When I pulled a 36 year old meditation manual off my shelf this week, looking for this morning’s reading by Jane Ranney Rzepka, I didn’t remember that it included specific mention of the winter holidays, and more specifically still, how they are celebrated in many Unitarian Universalist churches.

In nearly 31 years of ministry I’ve participated in lots of stewardship campaigns, each with a different theme.

I remember the year the theme was peloton, and folks were encouraged to give generously enough so that those church members with fewer financial resources were able to draft along with them, while the whole church still moved forward.

Today is the first of December. I haven’t even opened the first door on my Advent calendar of tea–one of many secular ways of counting down toward Christmas. And we’ve only just lit the first Advent candle on this the first Sunday of Advent–a more religious means of tracking the days until to Christmas. And I’m already grumpy.

Prior to this week, when Megan introduced me to Sleeping Beauty: A Midcentury Fairytale, my favorite version of the old tale came from The Barefoot Book of Princesses.

At the board retreat last Saturday, one of our UUCS board members said, “In order to plan for this year and beyond, we need to know how many members we want to have. And what kind of members do we want to have? ”

I was spending a few days with my friend Ruth when Ruth’s cousin came by for the afternoon with her kids and one of her daughter’s friends.

When the finance committee settled on this year’s stewardship drive theme just over a week ago, I didn’t hide the fact that I didn’t much like that theme. But I’m new here, and we were short of time, so I bowed to the decision of the group. I may have grumbled a bit on my way home from church that evening, but by morning I knew the committee had given me a gift: I’ve never had an opportunity to preach about enriched uranium before. More on that later.

This may sound like a bold or perhaps peculiar statement to make on Animal Blessing Sunday, but here goes: I don’t watch cute cat videos. Or cute puppy videos. Or avidly devour feel-good stories about animals saving lives or predicting the outcomes of elections or traveling thousands of miles to be reunited with their families