Brigid,
Hi, and happy Advent. You seem to be making a couple of suggestions that I don’t quite agree with.

Number one, if something is bad for children to watch because it is damaging to the immortal soul, than it is just as bad for adults to be watching. Why do we think we can ingest the poision we wouldn’t serve our children? Following that logic, when we reach adulthood and imagine ourselves to be that much more sophisticated, we may as well engage in any kind of spiritual poison. It just doesn’t add up.

Secondly, our duty in this life is to strive for perfection. Thomas Kinkadeville may be quite idealistic, but isn’t it worth striving for? When we gather for Christmas we do not deny our family skeletons, we tend to look beyond them, at least temporarily, because the birth of Our Lord is of much greater magnitude. When we throw up our hands as if to say, "it’s impossible," when we give in to the world, we are despairing. And despair is a sin; the opposite of Hope. Certainly the birth of Christ gives us a reason to hope, doesn’t it?

Norman Rockwell captured the innocense and charm of a by-gone era that ended because mankind gave up. Today, instead of Rockwell and Jimmy Stewart, and a host of others, we are presented with "National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation," "Bad Santa" and other garbage because somewhere along the way we convinced ourselves that we are incapable of ever achieving perfection.

The family that stood up for Christian decency should be applauded.