active in this blog as I would like to be. I haven’t had a lot to say lately. I still basically have no comments on anything current so we will go back to the years old yesterday when I was in school.

The year was 1972. Richard Milhous Nixon was the President and the Miami Dolphins ruled Brittania on the football field. If you are old enough, you might recall that this was the season they went 17-0, the only undefeated team in the modern history of the National Football League. Featuring quarterback Bob Griese (although veteran Earl Morrall played at QB the lion’s share of the season due to Griese being injured), the offensive attack was rounded out by the big bruising running back Larry Csonka and the speedy Eugene “Mercury” Morris. Paul Warfield was a sure reception at wide receiver and the kicking game was dominated by a curious little former soccer player from Cyprus named Garo Yepremian.  The defense was known as the “No-Name Defense”, Nick Buoniconti being the most well known name among them.

Now what makes this a compelling story is that I was in seventh grade at the time and I had a social studies teacher who was a HUGE Washington Redskins fan.  Every Monday he would recount what his Redskins had done to their opponent and then talked about what they would do to those Miami Dolphins should they happen to meet in the Super Bowl. See the Dolphins couldn’t be that good. They played in the AFC while his Redskins were in the NFC.

Now back in those days it was the golden age of corporal punishment in the schools. It happened daily and with regularity. Every teacher had their own paddle and some of them even had theirs customized. There wasn’t any such thing as parents suing the school or the teacher over a paddling. Nine times out of ten, if the parents found out their kid had received a paddling in school, they were assured of receiving a second one at home. Most kids were not dumb enough to tell on themself. I sure wasn’t.

Getting back to the story at hand, this social studies teacher was one of the more frequent paddlers. It wasn’t uncommon for him to paddle four or five students, one right after another. And he swung his paddle with authority. If you got one from him in second period, maybe by lunch, if you were lucky, the sting would have finally wore off. When he wanted silence he would simply say “One will get you three”, meaning one word will get you three licks.

Now it’s pretty obvious which team won that football game. The Dolphins completed their undefeated season by winning 14-7 in Super Bowl VII. Not a complete and total obliteration of the Redskins, but it should be noted that the Redskins sole score came as a result of kicker Garo Yepremian attempting to throw a pass after a botched field goal attempt. This came late in the 4th quarter.

The very next day there was a sign on the door to the social studies classroom. It read: “Don’t say anything about the football game. One will get you three.”

Now if I had it to do over again I would have kept my mouth shut. Not because I got punished unjustly, but because he was just a big fat idiot who wasn’t worth it. He dished it out, but then he wasn’t willing to eat a little humble pie and congratulate the other side. I call that being a sore loser. I call that a few more things but I won’t say what I am thinking.

“How ’bout them Redskins,” I blurted out. “They just stomped them Dolphins didn’t they,” I added.  True to his threat I was soon bent over receiving his wrath as he swung his paddle three times.

Now in my adult life I realize I was in the wrong disobeying an authority figure, but I was also in the right exposing his pettiness and hypocrisy. He was in the wrong for being so petty. He was the adult and it should have been his job to act like one. At the time of the incident I swore that if I ever saw him in my adult life I would take a measure of revenge. When I did see him at a football game many years later, I recalled my vow to myself, but having matured by that point, I simply looked at him as being pathetic and not worth my attention.

Is there a moral to this story? Not really. It’s just something that happened to me many years ago. For some reason I have always remembered it. Many years have passed since I held any malice toward this teacher. I wish him well. I wish him happiness. And I wish for all his teams to lose. <ha ha>

What God has taught me lately through prayer

I have had several epiphanies lately regarding my prayers. I have prayed that God would grant me unshakable faith and eliminate all vestiges of unbelief. Now I don’t want to sound like some TV preacher lunatic, but I felt like the answer to that prayer was God telling me that if I wanted that sort of faith then I needed to pray more and more diligently and immerse myself deeper in the Word. Again something so obvious that I don’t know why I didn’t see it. 

I have found myself praying recently for my children’s salvation. After having pondering the meaning of success I came to the realization that I would rather have my children work the night shift at Waffle House and live in a trailer and be willing vessels in service to God than to be selfish and wealthy individuals, admired by the world but scorned by God. I find that I just can’t tolerate the thoughts of my children ever entering into a Christless eternity and that drives me deeper and deeper into prayer. I cry out to Him: “Only you can draw them to Yourself. Use me, a marred and sinful man, not worthy to even call upon your Holy and Almighty Name, except for the cross of Christ. Compel me to teach them diligently, the things which have been taught to me, so that they might know, and in knowing believe, and in belief find salvation and adoption as your children.”

 I ask myself how can we say we love our neighbor if we are not willing to share the good news with them. How can we fail so many times so witness for Him. We fear man and what man will think of us, but we have no fear of a Holy and Righteous God who has the power to condemn us unto eternal perdition. Let us rightly fear the LORD our God. Man has only the power to kill our bodies, but a just and vengeful God (and yes I believe that He is both) has the power to consign the soul to the everlasting fires He has prepared for the devil and his angels. Why do I fear man? I must pray more and read and study the WORD more to overcome the fear of someone who has no real power over me. Jesus stands with me and if Christ is with you who can be against you. All praise and honor and glory be His, forever and ever.