It\u2019s Christmastime and I love to listen to Christmas music, and I have about 5 old cassette tapes I always pop into my decrepit tape player I bought at a yard sale a couple of years ago for this express purpose. It\u2019s great to listen to The St. Michael\u2019s Boys Choir, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Nutcracker, Barry Manilow (courtesy of my friend Amanda, whose awesome craft blog is here. She\u2019s amazing.), The Preston High School A Capella Choir, circa 1989 (featuring my younger sister and her friends and the songs they sang behind the newly fallen Iron Curtain in Prague and Warsaw, which is an amazing other story for another day), and Robert Goulet (also courtesy of Amanda.)<\/p>\n
Lots of great memories, great feelings from Christmas music.<\/p>\n
So I was at my other friend Louise\u2019s house yesterday morning and she had me listen to a couple of new favorite Christmas songs she\u2019s discovered lately by a Christian artist named Bebe Norman. Louise admittedly loved \u201cweird\u201d Christmas songs, and these aren\u2019t weird, but they definitely come at the story from a different angle. I loved them!<\/p>\n
Which made me think: are there a lot of other Christmas songs I\u2019m missing out on? How would I possibly find out (without wasting YET more time on the internet. I mean, seriously, there are only so many hours in a day to waste online, and I\u2019ve got them booked up with social networking)?<\/p>\n
It hit me: Pandora. I\u2019ve had an account for a couple of years but only used it once to find a Michael Bubl\u00e9 song. Since then I haven\u2019t even launched it\u2014mostly because I was *sure* I\u2019d forgotten my password. But I have this Pandora Channel on our Roku box (which, honestly, was the best entertainment purchase we have ever made, hands down), and so I went onto the internet (without even checking my email, be proud of me) and logged onto Pandora.<\/p>\n
WEIRD. I was still logged in. After all the multiple system crashes since I first signed up like two years ago. And I set it up on my Roku so it plays through my TV and everything. And I set up \u201cTraditional Christmas Radio\u201d and a few other stations, and now as I make my first of many batches of Grandma Sybil\u2019s best rolls, I have been listening to a bunch of songs that were there waiting on my system all this time.<\/p>\n
But it hit me, I\u2019ve had this sitting here waiting for me and never used it. I could\u2019ve been motivating my kids to clean house to the Beach Boys or some kind of showtunes, and I never bothered to even launch it.<\/p>\n
It reminded me of this phrase we hear in church pretty often, that we as women need to \u201clive up to our privileges.\u201d I hadn\u2019t been living up to my privilege, something that was free to me because of what I\u2019d already bought, and all I needed to do was tap into it. Meanwhile, it made me think am I living up to my spiritual privileges. Are there things I\u2019m missing out on, things that have already been bought and paid for on my behalf and I\u2019m not taking full advantage of the joy and peace and well-being and enjoyment that are waiting for me if I would simply\u2026tune in. Like, promptings of the Spirit, chances to serve and be blessed, learning or understanding from the scriptures, the peace that comes through repentance and being forgiven\u2014the ultimate gift and privilege that has been bought and paid for for me by the Savior Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s Christmas. I\u2019m going to work a little more on accepting the free gifts, and do better at living up to my privileges as a daughter of God.<\/p>\n\n
It\u2019s Christmastime and I love to listen to Christmas music, and I have about 5 old cassette tapes I always pop into my decrepit tape player I bought at a yard sale a couple of years ago for this express purpose. It\u2019s great to listen to The St. Michael\u2019s Boys Choir, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[303],"tags":[311,313,276,312,314],"class_list":["post-541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-2","tag-barry-manilow","tag-living-up-to-our-privileges","tag-pandora","tag-robert-goulet","tag-roku"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2OUjT-8J","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.authorjennifergriffith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.authorjennifergriffith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.authorjennifergriffith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.authorjennifergriffith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.authorjennifergriffith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.authorjennifergriffith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":543,"href":"https:\/\/www.authorjennifergriffith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions\/543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.authorjennifergriffith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.authorjennifergriffith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.authorjennifergriffith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}