Tag: holidays

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 6th, 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 20th.

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!

Biden Makes 2 Unforced Errors – an Ill-Timed Cash Grab, and Getting Trans-y on Easter (posted 4/1/24)

I hope you all had a good Easter weekend, or Paraphilia Day, or whatever.  I certainly hope that you had a better weekend than Joey Gaffes did, since his was marked by two major unforced errors. 

The first one – going to a glitzy fund raiser at the same time as the memorial service for murdered NY cop Jonathan Diller – wasn’t initially his fault.  The fundraiser had been previously scheduled, and it was bad timing. 

On the other hand, one might note that maybe if Biden’s party hadn’t been pushing the kind of soft-on-crime policies that enabled Diller’s murderers to be out on the street instead of doing life in prison in the first place, Diller would still be alive, and Joey’s cash grab could have taken place without such ugly visuals.

Regardless, once Biden realized that his fundraiser was going to coincide with Diller’s service, and that Trump was going to attend (and be welcomed at) that service, a reasonably competent politician would have at least tried to avoid the disastrous optics.  Maybe he could meet with Diller’s family privately to express condolences, or bump his fundraiser back a day?

If nothing else, he could have put out a press release saying that under these tragic circumstances, he wouldn’t be attending the fundraiser.  It still would have brought in the big bucks, for two reasons: 1. Anybody contributing to the late Joe Biden at this point is ineducable, and would donate anyway.  2. Nobody was there to see Biden.

I mean, other than people who had laid bets in Vegas in the ongoing “when is Biden going to die” prop bet, and had their money on “during a creepy fundraiser on March 29th.”  (For the record, I’ve already lost my $100, because my over/under on that one was “halfway through the SOTU.”)

(And by then, he’d already been dead for several years, so I don’t know what I was thinking.)

Biden’s second unforced error was deciding to declare Easter Sunday as the “Day of Trans Visibility.”  Man, that decision is all kinds of wrong!

As a Protestant, I used to tease my Catholic friends about how many saint’s days they had in their calendar.  (“You weren’t in school yesterday.  Don’t tell me: it was St. Horace’s Day, right?  Wasn’t he the patron saint of cobblers?  Or was it shoelace makers?”) 

But in general, Christians only have two big holidays, plus a few associated minor ones (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, a handful of church services during Lent).  Altogether there are barely enough Christian holidays to fill up a week, and non-Christians are not expected to even notice – let alone approve of – more than the big two.

But LGBTQ zealots are going nuts, with something like 145 recognized “holidays,” not to mention three entire months devoted to pride, LGBT history and trans awareness. 

And if the weirdest oddball in your office interrupts a staff meeting to ask what kind of events the company is planning to hold to commemorate “Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week” (February 19-25th, so mark your calendars for next year), you can’t even do a spit-take with your coffee without being shunned as a bigot. 

An anonymous commenter summed it up best: “40% of the year to recognize 1% of the population?”

Which points out the political idiocy of Biden’s Easter debacle.  Yes, church attendance and the number of people who claim to be Christians has been on the decline.  (At the same time, society seems to be mysteriously decaying on just about every moral and ethical issue in sight.  UNEXPECTEDLY!)  But people who are at least nominally Christian still make up a majority of the country.

On the other side, a very tiny number of deranged activists have been revealing themselves as raving Christophobes in ways that repulse normal people, whether Christians or not.  Morons disrupt Easter services at St. Patrick’s in NYC, unfurling a banner and shouting nonsense.  A Cadbury chocolate store in England advertises “gesture eggs.”  (I’m not making that up.)

How does that political calculus work?  “Let’s go out of our way to intentionally offend tens of millions of Christians, and in a rude, obnoxious way that will offend tens of millions more who don’t like offensive jackasses, just as a general rule.  And by doing so, we’ll lock up the sought-after ‘blue-haired narcissistic malcontents’ vote!”

It really must be tough to be in a political party whose most zealous members are rabidly hostile to Judaism and Christianity.  The smart tack would be to just acknowledge Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Christmas and Easter with a half-hearted, banal public statement (like the Biden WH did on Sunday), and then move on.

But the hard left can’t abide that. They’ve got to go out of their way to highlight their contempt.  Like when the White House has an E***er egg roll, but feels compelled to warn kids that there better not be any “religious symbols” or “overtly religious themes” on their East** eggs. 

Got it?  We can’t “ban” gay porn from our middle school libraries, but you should expect an assault team from the DOJ to fast-rope down to your front lawn and arrest your parents if they try to sneak some “religious overtones” into a holiday that exists to celebrate the resurrection of Christ!

Bah!

Bah, I say!

By the way, no one has asked me my thoughts about transgenderism, and I have no special expertise on that topic.  But the same could be said of every MSM talking head, national Democrat politician, and cast member on the View, and they’re always yammering on about it.  So why shouldn’t I?

Especially since I’ve got what many have called a crystal brain (hat tip to Adam Carolla), and an uncanny ability to be right about stuff.  So here goes:

I think that people who say they are trans fall into one of 4 groups:

1.People who truly have the mental illness of gender dysmorphia, which is similar to other conditions such as anorexia, in that in both cases, the sufferer believes the reality of his/her body to be different than it actually is.

2.Those – mostly adolescent females – caught up in a social contagion.

3.Men who have the sexual fetish of autogynophilia, which is being aroused by the thought of oneself as a female.

4.Creepy grifters who do so for personal gain: in the form of winning sporting events against women, getting prurient access to female bathrooms or showers, or getting into female prisons when they should be in male prisons, getting “misgendered” the old-fashioned way.

I really do feel empathy for those in the first two categories, and think our society should give them all the therapeutic and social support they need to get well, and successfully deal with their hardships. (But we obviously shouldn’t humor them, any more than you’d agree with some poor soul dying of anorexia, and tell her that she’s horribly fat!)

Those in category 3 should probably also get therapy – if they recognize their sickness and want to get well – or else swift opposition by police, and anyone else who learns of their predilection.

Those in category 4 need to be opposed, thwarted, shamed and punished.      

Okay, this column is getting long, so I’ll make this another three-column week, and post a shorter one on Wednesday. 

But I can’t leave without pointing out the evil criminal story that precipitated Biden’s first gaffe of the weekend.  Because the two scumbags who murdered Jonathan Diller are veritable poster boys for the national Dems’ horrific pro-criminal legal stance.

The shooter was career criminal Guy Rivera (with 21 prior arrests), and his sociopath driver was Lindy Jones (14 prior arrests), who was illegally carrying two guns in the car with him.  Diller’s partner managed to shoot Rivera, but he survived.  Tragically.

The Dems vigorously opposed “three strikes” laws for repeat offenders, but you’d think that by this late date, even they could tolerate a “10 strikes” law, which would have prevented at least this horrendous crime. 

For me, the creepiest detail in this whole, tragic story was that Rivera was found to have a shiv in his rectum when he was arrested.  Which could only mean two things: 1. He’s more sexually twisted than Hunter Biden.  Or 2. He knows how evil he is, and was thus planning to be sent back to prison at any minute, and wanted to go in armed.

That really gross fact has made me question my own – usually brilliant – plans to improve our country.  Because coming in at #12 on my personal List of Executive Orders which I would sign immediately after becoming president is, “The first part of the punishment for any cop killer – before ‘execution after a 30-day appeals process’ – is to have a shiv stuck up his rectum.” 

Now that I know that some of those freaks are already doing that to themselves – and (shudder) possibly enjoying it – I’ve got to amend my Executive Order List.

Thanks, Brandon!

Hamas delenda est!