RussHutto.com

These are the Scroogie things about me when it comes to Christmas time.

1. Christmas Carols/Songs on the radio for a month. I mean, seriously, does the phrase “run…into…the…ground” mean anything to these folks?
2. Bad Lifetime/Hallmark Christmas movies. Really? How many different ways can we spin the Dickens tale? Is it really Christmas every day? How many times is the “spirit” of Christmas gonna have to be restored to a quaint little town in the Pacific Northwest or New York City, for that matter?
3. Blue Christmas lights…actually rainbow colored lights bug me too. White Christmas lights just say, “We’ve got Christmas class.”
4. The PC “Happy Holidays vs. Merry Christmas” debate. Just say whatever you want. If someone doesn’t celebrate Christmas they can always respond with, “Mucho take it easy!” (Nacho libre quote)
5. Christmas clothing. I’m not talking about winter clothing, I’m talking about THAT sweater. You know the one I’m talking about. It’s busier than a medieval tapestry depicting the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 AD.
6. Fake Santa replacing Saint Nicholas. I don’t have kids and more power to those of ou who rock Santa at your house, but be darn sure I’ll be sharing who “St. Nick” really was with my kids and pointing out how what he did glorified God.
7. Fake Santa replacing Jesus. I’m a Believer, so sue me. Fake Santa represents “gimme” and greed (conveniently wrapped in the mantra of “Christmas is all about giving”)…while Jesus is all about “give you” and selflessness.
8. Fake courtesy. Christmas is the most joyous time of year right? Not really. We just tighten our masks a little bit tighter and paint a little more shiny makeup on them. Many people experience a lot of hurt and painful memories during this time of year. I hate that we fool ourselves into thinking that shiny lights and reindeer somehow change everyone into elvish happy go lucky joy dispensers.
9. Gaining weight over the holidays. Let’s face it, me, you’re not the beanpole skinny kid you were in college. It’s downhill from here. Quit eating like a starved castaway that’s just been rescued and sent to an all you can eat buffet. You can do it, self.
10. Giving needy families a helping hand only to do it again and again year after year. Don’t get me wrong, I think we should do all we can to help people in the short term, but there’s definitely something wrong when we have to go back to the same family ever year with handouts. I would really enjoy it if I were somehow able to get involved throughout the year and help educate and empower those families to move out of that neediness (thanks, keith!)…

Based on a post by Tam @ inProgress. She posted some things she didn’t enjoy and this was my comment response.

We all have some sort of holiday and Christmas traditions growing up.

Every Christmas morning my dad would get up early and make a delicious breakfast casserole, kind of poor man’s quiche, but in casserole form. It was awesome. We still do it to this day.

1 lb. sausage
2-3 pieces Toast
Eggs 12-15
1 to 1 1/2 cup Grated Cheddar Cheese
Milk (1/2 cup)
Pepper
Paprika

Brown sausage, and pour off grease. Spray Casserole Dish. Break toast into
pieces and place on bottom of dish.

Next layer – sausage.

Beat eggs and mix in milk, pepper and cheese together. Pour over Sausage layer. Sprinkle paprika over top.

Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes.

Then we’d all gather around the living room and share the story of Jesus’ birth out of Luke.

Then after much anticipation we’d share gifts.

What are some of your favorite yearly Christmas traditions?

(ht: @snowjunkie)

IHOP-KC (international House of Prayer, Kansas City) is giving away a collection of worship music including worship artists such as, Misty Edwards, Merchant Band, Justin Rizzo and more!

Go ahead and get on over there and get you some free music!!

Our website gets compliments from all over the world. People leave positive feedback on it all the time. It serves its functions and works very well for us.

The design is simple and clean. The backend maintenance is easy. Our staff keeps it updated. Not one guy with a password. Every ministry department has access to it to keep their sections updated.

It works.

What’s amazing is, we basically pay hosting on it. We didn’t hire a world-reknown firm to rock our site, though that would be nice. We didn’t have the budget to do that.

So we bought a year’s worth of hosting, downloaded wordpress, connected to photobucket, and the rest is history.

That being said, I know some of you web design and code folks can probably rip our site to shreds, but that’s not the point. The point is it serves our needs and it does it well.

Take a peek here: HouseOfJoy.info

Here’s the elements of our website.

1. Hosting: about $100 bucks per year.
2. WordPress: works for us. Got a good solid theme and tweaked it to our liking. Some html, php, css knowledge would be helpful if you plan on tackling this step.
3. Design: kept it simple and functional. The top header is also the “look” of our information brochures and also our big yearly mailer that we’ve used in 08 and will use in 09. Keeps the “brand” similar. I do all the design in photoshop or photobucket (they have an online editor). I do the thumbnails in photobucket.
4. Message series ads: I make a banner for the bottom and save it as “message-series-ad” every time. In the “code” of the template of the theme (wordpress) I’ve added a snippet of code that tells the website to grab the message series from the folder it’s in on the website. When I upload a new one (but keep it named the same thing) it automatically refreshes the ad. That way I don’t have to go in every time and mess with the code.
5. Page Side bar: instead of the typical blogroll/meta/ad stuff you see on blogs, we replaced the code in the sidebar template to show our families and quotes. That way whenever you visit a “page” – such as about, contact, etc. – you see our families and what they’re saying about HOJ. Instead of just having a “quotes” page we thought that would be a neat way to weave it in.
6. Using the “blog” set up for updates. We have 2 sections in our “front page” sidebar. One is “Around the House” – that’s for our churchwide events and news. Our administrative assistant updates those. The other is “Starting Point” – our discipleship classes. Our groups coordinator updates those. The updates process is basically them posting a blog. They select either “Around the House” or “Starting Point” as the category for the blog post and that places them in the appropriate location on the front page. When they’re finished they submit it for review and then I ad a thumbnail and publish it to the website.
7. Rotating photos: on the front page and on the youth and children’s page we use a rotating image slideshow from photobucket. I know there’s other image rotators that are spiffier and more “pro” but I decided to use photbucket because of the ease of use for all our volunteers. I’ve never been one of those “media” guys who puts pro output over volunteer involvement. Some church websites are so professionally designed that it takes a genius to maintain them. We wanted to create a web space that could easily be maintained and updated by anyone with even minor web experience. And it works. When our volunteer photographer, Jonathan Chick, takes new photos we can easily upload them into photobucket and add them to the slideshow without ever having to change any code.
8. Podcasts: a volunteer puts them together in audacity (a free program) and uploads them via ftp to our server. We have an rss feed that keeps our iTunes podcast updated as well. All he has to do is drag and drop the newest one by ftp. By using the Parent – Child category function in wordpress we can create archives pretty quickly by copying and pasting the “archive” podcast links into a new page and creating that page with the parent category of “podcasts.”
9. Ads in the rotating slideshow: For some big events we’ll double up on exposure and also put a “slide” in the rotating photobucket slideshow. It’s basically a matter of uploading the slide in jpg form and then clicking it to add to the slideshow. Pretty easy.

Granted, it’s not perfect, and I’m still working out a few kinks here and there, but it is a good solid website.

(EDIT) Links to services we use: photobucket.com, wordpress.org, audacity

12.03.08Living Room Video

Video summary:

1. Papa & Mama visit.
2. Angels We Have Heard (Gloria)
3. Coaching/Mentoring
4. Santa or No Santa @ ragamuffinsoul.com