This was one of my favourite of the Biblical novels I’ve written: I usually write about Bible women but this is a case where a man from the Bible (albeit a minor character) caught my imagination. James himself, as I imagined him based on his Epistle and the very few glances of him that we get elsewhere in the New Testament, is an intriguing character in himself, but writing this book also gave me a chance to write about Jesus from a different perspective. I’ve always found it difficult to write about Jesus because it’s so hard to portray sinless perfection in a way that’s interesting to the reader — but seeing him through the eyes of someone who (initially) doesn’t accept him as Messiah and actually kind of dislikes and resents him, gave me a whole new point of view. Writing this book was really fun and challenging. It had a complicated journey to publication which took awhile, but I’m so glad to have placed it with Pacific Press, a terrific Christian publishing house that I haven’t worked with before, and I hope it will find its way into the hand of lots and lots of readers who will learn from James’s journey as I’ve imagined it, just as I learned from researching and writing about him.

OK, so there’s not a lot of glory in being an extra, but it’s a cool experience to have, and Doyle had better get a fourth season so I finally get my chance! Until then I’ll have to live vicariously through others.

This is “plus sized” model Katie Halchishick, showing what changes would have to be made to her body if she wanted to look like a Barbie doll (she doesn’t).

And this is 20 year old, 5’11″, 175 lb model Lizzie Miller, who has been told by some “plus sized” clothing designers that she’s “too fat” too model their clothes.

Lizzie Miller, by the way, is my height and weighs about 10 lbs more than I do. I don’t know where she’s putting the extra 10 lbs because she looks a lot better than I do naked, but then, 20 generally looks a little firmer and smoother than 46, and she probably hasn’t birthed two live human beings out of that body yet. Anyhow, I’m not going to be posting nude pics of myself on the blog anytime soon (collective sigh of relief from readers).

A recent article points out that “plus sized” in model-speak now means sizes 6 – 14. At a time when illnesses linked to obesity are killing people, and eating disorders are also killing people, advertisers are forcing women’s ideal body images ever further from reality. The average fashion model now weighs 23% less than the average woman At a time when people need genuine information and help with living healthier lifestyles, what we’re being given instead is body hatred — the least  likely thing to motivate people to permanent, healthy change. And we’re buying into the self-hatred, and so are our daughters, and that makes me sick.

This is not an easy society in which to be raising kids at all, but raising a daughter is especially difficult. It’s so hard to send the right messages and help her block out the wrong ones. So hard to balance the message that you should never judge yourself by the size or shape or condition of your body, with the equally important message that this is the only body they’re ever going to issue you, and you should do all you can to keep it in optimum working order. Looks are a so much more immediate and powerful motivator for young girls than health and fitness. Yet wanting to have the perfect-looking body is the one motivator that will always, always come back to bite you on the butt — whether that butt is curvy or flat as a pancake. Because you will never be good enough for a world where a size 6 model is “plus sized.” And you’ll go crazy trying.

“So Emma, what do you think of the ‘Lego Friends’?”

(Makes face): “They’re terrible! Like they’re supposed to be for girls because they’re all pink and purple, as if girls only like to play with pink and purple things, and they’re supposedly all cute with their big heads and their big eyes and … ugh!!! It’s like they’re forcing us into stereotypes, where everything has to be all pink and purpose and cute and big-headed and big-eyed and …” (this rant went on for awhile).

Emma is, along with her older brother, a designer, architect, builder, character creator, visionary, chronicler and, oh yeah, film-maker of Bricktown, an ongoing Lego project that had to be moved, over Christmas, down to our basement because it had outgrown its previous space in Chris’s room.

When Emma was younger — probably about the age group the Lego Friends are aimed at — Lego was mostly a boy’s toy in our house. Chris was always into Lego, but as a younger kid he was very interested in Bionicles, Knights’ Kingdom, and other similar sets. Emma occasionally played with some Lego, but it was never a big thing with her. We had a brief tryout with Ello, but she never took to it in a big way. The one Lego set she had of her own, at about age seven of eight, was a small set featuring a soccer pitch and ten female mini-figures — a women’s soccer team. She put that together, kept it around for awhile, and then let it gather dust.

Then one day, about a year and a half ago, Emma decided to take some of her old soccer figures and some borrowed Legos from her brother (always a tricky negotiation) and build a Lego restaurant. Chris got interested and, working together (though not without conflict) they expanded on the restaurant, then branched out into other buildings. Chris was getting more interested in traditional Lego buildings and this fit well with Emma’s new interest: within a few months, Bricktown had become the thriving, growing community it is today.

If Lego Friends had existed when Emma was seven or eight years old (and wanted everything pink or purple), would she had been attracted to them? I’m sure she would. Would that have drawn her into Lego play sooner? Perhaps. Would Bricktown have been the end result anyway? Hard to say.  There’s always the possibility — and this is what makes me uneasy about the Lego Friends line — that the idea of a separate “Lego for girls,” while it might appeal to and attract some little girls who might not otherwise get into building sets, might also send the message that regular Lego must be “Lego for Boys.” (Kind of like the “women’s fiction” label — does that mean that by default, then, all the other books are “men’s fiction”?)

And the beauty of Lego, surely, is that it’s for everyone.

I think if Lego wanted to attract more girls, adding pink and purple and pastel blocks is a great idea — but they should have been added to sets in existing Lego lines, like Lego City. Those colours may catch the eyes of some girls, and they should be available, just as there should be a LOT more female mini-figures available in the regular lines. If Lego wanted to try introducing a different-looking set of characters like the Lego Friends characters, that certainly could have been tried too — though I can assure you that the purists who run Bricktown, and who have populated it with over 100 minifigures, each with names, jobs and backstories, will not be allowing any big-headed Lego Friends to dilute the racial purity of the town. Heck, they won’t even allow the minifigs with peach-coloured faces (which come from movie-tie-in Lego sets) — Bricktown is an all-yellow community. (They also won’t allow Megablocks, even if they’re compatible with Legos. Building codes are THAT rigid. You think it’s hard getting St. John’s City Council to approve renovations to your heritage home? Try putting a new building in Bricktown if you want to see some strict bureaucracy).

A lot of these innovations could have been brought in to new Lego sets and lines to attract more girls — but labelling one Lego line specifically as “Lego for Girls” is potentially damaging, I think. Because not only will boys go out of their way to avoid playing with Lego Friends; some girls will get the message that they are restricted to the pink and purple building blocks, and that Lego City and the dozens of other fantastic Lego lines are not for them.

The new Lego Friends line includes more “girl friendly” (?) sets like a beauty shop, a cafe, a  pet store, etc. Bricktown has, among other things, a bank, a police station, an airport, a beauty salon, a record shop, a school, a pet store, an outdoor stage, a swimming pool, a farm, and a coffee shop called Starblocks. Some of these came as part of sets, others are originals, created by pieces from other sets that have been repurposed. Some originated in my son’s brain, some in my daughter’s, and I’m pretty sure that while there are some stereotypically male/female choices there, I’ve also observed that a lot of things in Bricktown don’t divide neatly along gender lines. And that’s exactly as it should be.

I wish there were tons more girls as interested and involved in Lego as Emma is, because it’s a fantastic toy that inspires all kinds of creativity. But I don’t think introducing “Lego for Girls” is the way to do it. Lego already is for girls. And boys. And teenagers. And grown-ups. And anyone who wants to play with it.

10. Caleb’s Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks.

9. Far to Go, by Alison Pick.

8. Rin Tin Tin, by Susan Orlean.

7. When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead.

6. Maus, by Art Spiegelman.

5. Between Mothers and Sons.

4. The Ghost Brush, by Katherine Govier

3. Bossypants, by Tina Fey.

2. Planting Dandelions, by Kyran Pittman

1. 11/22/63, by Stephen King.

I said I would pick four winners, but due to some behind-the-scenes factors as I analyzed the responses (basically that I got five people with the correct list who replied within a very short time of each other), I decided to go with five winners instead. And they are …

Inkslinger, who gets a copy of my Biblical Fiction Prize Pack (Esther; Deborah &  Barak; Lydia; James)

Ruth and Cindy, who each get a copy of my Historical Fiction Prize Pack (The Violent Friendship of Esther Johnson; By the Rivers of Brooklyn; That Forgetful Shore)

Lesley, who gets a copy of The Chronicles of Uncle Mose by Ted Russell (not on the Top Ten list, but one of the books I reviewed this year)

Kristin, who wins a copy of Far to Go by Alison  Pick.

Thanks for playing, and happy reading in 2012! I’ll be back over at Compulsive Overreader with some more reviews in a week or so.

So, here’s a thing. On the first working day of 2012, Jan. 3 for most of us, one of the top news items was the annual reminder by the time the day was over, Canada’s top CEO’s had already made more than the average Canadian worker earns in the entire year.

I make well above the minimum wage and our family income, with one teacher and one engineer in the family, is above the Canadian average. So I’ll be generous and say it might take two days for some CEOs to equal my annual salary (though they could probably have knocked off at lunchtime today). A guy like Frank Stronach, Canada’s top earner, might be able to cover my salary in a day, though.

In a year of Occupy protests against the 1% who earn such ridiculous amounts of money while wage earners struggle make ends meet, this is obviously ridiculous and wrong. And it’s bad enough that the 1% includes people like our friend Frank, who can at least be credited with working for some of what he’s earned (though I don’t think top CEO’s work harder than teachers or engineers or nurses or janitors or any of the rest of us who put in a hard day’s work, so this idea that capitalism rewards hard work is a little out of whack somehow). What about people like the Kardashians, who are apparently famous for being famous and can blow gazillions of dollars on temporary weddings, because we all want to pay to read about and watch their exploits? (Well, I don’t, but obviously somebody must or they wouldn’t be on the cover of EVERY SINGLE MAGAZINE in the checkout line). Yes, our society is seriously skewed, but let’s pull back and widen our focus.

In these same two days of work during which I’ve been prepping for this semester’s classes and meeting new students while the CEO’s push some papers and take some meetings to earn the equivalent of my yearly salary — in these two days, I have earned pretty close to what the average person in Somalia earns in a year. (Based on stats from this website). And yeah, I bet some of them put in a harder day’s work than I did.

Who looks super-rich and self-indulgent now?

I posted this on Facebook and got a fascinating variety of responses, from people who clearly envy the 1%, to those who think we should count our blessings (which I agree with), to those who are angry at the imbalances in wealth in our world. I’m angry too, but I realize that I’m a legitimate target of anger too. Frank Stronach and Wassername Kardassian may seem super-rich to me, but I bet that my family of four with our two-story, three-bedroom home, our well-stocked fridge, our vehicle and our many many luxury items, seem pretty super-rich to that woman in Somalia and her kids.

I don’t know how to address all the imbalances in our world, but I’m sure they do need to be addressed. And I need to be reminded, when I start pointing fingers at the super-rich, that I am just as much part of the problem as I am part of the solution. It’s a big global village and a few of us are really living it up here in the suburbs.

Despite that, there were some very good books in this year’s list. I read 45 fiction and 23 non-fiction books; 26 books were written by men and 42 by women. In both those cases the proportions are about what they usually are.

So, what are my ten favourite books of the year? I narrowed it down fairly quickly to eleven, and then debated all day over which one to knock off to make it an even ten. It’s always pretty arbitrary.

As per usual for the last few years, I’m not going to just give you the list. No, I’m going to give you clues to the list, and you can search here through my archived reviews for the year, or anywhere else on the web (or dip into your own vast well of book-knowledge) to figure out which ten books made the list. If you think you have the list figured out, email me at trudyj65@hotmail.com (I’ve disabled comments on this post so you can’t accidentally post the list here and spoil it for other people).

This year I will pick four winners (probably the first four correct lists, unless I get a vast amount of entries in which case I might just draw four at random) and I will be giving four prizes. Two of the winners will get to pick their own favourite book from my Top Ten list (you have to actually pick one; just saying “Pick one you think I’ll like!” has not always given good results in the past). The other two lucky winners will get prize packs of my books (you can visit my writing page if you want to know more about them). The Historical Fiction Prize Pack consists of three books by me: That Forgetful Shore, By the Rivers of Brooklyn, and The Violent Friendship of Esther Johnson. The Biblical Fiction Prize Pack includes four books: Esther: A Story of Courage; Deborah & Barak; Lydia: A Story of Philippi, and James: the Brother of Jesus.

When you send in your entry, be sure to let me know which prize you’d like if you win!

Without further ado, here are the clues to my top ten books of the year:

10. Educational opportunities for Native Americans in colonial New England? I didn’t think I was interested, but … the right writer can draw me right in.

9. Just another Holocaust novel — but its intense personal focus makes it so much more.

8. Here’s another, “Didn’t think I was interested, but ….” This time, it was a non-fiction writer who made me fall in love with a long-dead German shepherd.

7. Supposed to be a young-adult novel, but this time-travel story fascinated me more than it did my eleven-year-old daughter.

6. I’m not normally hooked by graphic novels, but this one — yes. And it’s also “just another Holocaust story” … but so much more.

5. A collection of essays? Not my usual reading choice, but these witty, thoughtful women writers caused me to race through the book in a day.

4. Beautiful historical fiction, again about a subject I didn’t think I was fascinated by. Japanese painting? Oh yes!

3. I love her on TV so what’s not to love about her book?

2. Breezy, funny, wonderful memoir by an ex-patriate Newfoundlander.

1. I like this author’s writing, but I usually dislike his subject matter. This time I loved it all, making this weighty tome my favourite book of the year.

Remember, if you think you’ve figured out all the books, email me your list along with a note about which prize you’d like to receive, and if you’re one of the lucky four I’ll be sending you a book or maybe even a whole package of books! Contest closes 12:00 midnight, Newfoundland Standard Time, Friday January 6, 2012.

As you clear out under the tree and reflect on the gifts you gave and received this year, ponder this.

At this time of year we celebrate Incarnation: God taking on human flesh.

I dislike the word “flesh.” I try to avoid using it. It’s an unpleasant-sounding word, and I don’t like its connotations. “Flesh” sounds flabby, raw, unhealthy.

It also has negative connotations in the spiritual realm. “Incarnation” comes from the same root as “carnal,” the word St. Paul uses to describe the fallen, sinful tendencies of our human — fleshly — bodies.

The truth of Christmas is that Jesus came all this way to get a human body…but really, who the hell would want one? Human bodies are messy, flawed, fragile and inconvenient. They feel pain. Parts get injured and break. Human bodies overeat and get overweight … or they don’t get enough to eat and shrivel into starvation. Human bodies lead us into temptation. They get sexually aroused at inopportune times. Sometimes they fail to get aroused at opportune times. Human bodies inflict violence on other human bodies. We bleed. We make each other bleed. And if we somehow navigate all the pitfalls of the flesh, our bodies simply grow old and die.

Yet Christianity is not a dualistic religion in which “flesh” is simply bad and soul or spirit is simply good. The Bible teaches that God created our human bodies, cares for our human bodies, and will eventually resurrect and recreate our human bodies. Christianity goes a step farther than any other world religion and teaches that God not only values human bodies, God actually wears a human body. In the Incarnation Jesus took on our flesh — our sinful, fallible, flawed flesh.

Flesh brings us down; flesh also lifts us to our finest hours. Only in human bodies can we know the bliss of union between lovers. Only in a human body can a woman share for a few months the experience of the Creator as she grows another human life inside her womb, pushes out into the world, then sustains and nourishes it with milk from her breast. Only in human bodies can we hold a child, a parent, a lover in our arms. Only with human bodies can we laugh and cry and kiss and taste and touch and participate completely in the world God created for us. And in human bodies–transformed and glorified–we will someday be raised to live eternally.

In this human flesh, fragile and fallen, the Son of God deigned to meet us on our own ground: to become a helpless human infant suckling a mother’s breast; to be hungry and exhausted and weak; to bleed and to die.

Christmas in the secular world sometimes seems an inappropriate time for Christians to celebrate Christ’s birth. It’s hard to ponder the mystery of Incarnation in the midst of holiday specials and the shopping-days countdown and the flashing lights and Santa and Rudolph and Frosty and the Grinch. At Christmas our carnal nature shows its best — the glowing face of a child opening a longed-for toy — and its worst — the vicious triumph of the mother who literally had to wrestle another shopper to the floor of Wal-Mart to rip the last Furby from her shaking fingers.

I have no doubt that the Christ who loves the poor and oppressed deplores the consumerism that runs rampant at Christmas. I have no doubt that He longs for each one of us to make this a simpler time, to lay aside stress and ridiculous expectations of the “perfect” holiday, to spend more time listening to Him and less time looking for replacement bulbs for the tree lights.

But I also believe that the God who was not too proud to lie in an animal’s feed box in a barn, wrapped in the fragile flesh of an infant human body, is not too lofty to descend to meet us in the middle of our overpriced, overstressed, commercialized Christmas. He who did not refuse the company of cow and donkey does not exclaim, “Oh, how tacky!” when He sees His own image in the manger scene surrounded by Santa, Rudolph or Frosty. He descends into human flesh, into the carnality of Incarnation, and stoops to meet us in mangers and malls, in stables and supermarkets.

Christmas tells us that our God joins us in the experience of being human, having a human body. But Christmas is only Act I of the story. The grand finale, His resurrection, assures us that while He became truly human and experienced all humanity had to offer, the divine does not enter humanity and leave it unchanged. Jesus not only took on human flesh; He transformed human flesh. His resurrected body was recognizably human — He walked, talked, ate, cooked fish with His friends — but it was also far more than human, far more than the body that was born in the stable on Christmas Eve. God became human, and entirely transformed the experience of what it means to be human, to live within a human body.

So He is humble enough to meet us, this Christmas, in the check-out aisle of Canadian Tire as we realize with dread that the string of lights in our hand -the last string on the shelf –will not in fact connect to the three strings we already have at home. He will meet us in the overcrowded dining room as the uncle we haven’t seen in twenty years asks embarrassing and inappropriate personal questions over a plate of turkey and dressing. He will meet us amid the stress, the shopping, the crowds and the ornaments and yes, even the blinking lights. He will meet us there, enter into the experience of human flesh, and, if we allow Him, He will transform our Christmas, our flesh, our humanity.

He’s not too good for a stable; He’s not too good for a human body, and He’s not too good for Christmas. All He asks is that we meet Him there.

To continue my week of Christmas blog reruns, here’s my Christmas rant from last year:
As regular and reliable as over-the-top commercialism and rampant credit card debit, with the Christmas season come the annual anti-Santa rants from the farther fringes of  Christianity — including plenty of Seventh-day Adventists, some in my home church. Some, even, friends of mine.

While I respect everyone’s right to believe what they want, I don’t get the anti-Santa sentiment and never have. Mind you, I missed the adult Sabbath School discussion a few weeks ago where a member apparently told the others in all seriousness that Santa, along with the Easter Bunny, was one of Satan’s chief minions, drawing people into the kingdom of darkness. It’s probably not fair either to attack or to satirize someone’s position if you didn’t hear it first hand, but there are plenty of anti-Santa Christians out there to debate with, if you enjoy those kind of debates. Me, I’m just left shaking my head and wondering, “Do these people realize that Santa is, um … a fictional character? Not an actually Prince of Semi-Darkness dressed in fur-trimmed red suit, but … a character from children’s stories, a myth of popular culture on the level of Mickey Mouse or Superman?”

I’ve been exposed to anti-Santa rants my whole life, and I’ve still never heard a single strong argument as to why using the figure or image of Santa is so inherently evil.  Admittedly, not everyone stoops to the level of “if you scramble the letters, SANTA spells SATAN” (my answer: “I must go home and worship Max, for he is my DOG”), but I’ve yet to hear anyone present a cogent reason why Santa is dangerous to the Christian faith.

Of course, I don’t get the opposite view either — parents who tie themselves in knots to convince their children that Santa is real, so the little ones won’t lose “the magic of Christmas.” I don’t understand that at all — I mean, if you’re going to put that much effort and energy into getting your children to believe something, shouldn’t it be something that you, yourself, personally believe to be true?

I was raised with Santa as a benevolent fictional character — a figure who appeared in “The Night Before Christmas” and on various Christmas iconography, but was not given any actual credit for the gifts which, it was perfectly clear, came from loved ones (I always felt my parents didn’t want some fat guy in a red suit getting credit for those presents they’d shopped and paid for, and I don’t blame them).  “Believing” in Santa was a bit of a joke in my house growing up, as it has been with our kids — just as the tooth fairy is an agreed-upon fiction when a tooth falls out. 

I remember asking my grandmother at an early age if Santa was real.  I remember this well because it’s one of the few lucid conversations I had with my Nanny Morgan before her stroke, and since that happened when I was seven, I know I was younger than that. As I said, my parents didn’t encourage “belief in Santa” as an actual fact, but I had obviously encountered other children who thought Santa was real, so I figured I’d better run it by Nanny.

I still remember her telling me, “Santa is a lovely story — he’s not a real person, but he represents the spirit of love and giving at this time of year.”

That was perfectly acceptable to me, and I imagine it should be for most children long before they’re seven. Children do understand stories, and fictional characters, and enjoy imaginative play. Why shouldn’t that include a benevolent character, based on an early Christian saint (the original St. Nicholas story is well explained for Christian kids in the Veggie Tales DVD “Saint Nicholas”), who loves to give toys to children?

I guess the real problem is that some Christians see Christmas as a kind of Santa vs. Jesus showdown, with Santa detracting attention from Jesus’ birthday. Certainly we should draw people’s attention to Jesus whenever possible, and Christmas (while not the actual birthdate of Jesus, as I’m sure everyone is well aware) is a good opportunity to do so — in fact, one of the best opportunities we get all year.  It’s a holiday with many aspects, some sacred and some secular, and whenever we get a chance — through music and art and worship and well-told stories — to draw attention to the sacred aspects, we should do so. But that doesn’t mean the secular aspects need to be banished, or that they necessarily detract from the sacred ones. They can, in fact, complement them.

The thing about Santa is that, far from being one of Satan’s minions, he’s sort of a watered-down God-figure — to the extent that we often hear warnings about the dangers of thinking God is just like a big Santa Claus. It’s a mistake, of course, to think that God is like Santa, but if you think that Santa is like God — all-knowing, all-seeing, rewarding the good, loving to give gifts, especially concerned with little children — then you’re starting to get it. Santa, like lots of other great figures from literature and popular culture (Superman, Aslan, Gandalf, Dumbledore …) is a little like God, in some ways, though not much like Him in others. Santa is one of the Powerful Good Guys, and the PGG’s exist in mythology and literature as glimpses of God, tiny human attempts to portay some aspect of a Divinity too big for our comprehension.

Of course, God knew God was too big for us to grasp in entirety, and so He packaged Himself small — very small, smaller than all our superheroes. The Baby in the manger is far, far more powerful and real than Santa will ever be, and Santa, like all of us and all our other heroes, must ultimately kneel at the manger, and at the cross.

But that makes Santa Jesus’ subject, not His enemy. I would argue that Santa, as a fictional character, is a loyal and faithful subject of the true God, in that in his best manifestations he points us towards kindness, generosity, laughter and joy.  If Santa is used as a symbol of crass consumerism to urge us to spend, spend, spend — or if parents use him to inculcate a “belief” in “magic” that will later backfire when their children question all the truths their parents taught them, then yes, I have my issues with the jolly old elf. But if he is what my grandmother told me he was — a lovely story that embodies the spirit of giving and generosity we should all practise — then he will always have a place on my tree, and in my heart.