As Christians, Jane and I are a tad ambivalent about the whole Santa Claus thing. It’s not that we’re afraid that our kids will confuse Santa Claus with Jesus Christ–not in the short run, anyway. It’s just that we don’t want our kids to class Jesus Christ with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy in the long run.

At the same time, Santa Claus is a Christmas tradition of long standing. I got to sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what I wanted for Christmas, and I always got a present or two marked “From: Santa”, and I’m sure Jane did also. If my mom was at all ambivalent about the whole thing she didn’t show it; the only concession to logic was her admission that the folks in Santa Claus suits that I saw ringing bells and sitting in department stores were “Santa’s helpers.” That made sense to me; after all, Santa was at the North Pole making toys, he didn’t have time to race all over town ringing bells.

So for the last few years we’ve been walking a careful line. On the one hand, we’ve not gone out of our way to tell the kids about Santa Claus and the chimney; on the other hand, we’ve not tried to tell our kids that Santa isn’t real, either. We’ve let them come to their own conclusions.

Some people teach their kids about God this way.

Last night, we visited a neighborhood in Torrance that’s famous for its display of Christmas lights. It was spectacular. And in front of one house was, yea verily, a real live Santa Claus sitting on a big red throne. He was doing the whole Santa thing. Kids would tell him their special desires, their parents would snap a picture, and then he’d give them a little candy cane.

David, who is six, likes to work all the angles. He’d recently announced that he didn’t believe in Santa Claus; still, he was up there with the other kids, and was happy to rattle off his entire Christmas list.

James, on the other hand, streetlights shining down on his reddish-blond hair and his blue eyes and his freckles, walked up to Santa Claus and said, in his most serious voice, “You’re fake.”

I should add that there was nothing accusatory about James’ delivery; he was simply pointing out a fact that the man might have overlooked and would probably want to know.

The man recovered well; after a few speechless moments, he allowed as how he was one of Santa’s helpers. James was not particularly impressed by this, and didn’t tell the guy what he wanted for Christmas, but he accepted a candy cane anyway.

When I get caught up in a project, as I have been for some time, I
naturally gravitate toward old favorites–books that I know I’ll enjoy,
and that I know I won’t have to work at getting into because they are
already familiar. If I then get sick, as I did this week, the
acceleration of gravity doubles or triples. Which explains why I’ve
re-read Brust’s entire “Vlad Taltos” series since Tuesday–nine books,
all that currently exist, though ultimately the series is expected to run to
exactly double that.

And though–as I’m caught up in a project, and as I’m still getting over
being sick–it would be easy to tie all nine books up in a short bundle
of prose and say, “Go read them,” I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m
going to attempt to handle each book individually, and convey a little of
the flavor of each one.

Jhereg is the first of the series as they were originally
published (though not the first chronologically; as with the Narnia
books, I find it best to follow the publication order rather than the
internal chronology).

Jhereg introduces us to one Vlad Taltos: mobster; assassin;
gourmet chef; master swordsman (in the Eastern style); witch. Vlad lives
in Adrilankha, the capital city of the Dragaeran Empire, where he’s a minor
but successful mob boss. In addition to managing his territory, he’s
also security consultant to Lord Morrolan of the House of the Dragon.
And a minor disaster has arisen which brings these two worlds into
conflict.

In the Dragaeran Empire, organized crime is the province of the House of
the Jhereg. And it seems that a highly placed member of the house has
absconded with most of the house funds–and taken refuge with Lord
Morrolan, who has offered him 17 days of sanctuary. For business
reasons, the thief has to be killed ASAP, but Morrolan has sworn an oath
that the lives of his guests are sacred. Guess who gets the job of
performing the hit?

Vlad’s a witty (if unreliable) narrator, and Dragaera is an interesting
blend of hardboiled detective fiction with the traditional
sword-and-sorcery milieu, with perhaps a dash of Monty Python thrown in.
I confess, Jhereg took me a while to get into the first time I
read it, partially because Vlad doesn’t explain much at first, and
partially because the book is set in the middle of Vlad’s story, just before his
life is about to take an abrupt left turn. On the other hand, the book
introduces not only Vlad but also many of the other continuing
characters: Morrolan, witch and wizard both, who has been known to
sacrifice entire villages to his goddess, and who also maintains a
twenty-four-hour-a-day cocktail party; his fiery cousin Aliera,
Dragon-Heir to the throne, who’s inclined to kill first and ask questions
later–literally; Sethra Lavode, the undead Enchantress of Dzur Mountain;
Cawti, Vlad’s wife; Kragar, his lieutenant; and, of course, Loiosh,
Vlad’s sarcastic familiar.

This is quite simply one of my favorite books; in my view it should
belong on any list of the 100 best fantasy novels of the 20th century.

It’s a peculiar tale set in China circa 600 AD, and it begins in a
straightforward way. A plague has been visited upon the children of a
small village of silk-growers. Number Ten Ox, the strongest young man in
the village, is sent to Peking with his mother’s savings, there to hire a
wise man to come and save the children.

Ox soon finds the Street of Eyes in Peking, where the wise men live;
every door is adorned with the sign of a wide blinking eye. The wise men
see all, and they see quickly that Ox’s mother’s savings isn’t worth
their time. He is nearly despairing when he sees one last house, a shack
adorned with the sign of an eye that’s only half open. “Some things I,
but some I don’t,” the sign seems to say.

Ox enters the shack, and finds a wizened old man snoring amid squalor and
the smell of sour wine. On the wall is a diploma that declares that 78
years before, one Li Kao won first place in the Imperial chin-shih
examinations. He is quite taken aback.

I turned from the picture of the rose and gazed with wide eyes at the
ancient gentleman on the mattress. Could this be the great Li Kao, whose
brain had caused the Empire to bow at his feet? Who had been elevated to
the highest rank of mandarin, and whose mighty head was now being used as
a pillow for drunken flies? I stood there, rooted in wonder, while the
wrinkles began to heave like the waves of a gray and storm-tossed sea.
Two red-rimmed eyes appeared, and a long spotted tongue slide out and
painfully licked parched lips.

“Wine!” he wheezed.

I searched for an unbroken jar, but there wasn’t one. “Venerable sir,
I fear that all the wine is gone,” I said politely.

His eys creaked toward a shabby purse that lay in a puddle. “Money!”
he wheezed.

I picked up the purse and opened it. “Venerable sir, I fear that all
the money is gone too,” I said.

His eyeballs rolled up toward the top of his head, and I decided to
change the subject.

“Have I the honor of addressing the great Li Kao, foremost among the
scholars of China? I have a problem to place before such a man, but all
that I can afford to pay is five thousand copper cash,” I said sadly.

A hand like a claw slid from the sleeve of his robe. “Give!” he
wheezed.

I placed the string of coins in his hand, and his fingers closed
around it, taking possession. Then the fingers opened.

“Take this five thousand copper cash,” he said, enunciating with a
painful effort, “and return as soon as possible with all the wine you can
buy.”

After this inauspicious beginning things improve for truly this is the
great Li Kao, foremost among the scholars of China, and truly he is a
brilliant man–and also an incorrigible reprobate and con-man. It will
take all of Ox’s strength, and all of Li Kao’s wits, to save the children
of Ox’s village, for there is more going on than meets the eye. What
follows is a delightful romp through Chinese myth and legend. The story
is bawdy (but never obscene), funny, and moving by turns, and though
Hughart wrote two further books about Ox and Li Kao he never quite
reached the same height.

OK, so I broke down and bought all the books in the series after finishing
the two I had on the shelf. The bookstore owner just chuckled, the swab,
when he saw what I had in my hand. Apparently O’Brian fans come into his
store with an addicted gloss to their eyes needing the next fix in the
series. And, boy, can I see why. I thought I’d slowly drift thru the series,
maybe one a month, and take my time. But no, I am actually finding myself
staying up a night to finish one so I can go on to the next. And the
suspense with the whole Diane/Stephen thing is killing me.

Will has reviewed the books three or four times in the last few years and I
suggest you go and read his thoughts.

I can only add that if you are new to the series, muscle your way thru the
first book (Master and Commander) just to get the characters down and then
proceed on. Skip liberally if you need to but still retain the sense of
storyline. O’Brian gets over the need to explain ever jib, spar and sail on
a ship and moves the action along much better after he gets the series
going. Maturin also develops depth as the series progresses and so far as I
can tell, becomes almost more interesting than Jack Aubrey. He certainly is
a good foil to the heavily muscular naval setting in the books.

…but I’ve been sicker ‘n a dog for the last couple of days, on top of everything else I’ve got going on, and I’ve had no energy for writing. I do have a stack of books to review, though, and I hope to get to them over the next few days.

There are hundreds of thousands of distilled man-years of programming
wisdom in this book. Some of it was already familiar to me from hard-won
experience; some of it was new to me; some of it made me see aspects of
my current project in a new light. It’s the sort of book that puts words
to things I know perfectly well but have never verbalized.

If you’re a programmer, get a copy of this; it’s a fun read, and I
guarantee you’ll learn something you didn’t know before.

…the author’s intentions really do matter. Here’s an article on the
spiritual underpinnings of The Lord of the Rings, underpinnings of which Peter Jackson and his cast are apparently in denial.

Here are some blogs I’ve found myself visiting recently.

Captain Yips

The Captain comments on a number of things; I started reading him because of his commentary on certain recent happenings in the Episcopal Church.

Midwest Conservative Journal

I found MCJ shortly after I found Captain Yips, and for the same reason; plus he’s got some good ol’ conservative punditry.

Dawn Patrol

This is the blog of a writer (I gather) from New York who (quite to her surprise, given that she’s Jewish) became a Christian about four years ago. Dawn’s both thoughtful and reflective, and I’m enjoying her blog quite a bit. Alas, her page doesn’t seem to be responding at the moment, but with luck that’s only temporary.

Relapsed Catholic

This is another blog I discovered thanks to the mucky-mucks of ECUSA that’s made my daily rounds.

This is what I saw in my web browser first thing this morning. Courtesy of MCJ.

It’s always difficult to come into a series midstream if the narratives are
sequential and build upon each other. And this one is 5th or 6th in the
series, something I didn’t realize when I bought it or began to read it.
Still, it held my attention and then piqued my curiosity enough that I went
to the library and got a couple of the earlier books. They are buried
somewhere in the bag set by my chair for my reading hour during the day.

The setting for this series is mid-12th-century France. Catherine Le Vendeur
is a young matron and mother living with her husband in the home of her
merchant father. Catherine was a novice nun in a convent at Paraclete under
Heloise when sometime in the past she left the novitiate to marry her
English husband, Edgar. And sometime in the past, she discovered that
her father is actually a Jew converted at sword point to Christianity. Oh,
and her mother is insane and cared for by nuns somewhere and her sister,
Agnes, refuses to have anything to do with her or her apostate father. Oh,
yes, and somehow, Edgar lost his forearm in a sword fight.

That’s the background that I gleaned from this story, actually a murder
mystery. Agnes, her sister, up and comes to Paris demanding her share of her
mother’s jewels as dowry since she is marrying a count somewhere in a German
state. And after a couple weeks of marriage, her new husband dies
mysteriously and Agnes stands accused of witchcraft for causing his death.
Catherine can’t just let her sister either rot in prison or be killed as a
witch so she and her husband and a Jewish merchant partner of her father’s
make the journey to Germany under the auspices of a trade mission and
hopefully while there prove her innocence. Catherine discovers that the
marriage is unconsummated and that the count and someone else in the
household may have been involved in some odd ball ascetic cult of some sort.
And that may have been what caused his death.

For a historical mystery, Newman does very well. Giving Catherine a
converted Jew as a father gives her a twist that allows her to pick out bits
about the plight of medieval Jews in Europe. The supporting Jewish
characters are nearly as interesting as Catherine and her family. Now I have
to go back and find out just how Edgar wooed her out of the convent and just
what happened in England that he lost his arm. Not to mention what comes
next in the series.