Xmas

2005-12-06T07:50:00.000-08:00

The end of the semester cant come soon enough. Cant wait to go home for a month and not have to worry about tests and papers and grades. Plus Christmas is soon! im very excited even tho its hard to find time with all the crap i have to do. I dont know how much more i can change on my fifth paper i hope its almost good enough because im not going to be able to do much more with it. Maybee ill add some supportive evidence to some of my new points. Well time to take a calc test....

2005-11-30T15:11:00.000-08:00

Just finish my "draft" for paper 6. I decided to revise my fifth paper and i think its coming alot well. i was able to change a lot and i think ive managed to improve it alot. Chapter 7 of Nissenbaum was pretty interesting. its like the whole wassailing and role switching that whent on with the british was repeated with the slaves and their owners here. It is also mentioned that, as it did before, christmas helped the owners keep the slaves under thier control the rest of the year and show thier superiority.

2005-11-29T07:47:00.000-08:00

back from thanksgiving break and this semester is coming to an end. Christmas is getting very close. Thanksgiving to me has always symbolised the begining of the christmas season. The last paper has been postponed again. I think im going to edit my fifth paper because it wasnt my best work. I havent posted in the blog in a while... i hope ive written in it enough. I cant believe how buisy I am. I have so much work to do as the end of the semester appraoches. And I honestly cant wait to be dont with the last paper. Thanksgiving break was not long enough. Well I better get to work.

2005-11-08T07:44:00.001-08:00

i think its to bad people arent taught grammer any more. its an important tool in writing correctly and coming across as intelligent. Some times when i read some of my own sentences i can tell they aren't quite right. its deffinately a hard thing to grasp. Anyway i havent really figured out what all the points im going to make in my essay are yet. im having a little trouble putting it together. im using the Tiny Tim theme. Tiny Tim is a very important character and althought he is a bit 'over the top' i think its neccesary. he is a very touching character and has a great effect on the reader and the other characters in the story. i need some more evidence i guess and to expand my ideas a bit but im getting there...

2005-11-02T08:58:00.000-08:00

Well i finished a christmas carol last night and it mad me kinda excited for christmas. to day were going to discuss it in class. time to start the next paper i guess. the rest of this semester is going to be so much work. in class on monday we talked about college. i agree that its a very intellectual environment here and i think one of the reasons poeple choose to come here is to benefit from that kind of an atmosphere. i really like it here and i feel that hight school prepared me for college, no surprises. i think that maybe in smaller schools people were less liberal in their ideas but i graduated i a class of almost 500 and i we were always encouraged to have our own opinions. as for speaking in class and students having a more active role i think its a good thing for people to feel comfortable speaking there mind in class and we definately have that in this class. im dont participate in class discussion very often and i guess thats i bad thing. maybee ill try and participate more....

2005-10-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

Today schacht said hes giving us untill monday to finish the paper which is good, im not satified with mine yet and now friday we can dicuss it more in class. we also discussed religion in class today, i personally think the face on the tree was pretty stupid. When deciding to take this class i though there would be more descussion about religion but i guess religion doesnt have as much a significance in Christmas as i thought it did. This chapter brings religion into the picture because differnet religious beliefs give people different views on humanity. Are people born with an original sin or are people born pure and turned bad by how they are riased and their experiences? If people are by nature greedy then this trait should be forced out of children by thier parents but if not then parents should preserve thier childrens innocence. The christmas tree seems to be a way of keeping the children from expecting gifts the aspect of surprise was very important.

2005-10-20T16:10:00.000-07:00

Well i just sent in my draft for paper four, its deffinately a work in progress. I have to add more and fix it up i bit but its a good start. I started reading chapter 5 in nissenbaums book and its interesting how slavery is connected so much with the treatment of childres. who knew that the idea for the christmas tree was spread by abunch of abolitionists who were outcasts from society. Well thats all for now... i wonder what schacht thinks of the wiki

2005-10-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

Today in class the librarian showed us more about how to find sources to use for our paper. It was pretty kool that she found us a bunch of primary sources we can use. the source that i got is an article from the NY times about the markets during christmas. there are a few things the can relate to Nissenbaums book. i can tell that each essay is getting harder, this ones going to take alot of work to analize and compare the two and write a good paper about it but i guess it wont be to bad. ive never written so many papers but im getting used to it. At least this class is kinda interesting.
I think that bringing christmas into the home and off of the street is in the most part an improvement. It made the holiday more intimate, but we still have New Years to cut loose and have some fun. I guess the fact that the holiday is no longer celebrated as a community but instead as private individuals is kinda a down side. It sorta united society, all participated in a way. And when it was less a domestic holiday it was also less comercialized.
The third paper was also due today which means the Wiki project is about complete. i think it came out pretty good but i wish i couldve added more to it. i tried hard not to repeat what others have written and i think we've fixed a lot of the repeate. it is also more organized then it was. everyone did a great job, i enjoyed working on it.

2005-10-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

Today in class we were talking about brilliant choise to nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme court. she not only is under qualified for the position but this is clearly a way for Bush to have his friend and old personal attorney head the supreme court. At a time when like this when he is loosing support for the war and being critisized for the way he handled hurricane Katrina he just wanted a long time supporter some one on 'his side' to head the supreme court.
I think a judge should definately have good writing skills. As we said in class the way she wrote her ideas can easily be misinterpreted. I think that you can tell an inteligent person from an uninteligent person from the way the speak and write. Writing is an inportant way to express your idea and for a judge it is even more important. She seems from the quotes we read to not have a strong stance on any issue which means we really dont know how she feels about issues, the people should at least have an idea of her stance on main issues but we do not.
I also thought it was interesting how modern english differs so much from how it once was. its like the beauty of words and the art of writing is gone. it so much more bland and boring now. Verbs are replaced with abstact nouns and it doesnt have the same effect that the statement once did.

2005-10-12T17:23:00.000-07:00

I was just working on the Wiki when i came across an interesting site, http://jjorg.chem.unc.edu/personal/monroe/twas/twasall48.html , its a bunch of variations of a visit from st. nicholas. Alot of its actually pretty dumb. I thought it was kool how when i google searched "joe nickell the case of the christmas poem" our wiki came up. i think that its coming along really well. Its better then us writing a bunch of papers, this is a lot more interesting.

2005-10-07T08:59:00.000-07:00

alright im really bad at remembering to do this blog thing. well the third paper draft is due today and i decided participate in the wiki. mr. schacht seemed very excited about it and i foud the idea very interesting. its nice that so moany people are involved in it and its growing very fast. i think its going to be a success. im interested to see how it turns out. i never really thought who wrote a visit was a big deal but its an interesting controversy. i have to admit that im glad i chose this intd its pretty kool. anyway, i approve of the wiki.

2005-09-27T22:18:00.000-07:00

The other day in class we went over grammer. i find gramer very confusing and uninteresting. its hard for me to pay attetion to wheather or not im using the right pronoun. I just got back my first paper and i had some grammer errors in it. i find it hard to believe that i will ever be able to write a gramatically correct paper. I was not to dissapointed in my grade in my first college paper and i hope to improve. i just finishe the readings about who really wrote "a visit" which we will discuss in class tomorrow. i though it was impressive how much work these people put into their research. it seems to me like a waste of time but it must matter to them.

2005-09-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

I just finished writing my second paper draft and i chose to write about abortion. i personally am pro-choice and i felt wierd letting the pro-life side seem right without defending what i believe. i enjoyed looking at the issue from the other sides point of view and the paper was not that difficult to write. i hope i wrote it the right way. its such a relief when i finish each paper.
well in class the other day we discussed how the role reversal had more then one purpose. it made the lower class happy by letting them be on top for aday and it helped the upper class show who was ontop. it reestablished the classes. we also started to discuss santa clause. i found it interesting when reading chapter two how santa clauses appearance is so significant. making him a lower class person who came on christmas to bring gifts to the wealthier people without expecting anything in return, this is very different from the traditional christmas was viewed up to that point. who knew santa claus was such an important figure? it is clear to me that the spread of this view of santa clause had a great affect on making christmas how it is now.
well thats all ive got for now... more on this when we further discuss it in class maybe

2005-09-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

OK its been a while since my last post, first of all i found that writing about a christmas tradition wasnt that bad. im not a big fan of writing but the first paper wasnt that bad. it was wierd for me at first to edit someone elses writing. i dont consider myself a very good writer so correcting someone elses writing didnt seem like the best idea. it wasnt as bad as i thought tho, i made a few suggestions and it was nice seeing what someone else thought of my paper before writing the finil copy.
today in class we talked a little about what christmas meens to society today. i think christmas is way to comercialized. living in america, a society based on ecenomics, its hard for an average consumer not to be influenced by corporations. i also think that there are definately different social standings in our country, our economic inequality has been increasing. wealthy are getting wealthier and income is not increasing at even close to the same rate as profits. the old christmas tradition of role reversal seems to be slightly present but could you imagine a worker in a factory switching roles with the head of the corperation, it would never happen. if anything christmas heps the rich get richer by increasing their profits.
the second papre topic is very interesting. writing about something thay i believe strongly about and giving the opposing side the upper hand is going to be strange. the satire was very interesting, the slave did a very good job revieling his masters falts and making a strong case against his actions. i hope i dont find it too difficult to make my own version of the master slave dialogue.

Reaction to Nissembaum

2005-09-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

while reading chapter one i found the way christmas used to be celebrated very surprising. who knew so much sex, drinking, and other strange traditions were associated with a holiday now known for giving and santa clause. I also found a comment on pg.34 very interesting it said that before 1720 christmas was hardly to be found but after 1760 it couldnt be avoided. That is a big change to happen in only 40 years. I couldnt imagine living in that time and experiencing that change. i also found it interesting how many different meanings christmas had to people in the late 1700s. its so wierd how much the meaning of christmas and the way we celebrate it has changed.
And it was deffinately wierd how mant similarities Xmas had with Halloween, the "trick or treat" aspect of it and the "performance". theres a lot more to christmas then i thought.

2005-09-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

Christmas is kool