Angels We Have Heard on High

Surveying the collection of carols in American hymnody, one might be excused for thinking that Christmas was about angels.

The Christ child gets attention in carols like “O Holy Night” or “O Come All Ye Faithful,” and the magi of Matthew's gospel take center stage in “We Three Kings,” but we just can't get enough of those angels. Whether the heavenly host sings alleluia in “Silent Night,” or angels greet the newborn Christ with sweet anthems in “What Child Is This,” it's rare to find a Christmas carol that doesn't mention them. We just can't get enough of the angels proclaiming Christ's birth to a group of frightened shepherds.

The angels take center stage in the story of the first Christmas in “Angels We Have Heard on High.” In the structure of the song we are neither shepherds receiving the announcement of Christ's birth, nor are we angels declaring the news. We are instead a third party, wandering the countryside and arriving too late to witness the stunning tableau that transpired outside Bethlehem.

Imagine and take it in for a moment, what that spectacle would have been like. The gospel of Luke mentions a group of shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem tending their flocks of sheep, one presumes in connection with the sacrificial system at the Temple in nearby Jerusalem.

On the one hand is the landscape, barren except for the scrub, meadow muffins and a small flock of sheep that dot the area. Scattered through that flock are rough-spun shepherds, some sleeping, some possibly drunk and some watching the scene with whatever emotion sits in the hearts of a shepherd late at night. On the other hand is a heavenly visitor who has just appeared, illumined and illuminating with an unworldly light that burns with a wondrous terror.

Caesar and other rulers concern themselves with halls of power and faraway kingdoms. Whenever they have an important proclamation to share, like the birth of an heir, they send messengers throughout the realm to declare it to the mighty. The angelic messenger is here to declare that God has restored the royal line of David, Israel's golden king.

Fifteen hundred years earlier, Moses went to Pharaoh and declared that God had sent him to save Israel from slavery and genocide, and to deliver his people to their own land. Now the angel is declaring that God is sending a new Moses to free Israel again, but the announcement isn't going to Caesar or even to Herod. It's going to the beneficiaries of that news, a group of social outcasts who can't even give testimony in court.

It's hard to tell which is a bigger shock to the shepherds: that the messiah has been born, or that they're the ones who are receiving the birth announcement.

This is the scene of wild, uncontainable wonder expressed in the opening lines of “Angels We Have Heard on High.” That first verse comes from the shepherds themselves, struck senseless with wonder. They have seen a host of angels and heard those angels, lost in worship, as a heavenly song rolled over the plains and came echoing back from distant mountains.

This is their witness account of what they heard and what they saw, and frankly it is incredible.

By the time we arrive on the scene, it is 2,020 years later. The angels are gone. Their music, however glorious it once sounded, has faded into silence. There is no one left living whose great-grandfather might have been stirred by that song. All that remains is what purports to be a written record of their encounter, and whatever questions we have.

The first verse is the account of the shepherds; the second verse is ours, and it is addressed to the shepherds. Why this celebration? Why this singing? What could you possibly have heard to set you to such celebration?

These are all reasonable questions, whether they are asked as the shepherds rush toward Bethlehem, or two millennia later as we wonder at the story we have heard. Either way, the shepherds' response in the third verse is the only one suitable. They don't argue theology with us. (As for how they feel about it, that should be obvious from the major key and upbeat tempo to the carol.)

Nor do the shepherds even talk about what they think the birth of Jesus will mean for them personally, for their nation, or for the world. Their initial response is simply “Come to Bethlehem and see.”

What do we find there? A baby, certainly; some would say, no more. The remainder of the third verse, and the fourth verse as well, state what the shepherds themselves believed they would find: Christ the Lord, the newborn king, Lord of heaven and earth, laid in a manger.

And woven throughout the song at the end of every verse is the song of the angels itself, rendered in a rolling chorus that rises and falls in rapid tempo, the Latin Gloria in Excelsis Deo, “Glory to God in the highest.”

This, then, is our cue, as visitors to this pageantry. We have missed the angels, and are witness only to the record of what Luke tells us the shepherds found.

Follow the shepherds. Come to Bethlehem. What do you see there?



Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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"Angels We Have Heard On High"

1. Angels we have heard on high Sweetly singing o’er the plain And the mountains in reply Echoing their joyous strains Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo! 2. Shepherds, why this jubilee? Why your joyous strains prolong? What the gladsome tidings be? Which inspire your heavenly songs? Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo!

3. Come to Bethlehem and see Christ, whose birth the angels sing; Come, adore on bended knee, Christ, the Lord, the newborn King. Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo! 4. See Him in a manger laid, Jesus, Lord of heaven and earth; Mary, Joseph, lend your aid, With us sing our Savior's birth. Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo!

The latest hand-wringing over the war on Christmas

Did you see the article on Christianity Today's web site about the supposed war on Thanksgiving?

If last year's histrionics over the supposed war on Christmas weren't bad enough, now we're supposed to be panic-stricken that Madison Avenue is driving us to forget to be thankful in its push to sell Christmas loot. It's Madison Avenue. Of course they want to make a bigger buck, a faster buck, a greener buck, a more valuable buck, than they did last year. That's the nature of the beast, and the beast grows bigger because we keep feeding it.

It's really quite simple to stop the trend: Stop feeding it. Keep the Christmas spending in hand, don't go hog wild on the gift-giving -- I buy my kids two presents each, and my wife and I exchange one each, and we keep each store-bought gift down to $15 -- and we make a determined effort to keep Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hanukkah together, as a family.

If Christians in America put half the effort into quietly keeping the holidays themselves that they did into screaming that everyone else is celebrating them wrong, we might actually see a redemptive influence on society.

Enough with the war on this holiday or that one. I think God has enough dignity and glory that he's not going to be threatened by the self-indulgence and greed of a few overzealous capitalists.

I wish everyone would just get a grip.

We start celebrating Hanukkah

Count me and my family among the number of Christians making an effort to celebrate Hanukkah. It's partly to educate the girls about other cultures and ways of doing things, partly to educate them about Judaism, and partly to build their knowledge and appreciation of what God has done for his people.

My calendar has Dec. 8 marked as the first day of Hanukkah -- stupid Gentile that I am, I believed it, when I should have realized that Hanukkah would start at sundown Dec. 7. (Actually, I did suspect that, but failed to check.)

This afternoon, the girls and I went into a Judaica shop in the next town over and bought a menorah and candles. I think I inadvertently misled the owner into thinking that I'm Jewish. I'm not sure, but I think so.

For starters, I always say the opening H in Hanukkah like the "ch" sound at the end of Bach, which is how it's supposed to be pronounced. For a second thing, I explained to E and R in some detail the significance of the menorah and the shamash, told them time and again the story of Judah the Maccabbee, and of course R also has a biblical name. I think the girls' curly hair also lent us the image, although R's hair is far blonder than I've ever seen on a Jewish person.

On the other hand, E kept asking me what Hanukkah is, even on the way out. Maybe they thought I haven't been a particularly observant Jew, especially since I acknowledged I was buying the menorah a day late, or maybe that I was a Gentile who had married a Jewish woman. No idea.

E found it enthralling when I lit the candles tonight and said the prayers, although she was mortified that I wouldn't blow the candles out before they melted away. (She overcame that, and decided it was neat to watch them melt that far.) No dreidel games, although E learned a dreidel song in preschool last year, and we did eat latkes. With shellfish and pasta admittedly, but I didn't feel inclined to keep kosher, especially since dinner was rushed so my wife could get to book club on time.

No traditional doughnuts, though. I've never liked jelly doughnuts, especially a kind I can't even spell or pronounce. I might get a more regular sort of doughnuts to share with the girls, and explain that it's also a tradition we've half-borrowed.

This is actually (sort of) the second Jewish holiday we've added to our family observance. Last Easter, I tried to structure the meal around something like a Hagaddah service, focusing on the Easter story rather than the Passover one. It was a total disaster, of course, but I'm trying again next year. It occurred to me some time a couple years ago that the annual Pesach ritual is an excellent way of preserving the Jewish religion, culture and identity in alien and often hostile cultures, and that I'd have to be an idiot not to want to do that with my own faith.

Last night as I was watching the candles on the menorah burn low, I thought about a friend of mine named Josh. Josh is the son of a cantor, and the two of us had a tremendous working relationship at WCN, where we talked about our faiths openly and safely. (He said that I was a puzzle to him -- he'd never known another Christian as deeply religious as me who wasn't always trying to convert him, who told jokes about his own religion, or who agreed the Tanakh made better reading than most of the New Testament.)

We had talked periodically about the kosher rules, and Josh found it hilarious when I mentioned the amendment an ex-girlfriend of mine had had about pork. It was that pork is never kosher, unless it's eaten at a Chinese restaurant. He loved that one.

He also told me that his father had told him about a group of lost Jews discovered in South America. Their great-grandparents or whoever had been so secretive about being Jews, for fear of persecution, that their descendants didn't realize it themselves.

They celebrated Mass every Sunday, and prayed to the saints and all, but on every Friday evening, they turned the pictures of the saints around until sunset Saturday, and kept other traditions usually associated with Jews.

"For example," I threw in, "every Christmas, they go out for Chinese food."

"That's right," Josh said. "But they have no idea why they do it, since no one else does."

No particular relevance to Hanukkah, I suppose, but I thought about them and chuckled all the same.

We also read "The Christmas Menorahs," a true story about a whole town rallying around their Jewish families who were being targeted by neo-Nazis who were throwing stones through windows where they saw menorahs. It was a nice reminder about the power of courage and love, and E seemed to enjoy it, along with the traditional story about Judah the Maccabbee.

She had a hard time understanding why somebody would hate another person for being Jewish. Good for her. I hope she feels that way her whole life.

Tomorrow should be better. I figure by the eighth day, I should have it down to a science. I'd really like to get to know more of the Jewish holidays and incorporate them into our family life to one degree or another. I've always had an interest in Judaism, and it's deepened with my faith.

halloween sells out

I was complaining at work Monday night that everyone has forgotten the true meaning of Halloween, and it's all become commercialized. Nowadays the Great Pumpkin rises from the pumpkin patch and starts doing endorsements for one brand name after another.

Aside from that, it's just a fun and harmless children's holiday. When it ceases to be fun because of vandalism or recklessness, it needs to be reined in, but I really don't worry that my daughter is going to run off and join a coven because we made paper jack-o'-lanterns yesterday for homeschool crafts.

I did explain to her the history of jack-o'-lanterns, and told her that people used them before they knew about Jesus to keep themselves safe from scary things. (Evangeline has an active imagination, so I didn't see a need to start filling her idea with notions about ghosts, goblins and demons in the hours just before bedtime.) I told her that now that we know about Jesus and don't need to be afraid of those things, we make jack-o'-lanterns because they're fun to make and because they also can remind us that Christ is the one who frees us from fear and from our sin.

easter and pesach

A friend of mine and I today were talking about his visit home for Passover yesterday, and it hit me what a good thing the Jews have set up in the way they celebrate the seder.

The seder, as probably everyone knows, is a meal that is filled with structure, layered with meaning, and replete with teaching. The elements of seder, laid out in the book of Exodus and developed further in the Talmud and Midrash, remind children and adults every year about their Jewish heritage. Through the ritual, they remember the suffering of their ancestors in Egypt and the deliverance God brought them through Moses in exquisite detail. Each element of the meal from the horseradish down to the matzoh refers back to some element of the Exodus story. It's a fantastic way not only to educate children about the religion, but to keep the Jewish identity intact despite all the pressures to conform to a non-Jewish society.

By contrast, when we celebrate Easter this year, most of us are going to go to church like we do every other Sunday, although some of us might dress up a little more, and then we'll go home and eat an Easter ham with spend time with family.

That's nice, but I can't help but think what we're missing out on. When Jesus ate that final seder with his disciples on Maundy Thursday,1 he added new layers of meaning as reinterpreted each element of the meal to refer to himself, from the lamb to the glass of wine to the matzoh. I doubt the average Christian household would even know where to begin that process with our own Easter meals. Passover can tell the story of the Exodus and the Passion; my Easter dinner is mostly just a nice family time.

It doesn't have to be that way, though. When missionaries brought the gospel to our pagan ancestors, they used elements of the pagans' belief systems to explain the gospel. The renewal and new beginnings that the Anglo-Saxons looked forward to with the arrival of Easter met its fulfillment in Christ, and so the trappings of Easter celebration -- like eggs and rabbits, symbols of beginning and fertility -- were reinterpreted along those lines.

Last year, I turned the question of Easter eggs over and over in my mind and sought a way to use them to teach my children. I finally hit upon the egg as a type -- when we boil the egg, it changes from being runny to being hard. In the same way, Christ uses the trials of this life to change our inner being. And, just as dipping the egg into the dye changes its color, so we can be changed to look like Christ when we immerse ourselves in him.

The Easter basket I turned into a living parable. We search for Truth and when we find it we're glad and we treasure it, just as we search for the basket and are happy for what it gives us.

I'd like to do more with the Easter dinner, though. Some of the family traditions we have are nice. Eowyn likes to eat holiday meals by candlelight, just like I do; and there's the foods we "must" have or it's not Easter, like the ham and the mashed potatoes and what have you.

But I really want to see if we can do what the Jews do with Passover, and turn the day into more than just a family get-together and meal to feel good over. Easter is a different day for us too. It marks the day we were set free from slavery to sin and really experienced the joys of God's love and forgiveness. If Passover can be a meal to pass the faith down through the generations, so can Easter.

But I'm stuck for how to do it. Any suggestions?

1 I did point out to Josh, and he agreed, that Christians have much neater names for the individual days of Holy Week than Jews have for the days of Passover. Although we have the lame and predictable "Palm Sunday," we also have Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday.

Of course, as I also mentioned, Jewish holidays have much nicer-sounding names than Christian ones. Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and Advent just can't hold a candle namewise to Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashana, Hanukkah, Sukkoth and Pesach.

Plus, if Constantine had converted to Judaism, we'd get three weeks of vacation every year, since Passover, Hanukkah and the High Holy Days each run about that long. We really shot ourselves in the foot by making sure that Easter always lands on a weekend. What management stooge thought of that?

easter baskets redux

I was talking today with a co-worker about the golem legend and how it appears in other forms throughout literature such as Frosty the Snowman and Pinocchio, and somehow discussion trailed as it is wont to do onto other subjects.

The issue of how we celebrate our religious holidays with the extra trappings came up, and I mentioned the dilemma we faced over the Easter eggs. I shared with him how we resolved it at our house, which he found fascinating: As Evangeline and I boiled the eggs and dyed them, I explained to her that just as we change the eggs' nature and appearance every Easter, putting our faith in Christ changes our nature and our appearance to the Father so that when he looks on us he sees his Son. In other words, I made the Easter message a central part of the Easter eggs so that they're not a distraction from the meaning of the day.

It was great -- not only did I get to use Easter eggs to teach my daughter something, I was able to use them to share my faith with a co-worker in a completely nonoffensive and nonintrusive way.

We didn't do an Easter basket this year because it didn't occur to me in time how to do it, but next year we're going to use the Easter basket as a metaphor for searching for Truth and then discovering him in the person of Christ. If I get really fancy, we could leave the Easter basket somewhere on Saturday night, and then on Sunday when Evangeline goes to look for it, she'll discover it's not there and have to go looking for it, just as Christ's friends found his body had disappeared unexpectedly.

easter baskets

An odd question here: What sort of treatment do you give to extrabiblical holidays and extrabiblical customs? Natasha and I are trying to decide how we want to handle Easter this year and whether we want to go the route of an Easter basket for Evangeline.

I'm inclined to, on the grounds it's not an offensive addition to the holiday; Natasha is discinlined, on the grounds that it's an occasion for overindulgence on chocolate and other junk, and feeds into the American consumer mentality. We have similar concerns about Christmas, obviously.

My best thought of course is to reinterpret the custom in some way, not to give it a Christian gloss, but to give it a new spin that somehow is Christ-centered. What the missionaries did with Easter made sense at the time -- turning a pagan holiday about renewal into a Christian celebration of new life and forgiveness -- but I'm kind of stumped about what to do with an Easter basket and chocolate. The best I can see is something with the basket being hidden and then found somehow paralleling the risen Christ emerging from the tomb, but that's kind of a stretch.

What does everyone do?

The Great New Years Eve Tuba Processional

One New Year's, my brother and I decided to ring in the new year by walking around the block while playing our tubas as loudly as we could and wishing people a happy new year when they came out of their houses to yell at us.

I was, I think, in 10th grade. My brother Ward was in eighth grade. Who would have known that all those people would be trying to sleep between midnight and 1 a.m.?

We woke up one of our schoolmates, who decided to come out and join us. Unfortunately for Chris, we also woke his father, who discovered the back door was unlocked and latched it, unaware that his son was marching around the block with us, without a key.

The holiday traditions we make and teasure

With the holiday season nearly upon us and my daughter’s first birthday now in the recent past, I find myself wondering about the holiday traditions my wife and I will be able to create for her.

Family traditions, after all, are what make some holidays stand out, and others, well, not stand out. They’re why we will make a big deal out of Christmas next month but will notice Presidents Day only if we don’t have anyone in the White House by that time next year, which given the carnival in Florida lately doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

I find myself wondering what sort of traditions Evangeline will associate with the holidays. Will she grow up with memories of a Christmas tree left up until July? Or will she remember tearing the Christmas wrapping paper from her presents in a disgraceful display of self-indulgence before breakfast, only to realize too late that she’s unwrapped her little brother’s presents and hers are still under the tree?

Christmas is still a little while off, but with Thanksgiving only two days away, I find myself thinking more and more about how my family celebrated Thanksgiving when I was a child.

Thanksgiving always began around 10 a.m. with a bowl of Cheerios and a televised broadcast of the Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. After about 23 seconds of nonstop excitement listening to someone talk about the Spider-man float and get her facts wrong, I would tear myself away from the television and join my three brothers at looking for something to do until dinner at 6 p.m.

Einstein once theorized that time slows the faster you go. If that’s the case, my brothers and I must have been traveling at something dangerously close to light speed the entire day. The eight hours between breakfast and utter gluttony were the slowest we ever knew.

Part of the problem was the lack of anything structured to do. The TV schedule consisted mainly of annual holiday specials, and it didn’t take a genius to realize that if George Bailey’s friends had bailed him out for the past six years, they probably would rescue the old deadbeat this year too.

Our chief escape from monotony was to take our dog, a half-Cocker spaniel, half-poodle mix named Fonzi, out for a walk. At first, Fonzi shared in our excitement, just as relieved as we were to get out of the house and do something, and he would jump for joy as we reached for his leash.

But as the day wore on, Fonzi’s enthusiasm would ebb, and by the 4 p.m. "Intergalactic Thanksgiving" cartoon, the poor dog had had enough. One of us would reach for his leash, and Fonzi would jump, and run for cover under the living room sofa, where he would whimper and lick his paw pads.

The ennui was even worse when we visited a relative for Thanksgiving, especially if we had to wear the unbearably stiff dress clothes usually reserved for making us uncomfortable during church Sunday morning.

(We mostly endured those visits, but we actually enjoyed ourselves one year when Ward missed the warning that the punch bowl had been spiked and was only for adults.)

I think Fonzi secretly was relieved to have the house to himself for the day those years, and when we came back home, the hunted expression usually was gone from his eyes .

But eventually, whether at a relative’s house or our own, the waiting would end. Amid building excitement, the turkey would emerge from the oven, cooked to a golden-brown perfection and filled with steaming-hot stuffing the Society of Worry-Warts Who Want to Ruin Your Day now tells us it should have given us all salmonella poisoning.

And then, right on cue, my father would get off the sofa in the family room, walk through the kitchen to pick up the bird, and carry it to the dining room table with the ceremony of someone who has slaved over a hot stove all day to make a perfect meal. My mother, unnoticed, slumped into her chair, exhausted.

The seating arrangements also were fixed. My father sat at the head of the table, where he would put the food on plates and serve it to us. I sat at my father’s right hand, within easy swatting distance, and to my right sat my brother Brian.

At my father’s left, also within swatting distance, sat my younger brother, Ward, sandwiched between our two parents since that was the only way they had found to control him.

My brother Herb, two years older than I, sat at the end of the table opposite our father. Herb, my parents had long since discovered, was far past the point of being controllable, and sat there so that my father couldn’t strangle him during dinner.

We always ate Thanksgiving dinner by candlelight, a tradition that made the holiday all the more magical, particularly since no one could tell when we slipped pieces of yams under the table to Fonzi, who had emerged from the sofa once he was sure this wasn’t another ruse to get him to go on a walk.

In truth, I’m not sure why we ate by candlelight. Part of it could be that every time someone stood up at the table, they would bump the chandelier with their heads and as a result we never had more than half the lights in it working at any given time.

I suspect the chief reason is that in the dark, my parents could pretend they didn’t see us hit each other and could even get in a swat or two of their own and feign innocence.

But it was during dinner that the biggest tradition came. This was a tradition so important that we observed it every holiday without fail. Someone, some time, had to spill a glass of milk.

Herb and Ward usually were exempt from spilling anything since they aren’t big milk drinkers and Thanksgiving dinner was one of the few meals we were allowed to have soft drinks, and I did my best to avoid making a mess. I’ll let you figure out for yourself who usually did the honors, and we’ll leave it that.

Suffice it to say that the tradition of the spilled milk is a duty so sacred that last Thanksgiving, I excused myself from the table to call my brothers in Vermont, Indiana and Maryland to let them know the tradition had been upheld and they could eat their meals free of obligation.

And then, as fast as it had begun, it was over. The lights came up, revealing lots of fresh bruises and we would discover that Fonzi didn’t like yams any more than we did. Soon the table was cleared, the milk was cleaned up, and it was time for dessert.

And so it would go year after year. And so here I am, wondering what traditions Natasha and I will be able to create for our family so they can treasure these special days as they grow older.

And more than that, I’m wondering how we’ll survive the process.

Crises in leadership today's politicians should face

There are two things that disappoint me every election cycle, without fail.

The first is that we still haven't initiated a hunting season to thin out the ranks. Anyone familiar with the ongoing political process at the federal level has to agree that some thinning is needed. The herd has become so large that politicians are foraging for voters earlier and earlier each year. Some of the most promising candidates are getting bumped off because they can't compete with the less interesting, albeit more powerful, ones. Hunting season is definitely in order.

The second thing that annoys me about elections is that no one tackles the really important issues, the ones everyone really cares about. Most politicians discuss programs and projects that are more involved than quantum physics and less comprehensible than tax laws.

Saving Social Security, paying back dues to the United Nations and gun control are all important issues in their own right, but none of them are issues that really get masses of people up in arms.

Any politician who steps forward with a commitment to tackle these issues is going to get my vote:

1. Stupid holidays. Most holidays serve some purpose, at least originally. Memorial Day has been demeaned to merely the first barbecue of summer, but at least its stated purpose is to remember all the fallen in our nation's wars. What's the story with Columbus Day, anyway?

The whole point of Columbus' trans-Atlantic trips wasn't to seek out new lands and new civilizations or to embark on an age of discovery. All he was after was finding a new way to get to India to avoid the bandits along the established trade routes, and he couldn't even get that right.

Off course by more than an entire hemisphere, Columbus still refused to admit to the queen or to his crew that he was lost.

"I know it's around here somewhere," he'd say in typical-guy fashion, bumping into one Caribbean island after another.

If Columbus at least had taken his wife with him, she would have made him stop at a gas station and ask for directions. Then he could have discovered the alternate trade route and done something worthy of history.

2. Check-out lanes. Maybe I'm missing the point, but I thought the whole idea of an express lane was that it was supposed to go fast. At this point, I'd be happy if "express" meant the same thing in a supermarket that it means to express mail delivery; i.e., it takes less than 24 hours.

3. Tailgaters. In the 13 years I've been driving, I have seen exactly one driver respond to the recommended practice of taking one's foot off the gas and coasting.

Much more frequently, these goobers actually have continued to tailgate me, even when there are other lanes they can move into and pass me to their hearts' content.

4. Police who just want to give out tickets. Most of the men and women in blue I've met are decent folks, but it seems like there's one Constable Elbow in every department.

These are the officers who follow you for 30 miles, just waiting for you to do a California stop or for you to go one mile faster than the speed limit.

One time, I was pulled over in Bridgewater, N.J., for speeding, even though I had already had slowed down to the established limit. Officer Elbow pulled me over anyway, and hit me with three tickets.

If the police are that hungry for excitement, maybe they should help thin out the political herd or pull over some tailgaters.

5. Parents who give their children common names. There ought to be some sort of running tally somewhere in Washington, D.C., that monitors name use, similar to the way e-mail providers keep track of user IDs.

If too many people have the same first name, hospitals would have to tell new parents, "Sorry, that name is already in use. Can we suggest Dave3124?"

6. English measurements. There is nothing more frustrating than trying again and again to find the right ratchet socket, only to discover the car manufacturer is still using an outdated measurement system. It's even worse when other parts of the car are in metric.

Nothing tops the recent fiasco around the Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125 million spacecraft of NASA's, paid for with our tax dollars, that burned up in the Martian atmosphere.

Lockheed Martin Co., the contractor for the project, used English measurements instead of the metric ones employed by every other member of the scientific community in the world.

As a result, our tax money is a slagged monument on Mars to the lack of intelligent life here on Earth.

My wife and I have a couple friends who work for Lockheed. The next time I see either Astro or Dan, I plan to hit them on the head with my metric ratchet set until they get the idea.

7. People who complain too much. Enough said.

I should add that I used to be bothered by political posters that say "Vote Drake, Quince and Elwood for Township Council" and put the party mascot on the sign as if that were all that matters.

Such signs say absolutely nothing about who these jokers are or what they hope to accomplish if they get elected. It does, however, say that they frivolously spend money on shallow campaigning efforts that do nothing to educate the public, in keeping with standard practice for upper levels of government.

This no longer annoys me, however, since I've decided to look at the entire issue from a new perspective. They're investing in the local economy, which means the people who put up the most and gaudiest election signs care the most for local business.

Now if we could just get them to do something about those checkout lines.

have a productive memorial day

Monday, Memorial Day, is a time for us to remember those who have fallen in battle during the service of our nation. It is a time for sober reflection on the cost of freedom and for remembering those who have died.

During the Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln reminded his audience, "We cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract...

"It is for us the living, rather, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

The task President Lincoln set before the people gathered on the Gettysburg battlefield is one no generation has yet completed. It is a task that awaits us as surely as it awaited the Founding Fathers, President Lincoln, and every other citizen of this nation. It is a task we dare not shun, because we have presumed to include it in the very foundation of the country. Many claim that America is the greatest country in the world. That is a bold claim, but it is matched by a bold dream of equality for all people, regardless of their differences. Historically, that dream has gone unrealized as we oppressed blacks long after the end of slavery, stole land from the American Indians despite endless treaties, and denied women a voice outside the home. As dreamers, we have made progress, but we still have a long way to go before the dream becomes reality.

Consider:

• In October last year Matthew Shepard was killed for being gay. Many were horrified at that crime, but others used his death to speed their hate campaign against homosexuals, complete with a Web site that counts off the days "Matthew Shepard has been in hell."
• Last fall, a group of white men chained James Byrd Jr. to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him to his death in Jasper, Texas. Byrd's offense? He was black.
• In April 1993, the entire Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, was destroyed after federal agents from the ATF closed in. In the ensuing blaze nearly everyone inside died. The group had had licenses for its firearms, and from the reports of survivors had been about to surrender when the attack occurred.

And while we experience the longest economic boom in history, poverty remains a problem, and not just in major cities. Even in towns in the Princeton area, people live below the poverty line and need assistance just to get by.

Some say the American Dream has failed; others, with a touch of melodramatic cynicism, claim it has come true. The truth is, the dream is waiting for the dreamers to catch up.

On Memorial Day, we remember the fallen. Their sacrifice reminds us of the task still undone: not to die for our country, but to live. This generation, like every generation before it, contains the architects of tomorrow's America. It is for us to make America a land of individual freedom for everyone, a land where parents and children can live without the sting of bigotry, a land where we truly celebrate our differences instead of forcing others to be like us.

The American Dream is a good one, and the dead we will remember on Monday gave everything they had for it. As the beneficiaries of their sacrifice, we can do no less.

surviving easter

If I have to eat another ham sandwich, I'm going to throw a fit.

This past Easter Sunday was the first Easter my wife and I celebrated as a married couple. Last year, when we were only engaged, I think we observed the holiday by eating out at a restaurant, hanging out for a while, and finally heading back to our respective apartments, where we passed the rest of the day doing our individual things.

Not this year. This year, by gum, we're a family and I was determined to make sure we celebrated Easter properly. So on Holy Saturday, I paid a visit to the local supermarket to buy the proper ingredients for a Learn family Easter dinner.

It was about the time I pushed the shopping cart through the front door that I realized I had no idea what a proper Learn family Easter dinner involved. I don't know why that should be the case; I've been a member of the Learn family for 28 Easters, and all but five of them had been with my parents.

"Mashed potatoes," Natasha had told me before I left. "You have to have mashed potatoes."

I'm not sure why she thinks she's an expert on these matters; she's been a Learn for only 10 months. Still, in only 10 months I've learned that when Natasha uses that tone of voice, I have to listen. Natasha is only 4-foot-11, but she can make every inch count when she has to.

I picked up the potatoes in one aisle, bought some pork stuffing from another aisle, and found the perfect Easter ham in the back. ("I can't wait to hear how you plan to stuff a ham," one friend told me Sunday morning at church. Before I could tell her that that wasn't the point, Natasha cut in with, "He just likes to eat stuffing," and proceeded to embarrass me by recounting the time a box of stuffing was all I ate for dinner one night when I was a bachelor.)

Now I should mention that due to various circumstances, I have become the de facto househusband. I take our dirty clothes to the Laundromat every week, I wash the dishes after most meals, and more and more lately, I have been preparing the meals. I'm a liberated man of the 90s, and this is not a problem for my self-image.

The only problem is I don't know how to cook.

So it was that late Sunday afternoon, Natasha was talking to my parents about their Easter celebration. I walked into the study where she was and asked, "Honey, how do I glaze a ham?"

She told me, and when I still didn't get it, she made a mixture of mustard and brown sugar and glazed it for me. I popped the ham into the oven, peeled the potatoes and went back into the study where she was now talking with my brother Brian, who had just called.

"Honey, how do I make mashed potatoes?"

"Boil them!"

"How long?"

"Until they're done!"

(My brother later commented that it sounded like Natasha and I had been at any moment ready to file divorce papers over the mashed potatoes.)

Next it was, "Honey, how do I cook broccoli?"

"Steam it, or it'll lose its nutritional value," she said. (She really does talk like that, mind you. She's the only woman I've ever known to complain that she has a large surface area-to-volume ratio and that her glomerular filtration rate is higher than convenient.)

Of course, we have no bamboo steamer, despite the many TV ads I saw for them when I was a boy. I finally improvised a steamer by placing a colander of broccoli on top of a pot of boiling water.

By 8 p.m. - thank goodness for daylight-saving time - dinner was finished. We had a nicely done (if I do say so myself) box of stuffing; mashed potatoes with undercooked, unmashed pieces of potato mixed in for variety; mostly cooked broccoli and the ham.

All 10 pounds of it. For the two of us.

Did I mention that I'm sick of leftovers?