Happy New Year 2015

The HNJJ crew's traditional New Year's song, New World Coming by Mama Cass Elliot...


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This year we are including a picture of our usual New Year's celebration...

Merry Christmas From the ACLU Redux

Every year about his time many supposedly Christian Americans break their own Ninth Commandment by claiming that the ACLU is anti-Christmas. So the annual rerun from HNJJ 2011:

Christmas, the time of the year when anonymous forum posters around the United States mistakenly rant about the American Civil Liberties Union being anti-Christmas. These posters apparently pass around anti-ACLU emails filled with deliberately erroneous information and, without checking the facts, cut-and-paste them all over the Internet.

This year the HNJJ is going to be proactive, presenting only a handful of the many past ACLU cases that have supported the celebration of Christmas:

In 2003, the ACLU successfully defended the right of the members of a Massachusetts’ high school student Christian Bible Club to hand out candy canes with religious messages attached.

Five days before Christmas, 2006, Maui County, Hawaii, put up a Christmas tree after receiving a letter from the ACLU advising them they should get one.

The Rhode Island ACLU “…successfully interceded on behalf of an interdenominational group of carolers who were told they could not sing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve to inmates at the women’s prison in Cranston.”

While preempting the annual anti-ACLU Christmas posts, its also time to address the annual years-old “send a Christmas card to the ACLU” message which has been debunked by many fact checkers including Snopes and Urban Legend.

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As Hillsborough is located in Central Jersey, we couldn’t sign off without mentioning 2005's Turton, et al. v. Frenchtown Elementary School, et al. In this case, a second-grader was denied permission to perform the hymn Awesome God at an after-school talent show due to the religious content of the song. The ACLU participated amicus curiae, defending the child’s right to sing her chosen song.

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As a brief update, here are links to the ACLU article Celebrating Chistmas in America and further information on ACLU Defending Christmas.

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For those Christians who don't want to admit that they don't know what the ninth commandment is, it's the one about bearing false witness.

HNJJ CHEF: Pumpkin Cake Roll

While the HNJJ Chef has claimed in the past to focus on Cheaper Healthier Easier Food,  this is one of those recipes that just has to be done for the holidays.  In the past many pumpkin cake rolls have been rather blah, but finding a recipe sponsored by a spice company suggested that it might be more flavorful...and it was...

 

They even put some pumpkin pie spice in the cream cheese filling.

There are a lot of dishes to wash, but putting it together wasn't as daunting as expected and it came out looking as good as the photographs in the fancy magazines.

  Enjoy!