I have so many Christmas ornaments, I have to put up my tree in stages. By ‘stages,’ I mean, every once in a while I go in there and hang a few ornaments. I think I finished the main living room tree tonight, though. Next stop: dining room tree. I want the house to be pretty when my friends come over Saturday night for a few rounds of killer euchre.

The new Carnival of Education is up; click on over and catch up on what’s happening in the world of education. You owe it to your children, and all the other children in the world. CLICK.

Then, you need to go over to Patriside’s blog and sign up for the new MixMania!

THEN, I want you all to click over to Genuine’s blog and assure him that it’s perfectly normal for a small child to sleep in the linen closet. Heck, my son used to love to sleep in large cardboard boxes in the living room or front porch. If he ever drops out of school, I figure he’s had practice living in a prototype of his future home. If he drops out of school. I’m not kidding, either.

I teach a college ‘orientation’ course. One of the requirements is four hours of community service. This requirement works a hardship on my older students who have families and full-time jobs, and who are having a hard enough time working in some credit hours around already-overloaded schedules. That being said and duly noted, I think everyone should put in some time with service projects, but those projects need to be adapted to the dynamics of the particular class.

While most of the professors are having their students volunteer at the Humane Society, Red Cross, Salvation Army, various shelters around the city, or perhaps tutoring kids in after-school programs, my students chose something a little different. I submitted it for approval, and it was approved.

My students are sponsoring a cabin of boys, in a facility for troubled children, for Christmas.

This service project fulfills all the requirements the college set down, plus. My students put in far more than four hours of time on it, but it was time that was a part of their regular shopping and class time. We spent three hours just this afternoon, tagging and wrapping hundreds of packages for our boys. My students went far above and beyond the call of simple duty with this project, and I am very proud of them. There will be a cabin of very happy boys on Christmas morning.

I am not discounting the typical service project of monitoring the desk at the humane society or answering phones for the Red Cross, but I really believe my students got a lot more out of our project. I never was conventional, and back in the public school I was used to my students sponsoring a family for Christmas each year. It feels good to be back in the service project saddle, as it were. Thank you, dear Jim, for allowing us to be part of your beloved boys’ holiday season.

It’s a little after six and I’ve got my huge hideous red nightgown on already. If you come over and ring the doorbell and I answer and you see this humongous red thing coming at you, please don’t yell ‘fire.’ It’s just me, as is.