There’s the out: Even though Brendan’s been REALLY bad, he’s not “bad at heart” (or he’s repentant); if Santa brings presents, he “sees what’s in our hearts”.
On my 21st birthday, I went to church. After worship service, I walked right across the pond on my way home! Of course, my birthday’s in mid-December, so…
Actually, when I was in the hospital (at about Sam’s age) for two three-week stints, I liked the pudding pretty well. I also liked the Jell-O. The veggies were generally over-cooked a bit, and the liver was…well…liver (luckily, the first night they served me liver, mine had a glazing point in the first bite, and they took it back, brought me a hamburger, and never served me liver again!). The nursing staff was absolutely fabulous; kind, friendly, competent, even fawning, I would say.
We know, from personal experience, that vegetable oil works REALLY well! When my son was about 20-months old (he’d just learned to walk), my mum had a jug of corn oil on the kitchen counter. Our son pulled it onto the linoleum floor, and the lid came off in the fall. My wife came into the room to see my crying son trying to stand up, and slipping back into the large puddle of oil every time he got to his feet. In retrospect, it was quite an amusing sight. My wife took the oil-coated boy off to the tub while Mum mopped up the oil-coated kitchen floor.
I don’t see any blonde hair in that picture of Jesus. His hair is definitely a rather dark shade of brown…just a shade darker than the colour in my mother’s nearly-identical print (and we’re of Norwegian stock, so if anybody had a “Nordic Jesus”, I would expect my family to be among them..True, Westerners don’t generally depict Jesus as looking particularly “Middle-Eastern”, but this one is certainly not blonde.
There’s the out: Even though Brendan’s been REALLY bad, he’s not “bad at heart” (or he’s repentant); if Santa brings presents, he “sees what’s in our hearts”.