Quick Takes (10)

After being absent from the quick takes scene for a couple weeks, I figured it was high time to re-join Jen and crew for a few updates!

1. Yesterday was my birthday! As a kid, the only reason I liked having my birthday that close to Christmas was because I could ask for presents that I didn’t get two days earlier. It’s a little different now that I’m older and don’t want toys anymore. Haha. I ended up spending the majority of the day with a friend who didn’t even know it was my birthday. Hahaha apparently he forgot to check Facebook ;)

2. As I was opening my sister’s gift to me on Christmas, she says, “I don’t even know if this is something you’d want or like.” Well that’s a promising intro to a present…She got me The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling. We’re both huge Harry Potter fans, but I actually hadn’t even looked into her new book. Anyone have any opinion on it? Is it worth the read?

3. Since I didn’t do a quick takes last week, I forgot to write about cookie day. Every year around Christmas, my family gets together and spends all day baking cookies. Literally all day. My mom started at 5 or 6 in the morning (I didn’t get there until about 7:30) and we mixed, rolled out, dropped, and baked cookies until 7 or 8 at night. I don’t even know how many we ended up making. Dozens upon dozens upon dozens. A few lucky friends got some in the mail and my fellow daily mass goers gobbled up quite a few as well :) Anyone else have any Christmas traditions?

4. Over the summer, I borrowed a couple seasons of ER from my grandma. I had watched some of the later seasons when they were still new and had seen most of them in rerun form, but I was running out of things to do so I started from season 1 and worked my way through them. Now I’m on 11 or 12. Gotta love old medical dramas.

5. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas filled with peace, joy, love, and good times with family!

6. In honor of the Holy Feast of the Innocents, I wanted to share this: "Today, dearest brethren, we celebrate the birthday of those children who were slaughtered, as the Gospel tells us, by that exceedingly cruel king, Herod. Let the earth, therefore, rejoice and the Church exult — she, the fruitful mother of so many heavenly champions and of such glorious virtues. Never, in fact, would that impious tyrant have been able to benefit these children by the sweetest kindness as much as he has done by his hatred. For as today's feast reveals, in the measure with which malice in all its fury was poured out upon the holy children, did heaven's blessing stream down upon them."

7. And I’ll leave you with this quote from John Paul II: “People are made for happiness. Rightly, then, you thirst for happiness. Christ has the answer to this desire of yours. But he asks you to trust him. True joy is a victory, something which cannot be obtained without a long and difficult struggle. Christ holds the secret of this victory.”