Holding on to joy when the world feels heavy plus a big warm dive into Christmas traditions (and the surprising history behind them).

This week on Chasing Faith, Dorothy and Jason start in a very real place: grief, shock, and exhaustion after a brutal news cycle. From the shooting at Brown University to a horrific mass shooting in Australia, the conversation wrestles with what it means to look for “comfort and joy” when comfort feels absent and joy feels out of reach.

From there, Dorothy invites Julie Bennett (pastor’s wife and future guest) to help make sense of it. Julie offers a grounding reframing: joy isn’t a reward for having it all together. Joy is fuel. Strength. Something given, not earned.

And then, because it’s Christmas week, the episode turns toward tradition, memory, and meaning with holiday historian and author Ace Collins (aka “Doc Holiday”), who brings the kind of Christmas lore that makes you laugh.

In This Episode

The hard stuff we’re carrying

• Dorothy reflects on the horror of school shootings and how it lands differently when you’ve lived breaking-news chaos in a newsroom.
• Jason shares a personal gut-punch memory: hearing about a school shooting near where he grew up while his mother was teaching.
• The ache of the season: students coming home, families gathering, and the world still feeling unsafe.

Holding on to joy (Guest: Julie Bennett)

Julie shares what she calls a “bubbling up” scripture: Nehemiah 8:10 “The joy of the Lord is our strength.”
Her takeaways:

• Joy is not a trophy for being okay.
• In the Biblical context, the people had messed up badly, and God offered joy instead of shame.
• Peace makes space for joy, and joy becomes strength for the moment you’re in.

Christmas week detour (and the fun stuff we need)

• Dorothy’s December lifestyle: Christmas movies + See’s Candy (nonstop).
• Jason shares a childhood memory of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” and reading it to his grandparents.

Main Guest: Ace Collins (aka “Doc Holiday”)

Holiday expert. Prolific author (over 100 books). Christmas historian. Story machine.

What Ace brings:

• Why It’s a Wonderful Life flopped at first (wrong cultural moment, wrong season, film noir era vibes) and how TV resurrected it into legend.
• Why Christmas songs make you “immortal,” and what it takes for a song to become a multi-generation touchstone (yes, Mariah comes up).

Wild Christmas history highlights:

• “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” helped shift America’s Christmas from rowdy to family-centered.
• Christmas trees were once hung upside down from ceilings in parts of Europe (picture the ladder chaos).
• Martin Luther gets credit for putting candles on trees (and inventing the first major Christmas fire hazard).
• The first widely affordable electric Christmas lights took off in the late 1800s.

“O Holy Night” the story inside the song:

• Written from a poem commissioned for a Christmas Mass in 1840s France.
• Played in 1906 during what Ace describes as the first wireless broadcast of a song.

Dorothy shares a tender thread running through this season: ornaments as memory. She talks about friends who lost homes in the Malibu fires and how Christmas decorations hit differently when “the stuff” is actually history—handmade preschool ornaments, keepsakes, family markers. Dorothy saved her meaningful ornaments, but they’re still being cleaned, so for now it’s a “Charlie Brown” little tree and hope.
Jason and Dorothy close with a simple Christmas wish and a reminder to rate, review, and subscribe.
Merry Christmas from Chasing Faith. 🎄✨