A peek at the process of picking Top 10 stories

This is what happens when you reach the end of December, schools and most government offices are closed and nothing much is happening in the way of news.
Every December we look back on the year that was and quite subjectively pick the top 10 or 20 news stories of the year. It’s what we in the media do because a) we’re bored, and b) we like starting arguments.
On the front page of this week’s paper is a list of stories that we feel are the biggest news stories of the year. Rather than picking the top stories and ranking them from 1-10 based on my own, biased perspective, I engaged a much more thorough and scientific approach to picking the stories. (I asked my colleagues here at the Star which ones they thought were the top stories.) What you see is the result of much thought and countless hours of market research to determine which stories had the most impact on our readers. (Actually, I hastily sent out an email with some suggestions.)
I usually consider two things when trying to pick top stories of the year. First, how did it impact the readers? Second, what was the “wow” factor; what were people talking about?
Based on that, I have to believe that the top story of the year is actually two stories – the two floods we had last spring. The floods most definitely impacted lives and it generated a ton of buzz.
From there, I think the next three stories are pretty interchangeable in terms of importance. They are the Sugar Land Skeeters championship, the opening of the Smart Financial Centre at Sugar Land, and the elections.
The Skeeters winning it all was certainly buzzworthy but it really didn’t impact the lives of readers. It impacted the organization and is certainly a feather in the city’s cap, but it didn’t move anyone to action (aside from buying tickets and merchandise). The opening of the Smart Financial Centre is the culmination of 10 years of work from conception to completion. It has gotten people talking, but its real grand opening is next year and that’s when its impact will be felt.
The elections made a lot of news but it’s too soon to say what impact they will have. Sugar Land has a new mayor in Joe Zimmerman. Fort Bend County voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton at the top of the ballot, but went solidly Republican down the ballot, including replacing Democratic County Commissioner Richard Morrison with Republican Vincent Morales.
Of the few Democrats who did win, one passed away just before Election Day, and another is a convicted criminal in deep financial trouble. I do not make light at all about the passing of Pct. 2 Constable Ruben Davis, whose service and integrity transcended party lines. He was running unopposed and deservedly so. Our condolences go to his family and the community for his loss.
State Rep. Ron Reynolds is returning to Austin for another term. While his re-election was not a surprise, he is yet another in a long line of politicians taking a seat with a criminal history and facing bankruptcy. The attorney was convicted in 2015 of barratry (ambulance chasing) and has settled several lawsuits against him from clients who accused him of keeping their portion of legal settlements. He has lost his license to practice law in Texas and filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Despite all of this, voters here overwhelmingly returned him to office. To me, that makes the story more about the voters than it does Reynolds.
As for the rest of the Top 10, you’re welcome to read about them on the front page and debate them all you like. I’d be happy to hear your opinion. At this time I’d like to do some inward reflection on 2016. I know a lot of people think it was a terrible year, but for me it was one of the best years of my life.
From a family standpoint, my two oldest children completed their formal education this year. Heather earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Northern Colorado and my oldest son, Wesley, became a certified machinist and lives in Florida. My wife, Sandy, is working on her masters in health administration and has just one semester left. Backing up a couple months into 2015, I gained a fantastic new stepmother when my dad re-married. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Barbara for the past year.
On a professional front, I have this wonderful new job as the editor of the Fort Bend Star. I love my colleagues and the community and feel very fortunate to be here. Being here for the past 10 months has afforded me some incredible opportunities. One of my greatest passions is sports photography and I’ve been able to cover the Skeeters throughout their championship season. I’ve also been able to cover the Houston Texans. Photographing NFL games is a lifelong dream come true!
This world is full of amazing opportunities and I’m excited about the coming year and everything that can be done and accomplished. I hope that you, too, are optimistic about what the new year will bring.
Thank you, dear readers, for such a great 2016. I sincerely hope it will be a good and prosperous 2017 for all of us.

December is disappearing faster than the meaning of Christmas

What do you mean Christmas is this weekend? What on earth happened to December?
Usually December is a slow time for those of us in the news business. It’s hard to reach people due to vacations and pressing deadlines to get things done by the end of the year. I can usually spend much of December catching up on personal stuff that I’ve had to put off because the rest of the year is so busy. This year the personal stuff overwhelmed me.
The first weekend of December was Colton’s birthday. It’s hard to believe my youngest is 14 years old now. The following weekend I flew back to Colorado for Heather’s graduation from the University of Northern Colorado. My oldest child is now a college graduate and I am so proud for her!
Last Saturday was my 17th wedding anniversary. Sandy is an incredibly amazing woman to put up with me for so long and to be so loving and kind.
In between these events are office Christmas parties, holiday events to attend and/or cover for the paper, and humbling attempts to do some shopping for the aforementioned birthday, graduation and anniversary. It’s no wonder I’m sitting here staring at Christmas this weekend with a deer-in-the-headlights look in my eyes.
I don’t know why Christmas always seems to take me by surprise. It shouldn’t. It’s been the same day on the calendar a lot longer than I’ve been around. What is surprising is how relatively short the time is that we have celebrated Christmas. There are many conflicting accounts of how the holiday came to be, but the modern version that we recognize and celebrate today is less than 200 years old.
Like most every other Christian holiday, what we recognize as Christmas has been blended with pagan rituals and symbolism. Although the history and symbolisms could be debated ad nauseam, the bottom line is Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Christ, an event the early Catholic Church celebrated at the Christ Mass (or Christ’s Mass). The inclusion of the traditional trappings of Santa Claus, reindeer, Christmas trees, elves, etc., has evolved over time, most notably in the early and middle 1800s.
Unfortunately, there is a strong movement to move Christ out of Christmas. It has been gaining momentum for decades and I strongly believe there are more people today who naively believe Christmas has nothing to do with Christianity than there are those who know the truth.
Both Easter and Christmas – the two holidays held most sacred by modern Christians – have their roots and traditions so intermingled with secularism that they barely have any semblance to their original meaning. I find this bastardization of Christian traditions disturbing on many levels even though I am blatantly guilty of promoting the secularization of the holidays.
As a child I used to look forward to the arrival of Santa. As an adult, not only have I carried on the tradition of Santa with my children, I have been Santa. For two seasons in the early 2000s, I portrayed the jolly old elf in a mall back home in Colorado. My own children sat on my lap and shared their wish list without ever knowing who it was behind the beard.
It was about this time that I was going through a tremendous growth spurt in my Christian faith and became conflicted about how to celebrate Christmas. I still love the traditions of giving gifts and opening them around the Christmas tree on Christmas morning. We still do that and probably always will.
On the other hand, I don’t want to lose sight of the real reason we celebrate Christmas. It’s the time we recognize and honor God’s perfect gift to mankind – the birth of his son. It might be more appropriate that we make a nativity scene the centerpiece of our decoration, but even that is in error. I often call it a naivety scene, because the arrival of the shepherds and wise men did not happen at the time and place where Jesus was born.
What we know as the nativity is a mash-up of events that happened months or even years apart. Nonetheless, it is a better representation of Christmas than Santa Claus and a decorated pine tree.
In a column I wrote many years ago, I suggested that there be some kind of new council of Christians that convenes with the purpose of researching the historical timeline of Jesus and re-establishing the celebrations of his birth and crucifixion separate and independent of the traditional Christmas and Easter celebrations. Although there are no recorded dates for the birth, death and resurrection of the Christ, we do know that the dates currently in use have a very high probability of being wrong.
Since then, I have downplayed the idea of separating the Christian aspects of Easter and Christmas from the holidays because I feared that the new holidays would not take hold and the opportunity to use the traditional holidays as tools for evangelism would be lost. I now believe those opportunities are being lost because the secular celebrations so overshadow the religious aspects.
So, maybe it’s time to reconsider uniting Christendom with the intent of taking back our holy celebrations. I don’t know when or how something like that might happen. It may never happen, but if it does let my voice clamor with any of those who would join me in calling for such a venture.
Let’s just do it after December, OK? There is already way too much activity packed into this month and it’s quickly vanishing like the meaning of Christmas.

The Force of Star Wars is strong in my family

For a moment, I was 11 years old again.
For a moment, I was that boy pretending to be Luke Skywalker, blasting away at the Stormtroopers while rescuing the princess from Darth Vader and the Death Star.
The moment was fleeting but the pain that went with running, jumping, ducking and stretching lingered on for days in my 50-year-old body. Last year at this time I was the editor of The Sealy News. Our staff did a team building exercise at The Main Event in Katy. One of the things we did was play laser tag. I had never played before. For those few exhilarating moments, however, I wielded my blaster and became that little boy 39 years ago who used to run through the forest, shooting it out with his peers with gun-shaped sticks. All of us youngsters were on a high from having seen “Star Wars” for the first time.
That movie changed my life in 1977 and even now, 39 years later, it still has a strong influence. I have been giddy with excitement and anticipation for “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” which finally opens in theaters this week. Back when the movie was first announced, I told myself I wasn’t going to obsess over it. I should have known better. The Force has a strong influence over my weak mind.
I have watched the movie trailers numerous times and have read several stories about it. It was just as I had done last year when “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” came out.
When our middle son was born in 2001, Sandy and I named him Luke. Anyone who knows me will swear that I named him after Luke Skywalker. The truth is that we named him after the biblical Luke. The Luke from the Bible was a physician, which represents Sandy’s occupation and passion. Luke was also an investigative reporter and chronicler of the life of Jesus and the early church. That made him a journalist like me.
A year and a half later when our youngest son, Colton, was born I wanted to give him the biblical names of James and Timothy. Even Sandy saw through that one, knowing that I’m also a huge Star Trek fan. No matter how much I argued about the names being biblical, Sandy wasn’t going for it. James T. (Kirk) was just too much of a coincidence. In a compromise, James became Colton’s middle name.
Suffice to say, Star Wars has weaved its magic through the fabric of my life. When the original trilogy debuted, I was just another obsessed fan. In 1999, when the first of the prequel movies came out, I took Sandy to the Star Wars Celebration in Denver. It was there, standing in line in the rain and the mud that I asked her to marry me. The Force must have been strong that day because she said yes!
We attended the midnight showing of “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” and I took the next day off from work so I could watch back-to-back showings all day. I can’t say that was the smartest thing I ever did, but it sure was fun.
On Dec. 17, 1999, Sandy and I were married. This Saturday will be our 17th wedding anniversary. We will celebrate it by going to a movie. (Three guesses which movie and the first two don’t count!)
All the excitement for the new Star Wars movie has me feeling like I’m that 11-year-old kid again. Celebrating 17 years with my beautiful, loving wife, however, is an even bigger joy. Doing both on the same day gives me one of those moments in time that will live with me forever. (It also makes it easy to figure out how to celebrate our anniversary. As long as Disney keeps releasing Star Wars movies in late December, I’ve got it made!)
Here we are a year after “The Force Awakens” and we get to experience a whole new Star Wars movie. There is a new one scheduled for each year through 2020 and probably beyond. I’m stoked! I can’t wait for it. Each movie brings a magical moment in time to treasure.
For a moment I get to pretend I’m Luke Skywalker on a great adventure in a galaxy far, far away. Only this time I’m not rescuing a princess, I’m loving and cherishing my bride and celebrating with a wonderful family. I wouldn’t change that experience for anything – not even for a moment.

Overcoming instability to achieve great success

Her parents separated when she was 3 years old and divorced when she was 6.
In her 12 years of schooling, she attended seven schools across three states. She followed that by attending two community colleges and a university in two states. In that time she bounced back and forth between three families and 14 different houses, not counting the three she lived in before the divorce and her time later in a college dorm.
Two years ago her grandmother – her rock and confidant – passed away. Both of her families have been through spells of extreme financial difficulty. Although she was blessed to have her tuition covered by loving grandparents, grants and student loans, she took jobs at a fast food restaurant and a big box store during her breaks from school to help earn money to get her through.
Despite the hardships and instability, she graduated high school with honors and on Dec. 10 will receive her bachelor’s degree in international affairs with a 3.5 GPA from the University of Northern Colorado. It took her six years, issues with credit transfers and a change of majors, but she did it!
The future is bright for this exceptional young lady. It’s also very clouded. At 24 years of age she has a college degree and the whole world at her feet. She is also preparing to embark on a career in an uncertain economy and without the prospects of employment beyond her current job as a cashier.
Her situation is one I can certainly relate to. When I graduated from Adams State College in 1987, I taped a message to my mortarboard that said “Now what?” I was 21 years old, had no job and was engaged to be married in two months. Times were tough in the late 1980s but somehow I made it through.
I have a very strong feeling that this young woman will do the same. The world is a much different place than it was 29 years ago. Back then we didn’t have cell phones, social media or even the Internet. We have those things today. The way employees and employers connect is very different. The world is different, especially for someone who wants to work internationally. Relations between countries are inconsistent and there is the great unknown of what the nation and world will be like under President-elect Trump.
There are times when I’m envious of this girl and the chance she has to make a fantastic future for herself. There are times when I’m afraid for her and the instability of this country’s current state of affairs.
This resilient young lady I’m talking about is Heather Southern, my firstborn child and only daughter. Heather’s journey to college graduation has not been easy. She was born in Elizabeth City, N.C., and moved with me to Colorado when my wife and I split up. Her mother soon followed. The divorce was final three years later and both of her parents remarried the following year.
When Heather was in middle school, her mother announced they were moving to Minnesota to be closer to her parents. We had a long, heated debates about where Heather would go and ultimately let her decide. She went to Minnesota and a couple years later moved again with her mom’s family to Virginia, not far from where she was born. There she graduated high school and started college.
At the same time Heather left Colorado, I made a move to Amarillo and later to Rosenberg. After a year of community college, Heather moved back to Colorado and lived with my parents while she enrolled in a community college there. With her core subjects out of the way, she enrolled at the University of Northern Colorado as an art major. In 2014 she took advantage of a program to study a semester of art in Florence, Italy. That changed her life.
Within two weeks of her return, my mother passed away. That had a profound affect on all of us, especially Heather. They were exceptionally close. That summer Heather faced the reality that she enjoyed globetrotting more than drawing and painting. That’s when she announced a change in majors. It added another semester of classes, but we think she’ll have greater career opportunities with an international affairs degree than she will with art. She does have an art minor and she is very gifted that way, so she’ll always have that to fall back on.
Whatever career course God leads her on, I’m very proud of her and she has my full support. Although I have many regrets not being a bigger part of her life, I am truly honored to have her as my daughter and I am overwhelmingly pleased with the woman she has become despite the rough road she traveled. Check that. I am proud of the woman she has become because of the road she has traveled.
She has strength of character, physical beauty and intellectual might. As a parent you can’t ask for much more than that.
Congratulations, my Little Princess! I love you so much!