Craig and Jodi's Wedding Movie

Dana and Papaw's 75 Anniversary

This is the news article that was in the Palestine Herald Press on Sunday, January 29th, 2012:

Virgil and Lela Harris of Palestine are celebrating their 75^th Wedding Anniversary on January 30th with a dinner hosted by family and friends.
Lela Kelley Harris says her father cried when she told him she was getting married. His 21-year-old girl was marrying a man that he had not met and that Lela had only known for a couple of months. The year was 1937. She was a tall, beautiful red head who had caught Virgil Harris’ eye as she walked past the gas station where he worked on Avenue A in Palestine. He was 22, having been born the year World War One broke out in Europe. He was six-feet-one, weighed 220 pounds and had a 29-inch waist. He was all muscle and movie-star handsome with black hair as thick as his biceps.
When Lela began her new job and first started walking to it from her parents’ home, she didn’t notice the young man at the station. Then one day, her older sister came in and said there was a good-looking fellow at the gas station. “Let’s go get some gas,” she said with a wink. The girls scraped up a quarter and went and bought two gallons of gasoline for their father’s car. Virgil and Lela made eyes and the rest is history.
Well, as Lela Kelley walked by his station each day on her way to her depression-era government job in the old Post Office building in downtown Palestine, Virgil would come out to the street with a water hose and pretend he was going to spray her. She was a country girl from the hills of Concord in north Anderson County. He had only recently moved to Palestine from Wood County after he and his older brother, Roy, purchased the gas station from Williams Oil Company. He lived with a family on Dallas Street and also walked to work every day. Lela had long red locks that flowed behind her as she strode by on her five-foot-eight frame. She would cock her head at him and giggle as he tried to make the best of their brief daily encounter.
It didn’t take long for him to ask her for a date. She accepted and he met her at the movie theater. She says it was the Texas Theater, but he says it was the Pal. She told me he walked up with a coke bottle cap in one of his eyes and grinning like a mule eating briers. He had borrowed the “shop car” from the gas station. It was a Chevy coup with a broken steering wheel and no heater. “We didn’t need a heater,” he said, grinning. Their first date was on December first – his birthday. After the movie, which neither can remember, they drove the coup to the Old Mill Inn drive-in restaurant and ate burgers in the car.
The date must have gone well because they married two months later on January 30, 1937. He met her parents the night before the wedding and she went to Winnsboro to meet his folks a month afterward. A couple with a car drove them in thick fog to Jacksonville to Rev. Green’s house for the wedding. No family members were present.
The young couple moved into a furnished house on Kolstad Street where the rent was twelve dollars and fifty cents per month with all bills paid. Each of them made fifty dollars per month so they did okay. Virgil joined the home guard when World War II broke out.
She was a member First Baptist Church in Palestine and he soon joined her there. In 1954, they joined a new church on their side of town, Norwood Heights Baptist. They were faithful members of the church, teaching Sunday School and attending regularly until this past year. Lela worked in a flower shop, but has mostly been a homemaker; Virgil retired from Mopac Railroad in the mid-seventies and went to work as a salesman at KLIS Radio until the early nineties. Both are members of the Masonic Lodge. Virgil is also a Shriner and Gideon.
Now days, they don’t drive anymore, so they only visit Norwood when they can catch a ride with someone. They lost their oldest son, Don, in 2010, when he was 72. Remaining children are: Judy Foree and husband, Ken, and John Harris and his wife Linda, and Daughter-in-Law Fran Harris. Grandchildren are: Kevin Harris and wife, Kelly, Craig Harris and wife Jodi, Lezlee Neel and husband Gregg, and Stephanie Miley and husband Robert. Great-grandchildren: Travis and Kristyn Neel, David, Savannah, Kody, Tanner and Payton Harris, and Monica Miley.
Virgil, 97, and Lela, 96, are residents of Dogwood Trails Assisted Living in Palestine.

Good Lookin' Family

Writing and Playing

This is what I really enjoy doing - writing and playing songs on the keys and guitar. I haven't been doing this much in recent years, but I'm finally getting back to it.

Joan Hallmark Emmy Reception

Really enjoyed seeing my friends from my days at KLTV. We still enjoy watching Joan's feature stories and Mark Scirto's weather. Joan was honored for winning a Silver Circle Lifetime Emmy Award for her years of great broadcasting. I was her photographer and editor from 1987 to 1989 or so. They showed some video of Joan's past stories at the reception and used video that I shot. It was a story on Earl Campbell we videoed in Austin at Memorial Stadium.

Jesus' Real Birthday

We celebrate Christmas on December 25th each year, but is that really Jesus’ birthday? Almost certainly no. We celebrate Christmas on that day because Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor declared it be held on that day in the year A.D. 320. Scholars believe he did this because Christians were already celebrating Christ’s birthday on that date, which was the Roman holiday Saturnalia, a festival of light returning, to avoid persecution. Constantine did away with the pagan holiday and declared the 25th to be Christmas.
In fact, many believe the Bible indirectly teaches that Jesus was born on the first day of the Jewish festival called The Feast of Tabernacles (or Booths). The evidence is very compelling. John said Jesus came and “tabernacled” (dwelt in English translations) with us in John 1:14. The Feast of Tabernacles was a Jewish holiday that celebrated “God coming and dwelling with us”. It begins on 15th day of the Jewish month of Tishri (our September/October). It celebrates Moses’ building God a tent in the desert. During this joyous, seven-day celebration, the Jews go outside and live in booths (tents) to remind them that God is with us and that this earth is not our true home.
The Feast of Tabernacles holiday is called the “Season of our Joy” and the angel told the shepherds, “Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy that will be to all people.” The holiday is also called “The Feast of Nations”, because it was to be celebrated by all peoples after the Messiah came (Zechariah 14:16).
The swaddling cloths that Mary wrapped Jesus in give another clue. During the Feast of Tabernacles, strips of cloths were used to light the 16 vats of oil in the court of women. Even the word “manger” is symbolic here. It is the same word used for “booth” in the Old Testament. (Genesis 33:17)
The Bible says Jesus was circumcised on the “eighth day”. This was Jesus’ eighth day, yes, but it is also the name of a day on the calendar, called Shemini Atzeret, which is the day after the seven-day Feast of Tabernacles. That’s why many believe Jesus was born on the first day of the Feast of Tabernacles.
But that’s not all. The Magi were probably Jews from Babylon who had remained there since Nebuchadnezzar captured them. They continued the Jewish traditions and during the Feast of Tabernacles would have stayed out in tents. The tents had a hole in the ceiling so you could see the star of the Messiah!
When you think about it, shepherds would not be out in the fields with new lambs in the winter, but in the spring, summer or fall.
There is even more evidence. The Bible says that John the Baptist was six months' older than Jesus (Luke 1:36). You can calculate that John the Baptist was born in the month Nisan, which is our March/April. Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father, was in the division of Abijah, and Jewish Scholars say they were in the temple in the tenth week of each Jewish year. When you add nine months from when he was in the temple you find that John the Baptist was born in the spring.
John the Baptist, then, could have born during Passover. To this day, the Jews put out a plate for Elijah during their Passover dinner because he is prophesied to return before the Messiah (Malachi 4:5). Jesus said John the Baptist was the return of Elijah and fulfilled that prophecy when he was born (Matthew 11:14). Many believe, then, that Elijah did return during Passover, just as expected.
If you use an Internet calendar conversion program to calculate what Gregorian day Tishri 15 would have been on in 1 B.C. (The Jewish year 3761), you find that the day is Saturday, September 30th.
Why the year 1 B.C.? Because Luke 3:1 and 3:23 tell us that Jesus turned 30 years old 15 years after the Coronation of Tiberius Caesar which historians universally agree was in A.D. 14. When Dionysius Exignus, the Ukranian monk who declared the years that we still use, set the calendar, he used the January after Jesus’ birth as “the year of our Lord” – Latin: Anno Domini or A.D. 1. There is no year zero, so Jesus turned 30 in the fall of 29 A.D. Like it or not, we declare every day of every year that Jesus was born just before 1 A.D. Every time you write the date you acknowledge that Jesus was born, whether you believe in him or not. Some people want to say Dionysius was wrong, but I'm not willing to do that. I believe he was absolutely right.
Some scholars – even Christian scholars – have long stated that Jesus must have been born between 6 and 4 B.C. because of writings from Jewish historian Josephus stating that an eclipse occurred shortly before the death of Herod the Great and a known eclipse occurred in 6 B.C. Astronomers now say another eclipse occurred on December 29th of 1 B.C. Herod could easily have died in 1 A.D when Jesus was nearing two years old, which would fit right in with Matthew 2:16.
John 2:20 says the Temple in Jerusalem had been under construction for 46 years. It is universally agreed upon that Herod began renovations on the Temple “around 19 B.C”. If Jesus was 31 in 30 A.D., remembering that there was no year zero, then the Temple construction would have begun right when historians say it was.
Back to the birth date. This story is about to take an interesting twist: If Jesus was born on Tishri 15, he would have been conceived of the Holy Spirit on or near our Christmas Day. We may well be celebrating the day Jesus' life truly began on planet earth – the day he was conceived. A life begins at conception and it is fitting that we celebrate all of Jesus' life, not just after he was born. We make a big deal out of Christmas and well we should. For one thing, the world's economy would immediately collapse if we removed Christmas from the calendar. Whether or not you are a believer, your world would end as you know it if you took away the Christian faith.
One final thought. The Jewish holiday Hanukkah always falls near Christmas. The Hanukkah Menorah is said to represent Israel, “a light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42: 6). It would be fitting if Jesus was conceived during Hanukkah because, as the Messiah, he is indeed the Light of the World.

A White Christmas (Tree)

I talked my wife into getting this white tree this year. I wanted something different. I really like how it lights up the corner.