Weekend Links: Advent, Book-Binding, the Name of Jesus, and more!

I'm posting this weekend's links early because, well, it's Thanksgiving! :D  And I intend to spend the rest of the weekend drinking coffee, eating pie, and playing with Legos.  I hope you're doing something similarly relaxing with people you love. Happy Thanksgiving, wonderful people! I'm thankful for you.

And now, links!

"Advent: why it matters (and how to do it sanely)": I was excited to see "Let Us Keep the Feast" mentioned here (thanks, Tsh!), but also excited to see a lot of other awesome-looking resources. If you're looking for ideas for celebrating Advent, this post is a great resource.

"This is How Huge Door-stopper Fantasy Novels Get Made": If you've never seen the process of book printing and book-binding, this is a great photo essay on the subject. I thought it was fascinating!

"Savor the Name":

Most fruit seems like a gift, but a pomegranate is the most extravagant. The seeds burgeon under the skin, and when you tear it open with a tart ripping sound, the byzantine arrangement within tells you that here, there is both order and design, and an unaccountable exuberance. The seeds shine. They glow like rubies, and you crunch them with your teeth and lick the blood of rubies off your lips.

Well, that's how I feel about pomegranates. 

wordy wednesday: because if I had had a camera, it would have been a great picture:
a few weeks ago, I linked to a post by Sandra Taylor, saying, "this is why I love Sandra's blog: because she's always writing stuff like this." Well, the above-linked post is why I love Anne Kennedy's blog: because she's always writing stuff like this. (And this.)

Crossroads Kids' Club: looks like a neat activity-a-day Advent program!

"Let Us Keep the Feast: a Book Recommendation":

. . . because what I really wanted wasn’t an abstract identity, but something that I could touch: I wanted Shabaat meals by candlelight, and long, restful Sabaath days; I wanted mezuzahs and prayer shawls, feasting and fasting; I wanted to dance with the scrolls on Simchat Torah, and eat the bitter herbs of Egypt on Passover.

"What Steven Moffat Doesn’t Understand About Grief, And Why It’s Killing Doctor Who":

Then Moffat, of course, took over the show as show runner. And once again, people just seem to keep… not dying. Part of the problem is that Moffat’s a big fan of the Giant Reset Button — so much so that he literally wrote in a Giant Reset Button into the episode Journey to the Center of the TARDIS. One step above the “It was all a dream” plot, the Giant Reset Button absolves the characters and the writers of any repercussions and they can carry on as they were, even though we, the audience, saw a “major event” that is evidently no longer relevant. You can have your fun and adventure, but you need not learn or grow or change from it.