christmas – Martin Simpson

Looking Forward to the New Year, While Enjoying the Last of the 12 Days of Christmas (posted 12/31/24)

I hope that you all had a great Christmas! I’m still enjoying the holiday, since the 12 Days of Christmas don’t end until January 6^th, with the Feast of the Epiphany. This January, I’ll be combining the religious and the secular, when I celebrate the Feast of the Righteous Schadenfreude on the 20^th.

If the bourbon holds out, I’ll probably compose a speech for the occasion. I’ve already got a title (“Our long national nightmare is over!”) and a first line (“Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this Orange sun…”)

We had Christmas here at home, with both of my wife’s brothers and their wives coming over. Among my favorite gifts were two coffee mugs: one with a pic of Trump and Vance on it (from my wife), and one from my liberal brother-in-law with the words, “I love when I wake up in the morning & Donald Trump is President.”

You know my bro-in-law is a good egg when he’s willing to go against all his instincts to buy that mug for me! I don’t know if I could have brought myself to buy him a Que Mala mug if 11/6 had gone horribly wrong. (And if I did, it would probably have been sarcastic and mean-spirited. Like, “Nice job! You’ve ruined everything. Thanks for destroying the country!”)

My wife, daughter and I drove up to Tennessee the day after Christmas to spend four days with my mom, sister and her husband, and we really had a great time, even though there was a melancholy undertone because of mom’s progressing Alzheimer’s. She is still herself, and sweet as can be, even as time has become a winding current that she enters and emerges from unpredictably.

Not long after we arrived, she asked me when her brother Joe was going to get there. (She’s the last survivor of four siblings, and Joe’s been gone for almost 10 years.) My sister tells me that at least a couple of times in the last month, mom has come out of her room early in the morning, nicely dressed and worrying that she’d be late for work. One morning she said she hoped she hadn’t missed the bus for school.

But her maternal instincts are still there, as strong as ever. Regular readers may remember that after she’d had a small stroke last year, my sister had told her that she’d sleep in mom’s bed with her for the first several nights back home, since she was still unsteady on her feet and would need some help getting to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

By bedtime mom had forgotten the conversation, and as Rhonda was tucking her in, she had to remind her that she was sleeping in her bed that night. Mom said, “Oh, okay.” After a pause, she said, “Did you have a bad dream?”

Each night we were there, mom got up after she’d gone to bed, and pulled a bunch of blankets out of her closet and carried them out to me, asking if we were going to be warm enough. Two nights she did it twice, 10 minutes apart. The last time, as I was putting her back into bed, she looked unhappy with me. She whispered, “Who was that woman in your bed?”

Because I’m still basically a child, I said, “How can you expect me to remember all of their names?”

For just a moment she started to scowl, but then her expression changed, and she slapped my hand, saying, “Oh, that’s Karen. I know!” And she giggled like she used to when I was a kid, and she was a young mother.

It’s like watching a loved one walk into a foggy twilight. With each step, you see less of her, and she of you. The fog cyclically thickens and thins, and one moment you can look into her eyes and she’s fully present and clear, but you know that with each step, the fog may be swirling or lifting, but evening is steadily advancing.

Still, we really did have a great time. One of the gifts we got mom was a big puzzle made from a picture of all of us at my daughter Katie’s wedding two years ago. She helped put the puzzle together with my wife, daughter and sister, but her focus ebbed and flowed. They left the last three pieces for mom to put in, completing the puzzle, and she loved that.

We played a game of Christmas-themed charades that had us laughing ourselves to tears. (To get the flavor of the game, you can go to the old picture of mom and me on my site, Martinsimpsonwriting.com. Yes, she’s wearing a party hat and I’m wearing a turkey hat, and it wasn’t anybody’s birthday, or Thanksgiving. I have no explanation.)

At one point Karen drew the card, “The ghost of Christmas yet to come,” and she chose to do a Yeti impersonation to get to “yet.” (She got up on her toes and did a lumbering walk that was half Frankenstein and half Joe Biden, if he had better posture and longer arms.) And my daughter got it!

At one point I drew “Holiday Inn,” an old Christmas movie that nobody else had heard of. So I was reduced to trying to act out a mid-range hotel chain that has nothing to do with Christmas. (Nobody got it.) Later I got “Away in a Manger” and for some reason started by indicating it was five words. When they finally got that one and pointed out that it is actually four words, I counted again, then pointed out that I’m a hilarious genius, not a math genius.

Once when it was mom’s turn, she was laughing so hard that she had to go to the bathroom before looking at her card. Did I already mention that I am basically a child? Because I looked at mom’s card – “snowball fight” – and told everyone to yell it out as soon as she started to do anything.

She came back from the bathroom, looked at her card, then put it back down. As soon as she started to cup her hands together, we all yelled in unison, “Snowball fight!!”

And she looked as shocked as she had been when she momentarily thought I had stashed a mistress in my bed in the guest room at Christmastime!

We’re back home now, and looking forward to a new year more than I have in quite a while. I’m still so relieved and grateful for the election results, and I hope that you are too.

Happy New Year!

A Pistol-Packing Granny, Jim Clyburn Face-Plants in Real Time, and Sheila Jackson Lee is no Astrophysicist (posted 4/12/24)

Well, O.J. Simpson is finally dead. And I’m sure that reminds us all of the old, well-known, cliched folk-saying: “Martin Simpson is NOT related to O.J. Simpson in any way.”

If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And yet it still rings true, doesn’t it?

So in honor of the day, I’ll start with a Stupid Criminal story, and I’ve got to warn you: it contains some tumultuous conduct!

This one takes place in Bingham County, Idaho. Christine Jenneiahn (85) lives out in the boonies with her adult, disabled son, and at 2:00 a.m. on March 13^th, Derek Condon (39, but no longer going on 40) broke into her house. He was wearing a ski mask and carrying a 9mm handgun, and he hit Christine, handcuffed her to a wooden chair in her living room, and threatened to kill her if she didn’t give him her valuables.

She told him there were two safes in the basement. When he went down to look, she dragged the chair she was handcuffed to into her bedroom, where she retrieved a pistol from under her pillow. Because: Idaho!

She then dragged her chair back into the living room and hid the gun beside her, hoping she wouldn’t have to use it. But when Condon discovered her disabled son, he got mad at her for not telling him the son was there. He started threatening her again while he was rummaging around the house, so she pulled out the gun and shot him twice.

Condon emptied his gun at her, “hitting her multiple times in her abdomen, leg, arm and chest.” She fell to the floor, and lay there for 10 hours until her son came into the room and gave her a phone to call 911.

Condon made it to the kitchen before he fell, as dead as O.J. Simpson. (Who, I may not have mentioned, is not kin to me.)

There are several surprising parts to this story, including the fact that after being handcuffed, an 85-year-old woman could drag her chair into another room to get her gun, and also that she was shot multiple times, but survived.

Granny’s got a little something I like to call “grit!”

But the most shocking part is her choice of firearm. No little old-West-style derringer or dainty .22 for Miss Christine. She’s got a .357 magnum!

Sure, that’s not a .44. (Which, if I remember my Clint Eastwood films correctly – and I think that I do – is “the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off.”)

But it’s not nothin’. And in this case, it has proved the truth of yet another hoary cliché – and one only slightly less well known than “Martin Simpson is no relation to O.J. Simpson” – “That iron get ya mind right!”

It certainly did so for the late and unlamented Derek Condon. If he had survived, I’d tell him that he should be extra ashamed of himself for trying to victimize an old lady. Since he didn’t, I’ll just say RII (rest in ignominy).

The only downside of the story is that if Idaho has the same kind of voter integrity safeguards in place as those in Chicago, NYC or Philly, he’ll be casting several votes for Biden in November.

Speaking of which, at 85, Granny Christine is 4 years OLDER than Joe Biden. Does anybody in Christendom believe that in the same situation, Joey Gaffes would have been able to do anything she did in this story?

He wouldn’t have been able to drag his own carcass into another room, let alone dragging a chair along with him. And if he had somehow made it into the bedroom, he would have forgotten what he went in there for.

And if, against all odds, he’d been able to find and hold the 357 up, the recoil from the first shot would have sent him tumbling backwards and probably broken multiple ribs, both arms and a hip.

Changing topics, I’d like to introduce yet another new and hopefully recurring category in my columns: Proof that God has a Sense of Humor.

The inaugural example comes from yesterday, when South Carolina Democrat Jim Clyburn appeared on a panel discussion on MSNBC (where Democracy Dies in a Smothering Fog of Imbecility™). He was there to push the economic dumpster fire that is… Bidenomics!

He started by admitting that people are concerned with high inflation, but then tried to pivot. “But what we’ve got to get them to see is that inflation today is about 40 percent of what it was when Joe Biden took office. And so the inflation rates are down…” Followed by another two minutes on the theme of “don’t believe your lyin’ eyes!”

I should note that he appeared on screen shot from the mid-chest up, so I could not say for certain that his pants ignited during the interview. But if I had to guess…

So, Clyburn insists that inflation is dropping like a rock, and all will be well. Because: Bidenomics!

And then, Mika cuts directly to breaking news: “The Consumer Price Index increased at a faster than unexpected pace last month, a signal that inflation remains stubbornly high.”

She threw to Andrew Sorkin, who looked like someone had just urinated in his kale smoothie as he had to explain that, “We’ve been on this broadcast for months now about how the trendline was in Biden’s favor. Today I imagine they’re throwing a party in Mar-a-Lago.”

The entire segment was just more proof of what I’ve always said: God hates Jim Clyburn.

Okay, I’ve never said that. And – full disclosure – I can’t actually claim to know the mind of God. But ever since Clyburn saved Biden’s campaign for the nomination in 2020 and foisted his horrific presidency on our beleaguered nation, I would guess that God is likely carrying a grudge.

Anyway, for one rare moment, it was fun to watch MSNBC. We’re all used to watching leftists’ promises and predictions proven to be laughably wrong (unexpectedly!), but we rarely get a chance to see them implode instantaneously, on live tv.

Coincidentally, when Mika cut back to the studio, Jim Clyburn was nowhere to be seen. Rumors that he was rushed to the burn unit of a nearby hospital for treatment of “the results of a first-degree, trouser-related combustion incident” have not been confirmed.

Okay, there are more stories to get to, but I’ve only got room for one more, and I couldn’t let this one slide by without comment. Even though I’m sure most of you have heard all about it.

I’m talking about congress-dunce Sheila Jackson Lee (of guess which party), formerly of the Science Committee, and the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, speaking to a bunch of school kids on the occasion of the eclipse.

Some of you have called me a hilarious genius, and I’ve been known to take creative flights of fancy when writing about loony lefties.

But even if I had ingested the same mushrooms that guitar genius Billy Strings took before he tore through his epic “Dust in a Baggie” in that cell phone video in somebody’s rec room (if you haven’t seen that yet, c’mon man!), I could not have come up with the following quote, which I swear to you is directly from Lee’s mouth:

“[Unintelligible] provide unique light and energy so that you have the energy of the moon at night, and sometimes you’ve heard the word ‘full moon,’ sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is that complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gasses.”

“And that’s why the question is why or how could we as humans could live on the moon. Are the gasses such that we could do that? The sun is a mighty powerful heat, and it’s almost impossible to go near the sun. The moon is more manageable.”

Un-freaking-quote. And yes, she had us all at “unintelligible.”

As I mentioned in a previous column, my youngest daughter is near completion of two undergrad degrees, in planetary science and astrophysics, with an additional minor in regular old physics. This summer she’ll be doing a 10-week undergrad research internship in astrophysics at UC Boulder, and will hopefully return there next year to start a PhD.

(And not to brag, but I once did quite well in Algebra II.)

So I called her to fact-check Sheila Jackson Lee.

I asked her if it is true that “the moon is made up mostly of gasses.” The line was quiet, but just in case the call hadn’t dropped, I followed up by asking her if “the sun is a mighty powerful heat,” so much so that “it’s almost impossible to go near” it?

She hung up on me, but I swear I could hear her face palm all the way from her dorm on the space coast to my home library at Stately Simpson Manor.

To recap what we’ve learned here today:

Don’t get in a gunfight with a 357-magnum-packing octogenarian.

God hates Jim Clyburn.

Our elected leaders are morons.

And my amazing daughters – much like myself – have no genealogical connection to O.J. Simpson whatsoever.

Hamas delenda est!

Ready for a New Year (posted 1/1/24)

I hope that your year has started off as well as mine. Since we had covid on Christmas, we had our Christmas celebration on New Year’s Day, with Karen’s brothers and their families coming to the house to feast and exchange gifts.

So I started 2024 off with a Merry Christ-year! (Which I generally prefer to a Merry New-mas, though your holiday mileage may vary.)

As always, on the cusp of a new year, one’s mind naturally turns to marking the passage of time, and looking backwards and forwards simultaneously.

When I look back on 2023, I’m extremely grateful for many things happening in my personal life – disproportionately so, given the perilous condition our nation appears to be in: a relationship with my Creator who loves and forgives me; the patient, smokeshow wife; the healthy and thriving kids; the envy of canine-dom in the form of Cassie the Wonder Dog; the chance to live in a state with the best governor in the country, etc.

And though I’ve said it before, I’ve probably not said it enough: the chance to sound off on the Cautious Optimism site has been a source of great comfort and joy in my life. I mean that sincerely: comfort and joy! (Yes, I’m still in a Christmas mood, since we just celebrated today, and the 12 Days of Christmas extend through January 5^th.)

In December of 2016, the Great and Powerful CO invited me to contribute my occasional musings to this site, and since then I’ve had seven years of getting stuff off my chest, and lowering my blood pressure, and meeting so many great people. I can’t thank all of you enough!

If I can risk tainting the new year with a shameless plug…As regular readers know, when I post a new column here, I post the most recent column to my WordPress site, Martinsimpsonwriting.com. There you will find all of my columns going back to 12/16, as well as some pictures, a few short stories, and a few videos. If you like what you see there, you can click “subscribe,” and you’ll get an email notification each time a new column appears.

Looking forward, I’m going to be posting a handful of short stories I wrote during another life as a fiction writer, and a lot of pics of my (finally!) restored Victorian house, Rosewood. I’m also going to try to record and post at least one video a month on various topics of interest. (If anything is on your mind that you’d like to see discussed, please let me know.)

When I look forward to the next year in the life of our country, though, things are a lot more cloudy. In an election year when the stakes are so high and our national life so troubled and deteriorating, my fascination with politics – properly understood and undertaken – alternates with an increasing disgust with the grubby reality of politics as they are actually pursued.

When I’m in the latter mood, Wordsworth’s words sum up my instinctive distaste for public life: “The world is too much with us; late and soon/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”

Since I’ve retired, I’m not as focused on getting or (hopefully!) spending. My big-picture concerns now require more focus on how I spend time than on how I spend money. And spending time thinking about politics and politicians can often seem a foolish expenditure indeed!

But as soon as I say that, I recognize that politics are shaping the world that my kids and future grandkids will live in, and so attention must be paid. Plus, it is therapeutic to mock dishonest pols and bad ideas. Besides, both Thomas Moore and C.S. Lewis said that the devil cannot stand to be mocked, and those guys knew a few things.

And if that applies to Satan, I’m sure it applies to his minions (i.e. most politicians) too.

But there will be a lot of time for mockery later. For now, I’d just like to point out at least one silver lining during our current national malaise.

Although some of our problems are definitely hard to solve – social security is going broke, our national debt is staggering, our universities need ground-up renovation – many of them really are not.

It’s amazing how many “crises” should be simple to solve, because they arise from logical errors that would be ended with the application of the most basic common sense. For example:

It’s not good to sterilize young people, or cut healthy body parts off because they are going through a phase of discomfort with their bodies and/or mental illness. (The defining characteristic of being young is going through phases, so don’t make permanent and irreversible physical changes!)

You get less of what you punish, and more of what you reward. So if you reward criminals – make excuses for their crimes, minimize their punishments (ridiculous plea deals, short or no sentences, no penalties) – you get more crime.

Giving a drunk a drink doesn’t help him, and most of our welfare system is the institutionalized form of buying alcohol for alcoholics. Stop that.

A country without a border cannot remain a country, and cutting illegal immigration by 95% is a very simple task. It’s very hard to stop the last 5% or so, but if you build physical barriers and man them with adequately armed officers, and then take into custody and either immediately jail and deport everyone you catch, the draw for future illegals will be stopped.

Law and order MUST be maintained throughout our society, and our current hands-off strategy seems literally insane to me. Allowing mobs of protestors to attack public and private buildings, and to close off major highways and bridges, and to terrify students and cops and paralyze major universities (just as allowing millions of illegals to break into our country and disperse throughout it) – all of these are voluntary choices.

Mind-bogglingly, inexplicably, and weapons-grade stupid choices!

Especially because, again, the solution is so simple and obvious, in every case:

When a-hole narcissists block a highway or bridge to paralyze a major city, give them a few quick warning honks, and then drive right through them. (If any of them suffer injuries but then have to wait a long time for an ambulance to reach them because of the congestion they’ve caused, they can use that writhing-in-agony time to reconsider their life choices.)

When pro-terrorist students riot and assault other students and university officials, expel them permanently and jail them immediately.

“But Martin,” I can hear you saying, “despite the brilliance of your words, the logic of your argument, your personal charisma, and (let’s not deny it) your knee-weakening physical attractiveness, we don’t have the resources or manpower to drive-over and pepper spray and jail and deport millions and millions of Biden-voting wastes of space!”

Yes, but we wouldn’t have to. We’d only have to demonstrate our determination to the first few troublemakers, “pour encourager les autres,” as the Frenchies say.

Picture this:

The first antifa thug in a crowd to throw a bottle at the cops gets a faceful of pepper spray and/or birdshot and then is cuffed and arrested…

The first BLM whitey-hater who storms a courthouse gets a bean-bag round to the groin and then is cuffed and arrested…

The first two arrogant morons who try to block traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge are partially squashed in a game of human Frogger, and if they survive that, are cuffed and arrested in the hospital…

How do you think their co-would-be-revolutionaries would react after seeing that?

Or how about this: What if the two gender-confused, identified-as-male-at-birth “leaders” of a clot of cosplaying grievance-studies majors who attack a pregnancy-support center or Supreme Court justice’s house were arrested and taken to jail. And once there, they were photographed and printed and tossed into a holding cell – with their frosted pink hair and facial piercings, wearing a “Queers for Palestine” t-shirt over a gender non-binary skort — with a dozen recidivist criminals.

And the next day, after their rich yet feckless parents have bailed them out, what if they limped back to the collective and told their tearful tales of prolapsed this and bruised that, and how they discovered a whole new meaning of “misgendering” in jail…

What do you think would happen to the attendance at the next hate-filled leftist assault on a public institution or building?

Okay, that last example might be going a little too far. On the other hand, if we have to err on the side of either letting the rioters destroy our society, or letting criminals open a can of macro-aggressions on their temporarily incarcerated carcasses, let’s go with Door #2.

To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, predictable and swift consequences will concentrate the mind of even the most mouth-breathing, AOC-IQ-level miscreants among us. So why haven’t we tried that lately?

Let’s learn the lessons of 2023, and make 2024 the year of re-instituting cause and effect, and reaping what you sow.

Hamas delenda est!

The Bitter and the Sweet at Christmas (posted 12/18/23)

As you read this, my wife and youngest daughter and I will be flying to visit Katie (my oldest daughter) and her husband in Denver. We’ll be returning home on Friday, and I hope to still be able to post a column that morning.

I’m feeling a little of the usual, mild disorientation I feel before traveling, made much stronger now by the insane twists and turns our political world has been making. For one example, a conservative blogger turned me on to a 10-minute rant that Chris Cuomo made last week about Israel and Hamas… and I found myself agreeing with every word he said!

I know: Chris Cuomo! The dullest of the Cuomos! And yet he made perfect sense, pointing out how evil Hamas is, and how leftists who are joining in with the anti-Semitic mobs chanting for genocide are making a huge moral and political mistake.

Then I see a clip of Frankenstein Fetterman, and he’s continuing to make sense too! Now he’s said that even though he is pro-immigration, we still need to stop the unvetted flood of immigrants who are crossing our border daily. He’s also been taking more and more heat – and standing up to it – for continuing to back Israel against Hamas.

The usual fanatical suspects got their burkas over their head about him telling the truth about Hamas and calling them “terrorists.” Over the last month protestors have blocked streets outside his Philly office and heckled him at events. And he responded by saying that he’s not a progressive.

So yeah, I’m a little dizzy. Chris Cuomo is making sense; Fetterman is acting more like a Republican Senator than most Republican senators; the world is upside down, cats and dogs are living together, nothing makes sense anymore!

I’ve done a lot of the usual mockery lately, and the dominant tone of my recent columns has been mostly negative: it seems like the world and our nation are deteriorating before my eyes, and we have one national party that is going farther and farther to the radical and – I don’t know what other word to use – evil left.

And the other party seems like it’s bound and determined to do everything in its power to break my heart, personally.

But it’s Christmas time, so I want to change the focus in this column.

This has always been my favorite time of year, starting when I was a kid. I loved the snow, I loved the carols, I loved the Christmas plays at church. Oddly enough, though I’ve always been a wise guy, I was never a Wise Man.

Speaking of which, I just remembered a dumb joke about kids portraying the Three Wise Men at church. The three kids approach the manger, and one of them holds up a small box and says, “I have gold.” And he puts it down. The second kid says, “I have myrrh,” and puts it down. And the third kid steps up and holds out his box and says, “Frank sent this.”

Anyway, in my own experience, being young and blessed to be growing up in a loving and stable family, in the mostly functional and cohesive Midwest, Christmas was unadulterated bliss.

But as I’ve reached my sixth decade, it’s pretty easy to understand why this holiday can be a depressing time for many people. Mixed in with the good things, we can easily succumb to bittersweet nostalgia for lost loved ones, lost youth, and happier times that appear even more glowing because of their distance from the gritty present.

And when tragedy happens near Christmas – as it inevitably does over a long enough time span, considering that the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas season is about 1/8th of the year – the losses bite deeper when the season reminds us.

My dad died 9 years ago last Thursday, and Alzheimers has taken more of mom from herself and from us over the past year. A loved one died in the prime of her life last Monday from an unexpected autoimmune disease and pneumonia, leaving three kids and a devastated extended family.

Life continually reminds us that it isn’t fair, and that we’re not guaranteed anything on this earth.

Still, this site is about cautious optimism, and I don’t know if I’m getting wiser, or just older. But my increasing sense of the brevity and fragility of life really is making me value and appreciate each day more and more. (You may remember my column last month, in which I quoted the end of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73: “This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong/To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”)(That guy knew some stuff.)

And if that’s the case for every regular old day, for me it’s even more true of Christmas and the Christmas season. So I thought I’d conclude this column by recommending a few of my favorite Christmas books and music, and ask you to share some of yours.

I’ve written before of how much I love Dicken’s great “A Christmas Carol.” Even though we all get sick of songs, movies and people who get over-exposed – and no cultural production has been experienced more often than A Christmas Carol! – the tale has never gotten old for me.

I still enjoy watching it on tv, and my favorite version has fluctuated between the 1938 version with Reginald Owen and the 1951 with Alistair Sim, but in recent years the 1999 version with Patrick Stuart has elbowed its way into a near, three-way tie.

I re-read at least most of the book every year, but in recent times I’ve taken to listening to it as a book on cd (or streaming), as read by the late, great Frank Muller. You can easily find that recording, and if you’re traveling for the holidays, listening to the combination of Muller’s voice and Dickens’ masterful writing should put you in the spirit of the season.

This year conservative Hillsdale College – a great contrast and counterpoint to the kind of woke malice on display in the Ivy League and in way too many other universities – has put out a six-episode course on the Carol.

The videos are well done; their total run time is around 3 hours, and you watch them for free by registering on the Hillsdale site. An English prof named Dwight Lindley walks you through the text, mostly celebrating but also explaining and interpreting, and it’s worth your time.

When it comes to Christmas music, it goes without saying that when the great and powerful CO performed his own version of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” on guitar last Christmas at my request, I had reached the pinnacle of coolness. (Perhaps he can re-post that before Christmas, for those who have found the CO site over the last year?)

I’ve always thought that you can’t go wrong with Christmas carols played by brass quartets. I’ve also written in the past about the quirky but effective takes on many carols from Sufjan Stevens, which are worth checking out on line.

The Christmas song that I listen to the most in recent years is “O Come, O come, Emmanuel,” probably because its combination of hope and mourning speaks to the bittersweetness that I discussed above.

My favorite version lately is the OG country/bluegrass one by the Petersons, a family with three sisters with great voices. They do a 5-minute melding of “O Come, O Come” and “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus,” that is all kinds of right. The instrumentation comes from a banjo, violin, mandolin, cello, guitar and dobro, and while I appreciate a symphony, my hillbilly heart loves those six instruments together.

Finally – and this one might be a bridge too far for those of you who are not religiously inclined – I recently discovered Chosen, the video series on the life of Christ. In general, I’m a little put-off by most video versions of the Bible or Bible stories, but this series is really well done, and captures what seems to me to be the essence of the Man and His story.

If you’re inclined to give it a try, I’d suggest one particular scene to give you a taste of the series: the story of Christ meeting the woman at the well. The scene is only around 7 minutes long, but it captures the essence for me. And even if you’re not a believer, if that scene doesn’t choke you up at least a little, I don’t know what’s going on with you.

Okay, CO nation. I’m off for some family time in Denver. If you’ve got particular Christmas traditions, music or anything else that makes the season for you, please share them.

But as the holiday approaches, we must still not forget…

Hamas delenda est!