CSotD: On The Third Day of Christmas
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By now you should have three partridges in pear trees, four calling birds and three French hens, or at least three notices from UPS saying they will be delivered tomorrow and will require signatures, in which case you should keep your eyes open because they’ll be left on the porch in the snow.
Meanwhile, we’re getting ready for the New Year to arrive and there seems to be an agreement that 2025 is welcome to leave anytime, though not a lot of predictions that the New Year’s baby is going to bring anything more cheerful and positive.
The idea that something magical is going to happen when the ball drops on New Year’s Eve is a very old tradition that is based on hope being more powerful than experience.
The new year does bring in a few new laws and so forth, including, for those of us on Social Security, a cost of living boost which it turns out will put another four dollars a month in my pocket. I should probably consult a wealth manager to determine the best way to invest it.
Anne Derenne offers one last look at the Magic of Christmas, at least for those of us who don’t celebrate the full 12 Days. (If you are planning a vacation, you might want to enjoy Christmas at home and then scamper down to Mallorca in time for the Three Kings to arrive by ship with more gifts and pageantry.)
As I’ve noted before, I’m not sold on the idea that holidays are unfairly rough on women because I have been both the person relaxing at the table and the one bustling in the kitchen and, when I was the cook, I enjoyed “doing” for people.
I suspect it depends on how things go the rest of the year
British schools will begin efforts to tackle misogyny this coming fall, with particular teaching for at-risk boys, though Ben Jennings expresses a wish that the task could extend to all of society. I’m sympathetic with his point that kids learn at home, too, but you have to start somewhere, and I’d point out that educated kids did a pretty good job of nagging their parents into quitting tobacco.
It’s not so easy to nag anybody out of violence, but at least kids should be made aware that it isn’t okay, and that could be a breakthrough for a lot of young people who assume their own experience is normal.
Going unisex on chores like doing the dishes — not just on Christmas but every night — would be another step in the right direction, and a considerable change in a lot of families.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Christmas isn’t over, despite the father in Auchter’s cartoon, and Konopacki makes the connection between the season and current times. It’s understandable that, in better days, we focused on the manger and shepherds and magi, but that next part of the story has suddenly become horrifyingly relevant.
It’s more than ironic that the people who take the Nativity story as literal history rather than folkloric teaching seem to be the ones who pay no attention to the Massacre of the Innocents, but it’s more distressing to me that we had so many cartoons imagining ICE raiding the manger and so few that pointed out that the Holy Family had to seek asylum in another country, a parallel that should speak for itself.
But there have always been self-proclaimed Christians whose adherence to scripture is selective at best and self-interested at worst.
It’s nothing new: I’m reading Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, about the 14th Century, and her summary of the greed and corruption in the Church makes your soul ache, or should. And even in his own time, Christ preached against self-interest, greed and hypocrisy among those who claimed to be religious.
The easy way out is to reject it all. The harder route is to follow the ethical teachings even if you don’t accept the miracles in which they are packaged.
And the hardest may be to follow them when you’re surrounded by those who claim to but who clearly don’t.
It’s fortunate that Dear Leader inserts unintentional farce into his bizarre world view, and his announcement of a new set of battleships offers cartoonists some opportunities to poke holes in his inflated self-image.
There are questions being raised, particularly among the military, of why we should suddenly revert to building a type of ship that hasn’t been practical since WWII, and a proposed design with flaws self-evident to naval veterans.
The real mystery is what inspired Dear Leader’s latest fantasy. We know that watching a Clint Eastwood movie led to his sudden desire to re-open Alcatraz, and now the question is less why the US Navy should start building expensive anachronisms but whether the idea is going to get any farther than the Alcatraz brainstorm did.
It would seem like the basis for a Peter Sellers comedy if there weren’t inspirations that actually get carried out.
Dear Leader’s notion that terrorists in Nigeria are selectively attacking Christians does not match reality, but Nigerian leadership is apparently willing to let him believe whatever he likes if he’s helping their fight against the groups that have plagued their country.
But the city closest to the strikes is not in the portion of Nigeria where attacks have targeted Christians. Residents there were terrified by the bombing and insist that they live peacefully in a mixed Christian/Muslim area.
Meanwhile, the terrorists blew up a mosque, killing Muslims, not Christians.
This is not the only place in which Dear Leader is pursuing his own unsubstantiated policies. His fantasy about discrimination against white South Africans has made them the sole refugees privileged to come to America, despite the utter lack of substance to his belief, but at least he isn’t dropping bombs on anyone there.
Our most immediate war threat seems to be in Venezuela, and the administration continues to struggle to come up with a coherent explanation of our policy: Is it about fentanyl? Is it about cocaine? Is it because Venezuela ships oil to Cuba?
Does anybody know? Does anybody care?
Tune in next year!
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