Preaching and teaching that we must observe all things whatsoever He commanded. Matthew 28:19-20; Mark 16:15-20; Acts 1:8; 2Peter 3:9; Galatians 3:80. Spreading God's good news of Jesus's salvation message cannot be over-emphasized 2Peter 1:12-13).

12-7-24, [Report here] -- Sad that the Jewish people are STILL WAITING for the Messiah ... they don't believe that the Lord and Savior of mankind Jesus Christ is their Messiah also. Jews believe there are prophecies that the Lord Jesus hasn't fulfilled. ​Christians believe that the Messiah Jesus is the World's Messiah =>

<= and He will fulfill all remaining prophecies when He returns.
​At Christmastime Jews celebrate Hanukkah, which has festivities lasting for 8 days commemorating the Bible's ancient report of a famine when a Hebrew woman's one day supply of oil lasted eight days. More here: 1 Kings 17:10-16

'We're bringing it back for some things we need': Some shoppers are heading to the stores to make after Christmas returns.

The National Retail Federation says almost 20% of gifts will be returned or exchanged after Christmas. More here

​Is there a war on Christmas? Christians and Conservative Republicans say yes [here]
12-10-20, YouGov.com --  A 2018 YouGov poll found that 39% of Americans believed there was a war on Christmas while 33% disagreed. The poll was conducted without political weighting, it shows that a similar number of Americans overall (40%) believe there is a war against Christmas today...

​Keep Christ in Christmas
12-21-23, VincentianNews -- It's that time of year once again when we marvel at the meaning of this Advent of Christmas. If Christ is the title of this annual event, we should by natural inclination ensure that He is center stage; but can we in all honesty proclaim we have not excluded Him from the season that is His?...

In this one ballet, we gain a picture of a prosperous world that emerged in the late 19th century, was shortly shattered by war and revolution, and then was nearly killed off by the political and ideological experimentation of the 20th century. This ballet debuted in 1892. The generation of Russians living in St. Petersburg that saw it for the first time was experiencing a level of prosperity never before seen in history. It was the same all over Europe, of which Russia was considered a part. 
 
This was a time of the full maturation of the Industrial Revolution. Income was growing and dramatically. Lives were longer. Infant mortality was plummeting. The middle class could live in security and in comfortable homes, and the practical arts—electricity, lighting, telephones, universal medicine, indoor plumbing—were in a boom phase. We see these themes in the opening scenes of The Nutcracker. We’re in a home with a beautifully lit Christmas tree, and several generations of an extended family are celebrating the great season with abundant gifts. Gifts, that great symbol of abundance.
 
The person of the nutcracker character himself; is a soldier - but not a killer, not a person destined for being maimed and killed or slaughtering others. A soldier in those days was a symbol of the nation, a protector and a well-dressed person of discipline and dignity who made the peace possible. He was an extension of regular society, someone performing a light duty deserving of extra respect. [..]
 
This was a world that celebrated cross-cultural exchange. It was an age before the creation of passports, and traveling the world and seeing it all was first becoming possible for many people. You could ride on ships and not die of scurvy. Trains could take people from place to place in safety. Goods crossed borders as never before, and multicultural chic invaded arts and literature of all sorts. There was no managerial state, no one screaming about “cultural appropriation,” and no dominance of cursing whole groups for their identity.
 
In The Nutcracker we gain a vision of an emerging world ethos a vision of a time and a place – it wasn’t just Russia. The ballet not only celebrated the sugar plum fairies, but also Arabian coffee dancers, Chinese tea dancers, Danish shepherdesses, and of course Russian candy cane dancers along with a beautiful array of fantasy figures.
The composers and writers in Tchaikovsky’s era could not have imagined the horror that was unleashed by the Great War. The killing fields — 38 million dead, wounded, or missing – it was inconceivable. 

The concept of a “total war” that did not exclude the civilian population, but rather made everyone part of the army. [..]
What they could not imagine was the much vaster injustice that was just around the historical corner: mass use of poison gas, universal enslavement of the wartime draft, famine as a war tactic, the gulag, the Holocaust and slaughter of millions of Jewish people and their mass incineration. The Japan war when the USA dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
 
The features of society of the Russian people’s lives in the Nutcracker ballet was of faith, property, family, security. In 1917 following Russia’s disastrous involvement in World War I — resulting in horrible death and economic ruin — there was a revolution, one designed to overthrow despots and replace them with something completely new. The party that took control ruled under the pretext of ideological communism. And of what did that consist? Opposition to faith, property, family, and the very bourgeois life that is so celebrated in this ballet.
 
If you look at the demographic data following the October 1917 revolution, you see calamity. Income fell by half. Life expectancy became static and fell. It was total wreckage, exactly what you would expect if you tried to get rid of property and attack the voluntary society at its core. Many decades of communist rule in Russia gutted the country of the life and joy that this ballet puts on display.
 
Historians and those old enough; told the stories of terrible things. It was a wholesale looting of all the progress that Russia had experienced until that point in its history.
The experience also unleashed a dominance of munitions manufacturers in the UK and US, the beginnings of the modern military-industrial complex, in addition to previously unthinkable controls on the civilian population, including censorship and witch hunts over political affiliation. This coincided in the US with what amounted to a revolution against liberty: the income tax, the 17th Amendment that abolished the bicameral Congress, and the Federal Reserve that was deployed to fund the murderous war.  What’s beautiful about The Nutcracker is that we see none of it.
This ballet was created in that great time of innocence when all the world foresaw a beautiful future of unstoppable and unending peace, prosperity, and justice. It portrays a culture of free association, gift giving, personal and material growth, spiritual reflection and artistic excellence, dancing and dreaming — it can and should be our future in the USA.