Ski Mississippi

I'm still getting over a cold/the flu/an upper respiratory infection/AIDS.  Or something. 
Obama's on vacation in Florida and hasn't been able to screw up anything. 
Congress isn't doing anything. 
The White House keeps fiddling with "the law of the land", rather than take the consequences of writing the legislative drivel known as Obamacare. 
Not much else happening.

So here's a rerun....   I sent this in to Delta Magazine on a Sunday night back in 2011, and they accepted it Monday morning.  One of my favorite Christmas memories.  If my father sounds like a great person, it's because he was. 

Merry Christmas, everybody !!
 

I can only remember one white Christmas from my Mississippi Delta childhood. Not because of the snow, which was the largest we’d ever seen, not because the snow was particularly beautiful on our plowed-under rice fields, which looked like someone had sprinkled a thin layer of white sugar on a Mississippi Mud Cake, but because of how my father decided to celebrate the snowfall.

He took us snow skiing.

The Mississippi Delta is flat and snow skiing requires a hill. Our nearest hills were the on-ramps for the I-20/Highway 61 intersection in Vicksburg. Eudora Welty once complained that the Mississippi Delta was maddening, and couldn’t imagine spending days with nothing to see but the horizon. (I tell friends about the time my dog ran away, and three days later I could still see him.) It’s flat.

So Delta natives water ski.

My father probably taught two hundred kids how to water ski. During summers for a couple of decades, he tread water in Beulah lake, supporting his students through failed attempts until they “got it” and skied. After each success, he would dog-paddle back to shore with his wet comb-over hanging triumphantly past his left ear lobe, grab something to eat, and then get back in the lake to teach another one.

But when my little brother Steven came along, teaching had become a challenge. Keeping unwieldy skis and someone else’s fat child on top of the water was no job for a 40-year-old. When Daddy saw a pair of “training skis” at a sporting goods store, he bought them.

Imagine a pair of skis, much shorter and wider than usual, connected at the toes with an 18-inch long board. A traditional ski rope and handle went from this board to the skier’s hands. We could tie this thing behind a boat and pull a screaming child all over the lake on the first try. Steven was no more than four years old the first time he got on them, and he instantly got the hang of it.

Back to our White Christmas…. We enjoyed playing in the snow, but we couldn't go into town to see our friends.

After the mandatory snowmen and snow angels, we went inside and dared to say that we were bored. Our mother shot back at us with one of her anecdotes about growing up dirt poor in Yazoo City, and spending her winters sitting in a semicircle with her sisters and spitting on a radiator to see whose saliva would disappear first.

Daddy told us to stop our bellyachin', get dressed for the snow, and come outside. Waiting for us in the rice field in front of the house were the training skis tied to the back of a Massey-Ferguson 1800 series 4-wheel drive tractor.

The Massey Ferguson 1800 series could pull anything. They didn't get stuck, no matter how deep the mud.
We’d long suspected this, but at that moment we knew. We had the greatest… father…. ever.

I got on the skis first, my younger siblings crawled into the cab with Daddy, and we were off. The tractor took off across the frozen field, and I was towed along about 30 yards behind. I could feel every frozen clod underneath the skis, but Lord Have Mercy, it was fun. Once we got up to the cruising speed of 35 miles an hour, it was downright exhilarating.

I could lean back against the rope handle and go wide left or right. When the tractor made a quick turn, it would fling me past the “wake” like a slingshot, and then snatch a knot in my neck when the slack disappeared. The other downside were the unplanned exits from the skis. Hitting frozen mud at 35 miles an hour HURT.

My sisters and brother got their turns, and soon the field had been rutted enough to give us some nice jump ramp opportunities.

(I just got off the phone with my little brother, who is now a history professor at Mississippi College. He remembers us doing this, but was too young to remember details. However, he says that when he sees the "Jackass" show on TV, where a deathproof gang of idiotic males attempt ridiculous stunts and expose themselves to bodily harm just for fun, he thinks to himself, "Yep. That's how we grew up.")

We rode those skis for hours. If YouTube had been around, movies from that day would've been passed all around the world, titled "Mississippi Ski Slope". Why no one suffered a broken leg is a mystery. The gravel road we lived on didn't get much traffic, but anyone who saw us stopped to watch.

There were families who went to Europe that Christmas. There were young Olympians skiing down the Matterhorn. Aspen Colorado was probably swarming with what would soon be called Yuppies, wearing thousands of dollars’ worth of special clothing and equipment.

We were zipping around a muddy field of frozen mud behind a tractor, in the flatlands between Merigold and Drew Mississippi. We wouldn't have traded places with anyone in the world.

Merry Christmas ! It's what you make of it.

Put down this magazine till tonight. Go outside. Find some kids and a field and nail some skis together.

Ski Mississippi.

 

On Jesus And Santa Claus

I was in the 2nd grade, working on homework at a desk in our den. It must have been close to Christmastime, because my mother was explaining something about Santa Claus to my little sister.
I don't remember my sister's question, but it probably involved the North Pole, elves, reindeer, Rudolph, or (temporal) punishments and rewards for being either naughty or nice. In one blinding moment the Santa Claus/Easter Bunny/Tooth Fairy Axis Of Impossibility revealed itself to me.
There are no elves. Reindeer can't fly. Old fat guys can't get down chimneys. A giant rabbit can't leave us colorful plastic eggs (from Gibson's department store) filled with coins or candy.
Any fairy with a tooth fetish must be very lonely fairy indeed.

I had figured out the conspiracy, and needed some clarification on the finer points so I looked up from my homework and asked "Hey, there can't be a Santa Claus who brings all this stuff. Is it just you and Daddy, or is it somebody else?"

My Mother went through a frantic series of shushing gestures, throat slashings, and brow-furrowings, and then said something like "Of course there's a Santa Claus", followed by a wink-wink nudge-nudge. Once my sister left the room, she explained that Santa Claus was something that parents did to make Christmas more fun for children, along with a follow-up conversation about the need to conceal this from my sisters and brother. I immediately felt like more of an adult since I was in on what was obviously a very adult secret.

I relished the conversations I could have with my parents and other adults about what other kids were getting from Santa Claus. I had access to the people behind the curtain, the ones who made the magic happen.

I had a friend named Glenn Williams who was a year younger than me. (Note to self: write a post about the day Glenn was working at The Rushing Winery and managed to bottle his thumb.) Another friend, Walt Burns, took Glenn aside one day and told him all about Santa Claus. Glenn has told me at least three times about how mad he got at Walt for doing this.

Up until the time Walt spilled the beans, Glenn had a worldview that included a benevolent old guy who paid attention to his behavior and rewarded him with great stuff every December 25th. People were killing each other in Viet Nam but Santa was watching. Elves were making toys for people who were good, even if kids our age were starving in communist China. And Walt Burns had to ruin everything. There was no magic guy in a sleigh.  It was just Pat and Guy B. Williams waiting up past their normal bedtime to bring Glenn's toys down from the attic.

Other kids claimed to believe, or pretended to believe, until they were in the 5th or 6th grade. In their families, once you stopped believing, the quality and quantity of gifts from Santa declined. Why rock the boat?

Flash forward about 15 years.

I briefly attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Cemetery Seminary in Fort Worth. The place seemed to operate on two levels. In some classes the professors spoke as if every word in the Bible was inspired by God, and that all of scripture hung together as a unified statement and plan. But a few other professors would sometimes imply that the book was a mishmash. It was filled with time and place-specific rants that had to be twisted and tortured into relevance. A few brave souls, usually at the doctoral level, would introduce Biblical Criticism into the mix.

No professors publicly confessed any doubts about whether the basic story was true. And by true, I mean in the sense that this event happened, not true in the sense that something is a true to life parable or narrative that can teach us something about blah blah blah....

However, I found that if I could get these professors off the clock, and they would sometimes confirm that doubt was a valid response. Some of them would go so far as to give me further reading on the subject.

But by and large, the main response to doubt went something like this: "These stories have given comfort to millions. They are the foundation of our morality, our ethics, and our hope for the future. They are the received wisdom handed down from previous generations. If they weren't true, would God have given them to us? And one last thing.... people will give 10% or more of their income to spread God's Eternal Truth. But can you imagine anyone giving 10% of his money to spread a story that's just a parable? Churches and ministers that waver in their professed beliefs have a hard time paying the light bill."

In other words, once people start thinking of Santa Claus as a metaphor, you can't rely on them to put out milk and cookies in front of the fireplace.

We now have ministers all over the U.S. who no longer truly believe what they're preaching.  They no longer have a separate "carve-out" for stories about walking on water and resurrections and hells - a separate cubbyhole for the miraculous stories that otherwise would go the way of evles, reindeer and giant magic bunnies.  So why do they continue?

They don't want to be the Walt Burns who tells Glenn Williams what they've learned. They don't want to hurt their colleagues, financially or professionally, who still claim to take it all literally instead of figuratively. In some groups, to go against the story is to go against the entire tribe, and would mean rejecting family, town, denomination, and (ahem) salary. Sometimes it's too late to re-invent yourself as an insurance salesman, retail manager, or freight broker.

Plus, the church still owes $250,000.00 on the new education wing they built 10 years ago, and somebody needs to keep paying retirement funds into the Annuity Fund. 

When I'm feeling particularly dark, I sometimes tell people that I didn't learn the truth about Santa Claus until I spent 6 years training to be an elf.

Could there be anything sadder than a 25-year old who still believed in Santa?

On the other hand, could there be anything sadder than a 50-year old minister who lives on the same planet as theologian/scholars like Marcus Borg and John Spong, but who continues to proclaim the virgin birth, angelic visitations, and the eternal damnation of dead Muslim, Chinese, and Indian teenagers?

Let's make some changes, starting with a few obvious propositions. I don't believe in hell. I don't believe that I'll die and get some wings and a harp either. What happens after we die? I don't know. Neither does anyone else. But we can all agree on what happens to a tree when it dies, can't we? Let's start there.

Here's another one. I don't believe that Jesus got his Mama pregnant with himself.

I don't believe that languages were invented when people got uppity and tried to create a tower that would reach the sky and God felt threatened and punished everybody by giving them different languages. You don't believe that either. I promise, you don't. People... Just... Don't... Believe... That...

So if you're a minister who happens to read this rant, you have the blessing and approval of a lot of people to crawl up into your pulpit Sunday and admit what you don't believe certain things anymore. You're probably a good person with some good ideas. Give your folks something new to think about. The Santa Claus guided by Rudolph/Wise Men guided by the star in the east business - those stories don't work any more.

Sunday morning, tell us what you think will make the world better, without resorting to mythology.

I think you'll feel better afterwards. I feel better just writing all of this.

Merry Christmas !

People who didn't get what they wanted for Christmas

To see the complete list, go here.

The Libertarian Night Before Christmas

I found this on Libertarian Reddit.  (I'm finding LOTS of stuff this morning, waiting on the family to wake up!)
Ten years ago, I wouldn't have understood half of it.  It's funny what blind panic and fear for your country will make you learn ! 
Once again, Merry Christmas !!!

Twas the night before Christmas, and all over the net

Libertarian infighting, as good as it gets.

The young cats and rookies, the intellectual debtors

watch left and right scrum over racist news letters.


Should anarchists vote? Or is it a crock?

'Wendy's a statist!' Exclaimed Walter Block.

Anarchists, minarchists, a matter of degrees?

You min-mins are fascists! Awaiting kings decrees!


Atheist, Christian, Muslim or Jew

We don't fight over faith, like statists do.

We prefer to fight over who should be ruling.

And private vs public vs un-or-homeschooling.


Taxation is theft, and all war is murder.

Further consensus? Good luck, cat herder.

Even semantics are points for a schism,

Call it free-markets, or capitalism?


Austria or Chicago? Friedman or Mises?

Is Peikoff the pope, if Ayn Rand is Jesus?

Konkin or Rothbard? What's on your shelves?

Ah hell, what's the difference, Ron Paul twenty-twelve!


So on Hayek and Murray, on Ron and on Ayn.

On Ludwig and Milton! on Bastiat and Heinlein.

Let's call a truce, friends, for just this one night.

Then on the 26th... libertarians.... FIGHT!

The Rand Album Cover came from here. 

Jesus born in a manger? Why didn't they get Caesar involved?

This bit o' greatness came from these guys, who I suspected I'll be ripping off until they die. 

Now THAT is a Flash Mob !!!

Merry Christmas !!!  Enjoy !!!

Published Again ! Ski Mississippi !

In a rare lapse into bad taste, Delta Magazine has published one of my tales in their November/December 2011 issue.  That's the Delta Magazine about the Mississippi Delta, the center of the cultural universe, not the magazine about the insiginificant airline.  (I'd sent them another article, but a hunting magazine accepted it first..  I asked if they were interested in anything else.  They replied "750 words about Christmas".  I sent them this one night and they accepted it the next morning.) 
My great friend Patricia Starnes (soon to be Farrish) took the pic at Leo Allred's store on Beale Street in Memphis. 
Here's how it looked in the mag, as opposed to what I sent in.  Hope you folks like it.  Merry Christmas !!!

I can only remember one white Christmas from my Mississippi Delta childhood. Not because of the snow, which was the largest we’d ever seen, not because the snow was particularly beautiful on our plowed-under rice fields, which looked like someone had sprinkled a thin layer of white sugar on a Mississippi Mud Cake, but because of how my father decided to celebrate the snowfall.

He took us snow skiing.

The Mississippi Delta is flat and snow skiing requires a hill. Our nearest hills were the on-ramps for the I-20/Highway 61 intersection in Vicksburg. Eudora Welty once complained that the Mississippi Delta was maddening, and couldn’t imagine spending days with nothing to see but the horizon. (I tell friends about the time my dog ran away, and three days later I could still see him.) It’s flat.

So Delta natives water ski.

My father probably taught two hundred kids how to water ski. During summers for a couple of decades, he tread water in Beulah lake, supporting his students through failed attempts until they “got it” and skied. After each success, he would dog-paddle back to shore with his wet comb-over hanging triumphantly past his left ear lobe, grab something to eat, and then get back in the lake to teach another one.

But when my little brother Steven came along, teaching had become a challenge. Keeping unwieldy skis and someone else’s fat child on top of the water was no job for a 40-year-old. When Daddy saw a pair of “training skis” at a sporting goods store, he bought them.

Imagine a pair of skis, much shorter and wider than usual, connected at the toes with an 18-inch long board. A traditional ski rope and handle went from this board to the skier’s hands. We could tie this thing behind a boat and pull a screaming child all over the lake on the first try. Steven was no more than four years old the first time he got on them, and he instantly got the hang of it.

Back to our White Christmas…. We enjoyed playing in the snow, but we couldn't go into town to see our friends.

After the mandatory snowmen and snow angels, we went inside and dared to say that we were bored. Our mother shot back at us with one of her anecdotes about growing up dirt poor in Yazoo City, and spending her winters sitting in a semicircle with her sisters and spitting on a radiator to see whose saliva would disappear first.

Daddy told us to stop our bellyachin', get dressed for the snow, and come outside. Waiting for us in the rice field in front of the house were the training skis tied to the back of a Massey-Ferguson 1800 series 4-wheel drive tractor.

The Massey Ferguson 1800 series could pull anything. They didn't get stuck, no matter how deep the mud.
We’d long suspected this, but at that moment we knew. We had the greatest… father…. ever.

I got on the skis first, my younger siblings crawled into the cab with Daddy, and we were off. The tractor took off across the frozen field, and I was towed along about 30 yards behind. I could feel every frozen clod underneath the skis, but Lord Have Mercy, it was fun. Once we got up to the cruising speed of 35 miles an hour, it was downright exhilarating.

I could lean back against the rope handle and go wide left or right. When the tractor made a quick turn, it would fling me past the “wake” like a slingshot, and then snatch a knot in my neck when the slack disappeared. The other downside were the unplanned exits from the skis. Hitting frozen mud at 35 miles an hour HURT.

My sisters and brother got their turns, and soon the field had been rutted enough to give us some nice jump ramp opportunities.

(I just got off the phone with my little brother, who is now a history professor at Mississippi College. He remembers us doing this, but was too young to remember details. However, he says that when he sees the "Jackass" show on TV, where a deathproof gang of idiotic males attempt ridiculous stunts and expose themselves to bodily harm just for fun, he thinks to himself, "Yep. That's how we grew up.")

We rode those skis for hours. If YouTube had been around, movies from that day would've been passed all around the world, titled "Mississippi Ski Slope". Why no one suffered a broken leg is a mystery. The gravel road we lived on didn't get much traffic, but anyone who saw us stopped to watch.

There were families who went to Europe that Christmas. There were young Olympians skiing down the Matterhorn. Aspen Colorado was probably swarming with what would soon be called Yuppies, wearing thousands of dollars’ worth of special clothing and equipment.

We were zipping around a muddy field of frozen mud behind a tractor, in the flatlands between Merigold and Drew Mississippi. We wouldn't have traded places with anyone in the world.

Merry Christmas ! It's what you make of it.

Put down this magazine till tonight. Go outside. Find some kids and a field and nail some skis together.

Ski Mississippi.

Merry Christmas Demotivational Poster

Here's a rerun from the last two years, when horrible unemployment levels and a sluggish economy looked like a short-term problem....

I hope everyone has a great Christmas, Xmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Happy Holidays, Winter Solstice, Deer Hunting Season, etc.

"We Three Kings" poster - Elvis Presley edition

From a house a couple of blocks from mine:

First Baptist Church of Dallas, The Grinch Alert, Merry Xmas, and why Robert Jeffress needs a history lesson

The First Baptist Church of Dallas has started a "Grinch Alert" website.  Here's the Dallas Morning News:

First Baptist Church Dallas is keeping a list this season, and probably lots of people will be checking it twice, if not more.
The Rev. Robert Jeffress, the church’s pastor, today announced the launch of www.GrinchAlert.com , a First Baptist Web site where people can post the names of “naughty” businesses that use generic holiday language or nothing at all, rather than acknowledging Christmas through store displays, advertising or community relations.

“Too many businesses have bowed down to political correctness,” Jeffress said. “I thought this would be a fun way to call out businesses that are refusing to celebrate Christmas.”

The website features a “naughty” list but also a “nice” list for recognition of businesses that do acknowledge Christmas.

....“We’re letting readers and listeners make their own determination about who ought to be on the naughty or nice list,” Jeffress said. “This is just a forum to let people express their views. In a pluralistic society everybody gets to make their decision.”

Here's some more wholesome Baptist Jihadism from the Grinch Alert website.  If this doesn't remind you of Saturday Night Live's "church lady", you weren't paying much attention in the 90's:

Have you encountered a “Grinch” this Christmas season? Share your experiences here at GrinchAlert.com! Here, you can nominate businesses and organizations that shut-out expressions of Christmas in their interactions with the public via marketing, advertising and public relations. When companies use misplaced political correctness to halt the celebration of Christmas, they belong on the “Naughty List.”

We also want to know which companies are celebrating Christmas with excitement and meaning–especially those who keep Christ in Christmas where He belongs! Those companies and organizations will be placed on our “Nice List.” Help us preserve Christ this Christmas.

Of all the theologically unaware, culture-bound, divisive, and downright sanctimonious displays of historical ignorance I've ever seen, this is one of the worst.  It's almost enough to make me go into a cussing fit, but I intend for this post to be read from pulpits all across America next Sunday.
 
The following is an excerpt (actually, an entire chapter) from "Stories Behind The Great Traditions Of Christmas", by Ace Collins. 

On Xmas

Over the past sixty years or so, Christians have lamented the commercialization of Christmas.  Many have pointed to magazines, newspapers, and store advertisements that seem to pull Jesus out of the holidays by substituting an X in place of the name of Christ in the word Christmas.  While it is usually true that those who use Xmas these days are doing so to save space and shorten the word, Xmas is hardly a new concept - or an irreverent one.  Its use actually dates back to the earliest days of the Christian church. 

Many of the Gentiles who became the initial followers of Christ were Greek.  The Greek for Christ's name is Xristos (pronounced Christos).  While it is well known that a fish was often used as a symbol to denote churches and Christian gathering places during the ancient days of the church, many Greeks also used the letter X (pronounced chi) as their symbol of faith.  This X marked the places where they worshiped.  Therefore, the use of the letter X for Christ is one of the oldest traditions in the Christian faith - one of the first concrete symbols that signified the gospel message for people of all races and backgrounds.  Knowing that Greeks were following the teachings of a Jewish man was almost mind-boggling to scores of pagans during this time.  It also spoke volumes about the nature of Christianity - that all were welcome to become part of the family of God. 

The apostle Paul no doubt knew what the symbol X meant.  He had led a large number of his Greek brothers and sisters to Christ.  A majority of those who called the Savior Xristos financially supported Paul's missionary work and created an environment for the rapid growth of Christianity in Europe.  Many of these Greeks were so enthused about their faith that they helped ignite a fire that rapidly spread the word to the far corners of the known world.  Yet they paid a price as well. 

Countless Greek Christians were persecuted for their faith.  They were stoned, hanged, burned, and put to death in grotesque displays in Rome's Colosseum.  When a Christian was martyred, other Christians often traced an X to mark the spot where a true believer had  given his or her life in faithfulness to Christ.  Hence, in the initial days of Christianity, X was also the ultimate symbol of devotion and sacrifice. 

During the early days of the church, Xmas did not exist.  This was not because church leaders felt that using such a term would be a sign of disrespect.  Since carving letters into the stones of homes and churches was not an easy chore, having an X stand for the meeting place of Christians was fine with the clergy.  The reason that Xmas was not employed during the holiday season was that there was no holiday season.  It would be almost three and a half centuries before the church designated a date to celebrate Christ's birth, and even then Christmas was not a widely recognized holiday. 

Blogger note: And when the church finally decided on a date, they plopped it onto an earlier, pagan festival.  Winter Solstice.  Go here for details.  And when you get back, you'll always remember that the original, true December holiday greeting is "Happy Winter Solstice !!"   And if you say anything else.....you're a Grinch who bows down to the forces of Political Correctness.
Sorry for the distraction. 
Back to the Ace Collins chapter on the Christian origins of "Xmas":

Many of the early Christians had a basic education and could read.  But as time passed and the missionary movement spread the gospel across Europe, converts to the faith were largely unschooled. 

Kinda like whoever came up with this Grinch website.....

These men and women would not have recognized their own names on a document, much less the name of Jesus Christ.  Therefore, symbols became an important part of faith during the Dark Ages.  Some members of the clergy taught new converts that X was a symbol for Christ.  By writing the X, a man, woman, or child could easily spell out in one simple symbol what defined his or her faith. 

During the 16th century, as more and more European clergymen began to document the history of Christianity and to record the day-to-day business of the church, the use of an X for Christ was again widely employed.  It was during this time that the word "Xmas" first began to appear in the writings of Catholic clerics and monks.  Christ's name was probably abbreviated in this manner for three reasons.  The first was that almost all religious documents of the time were handwritten in a very ornate style.  A large X could be drawn in a much more artistic fashion than could the spelled-out name of Christ.  Thus, by writing Xmas with dramatic flair, the day of Christ's birth stood out. 

The second reason probably was that ink and paper were not as easy to come by as today.  Hence, shortening any word would save not only time but also precious resources. 

Ultimately, however, the primary reason many of the Christian writers of the time used Xmas was no doubt because of their knowledge of the Greek language and the early history of the church.  In the minds of these men, Xmas was a word of power that contained great devotional value.  It was a term that honored both the early Christian followers, many of whom became martyrs, and the Savior they had chosen to lead them.  The clerics wanted to make sure that believers remember the fallen heroes of the faith each Christmas. 

As time went on, and reaching a more educated public with a deeper understanding of what faith meant became more important, Xmas was again used by the church.  This time the term was employed to point out that while Christ's birth was necessary and was a cause for great celebration, it was his death and resurrection that gave real meaning to the Christian faith.  Therefore, the X in Xmas reminded believers not only of Christ's birth, but also of the most important Christian symbol, the cross. 

When Christmas finally evolved into a holiday with commercial significance in the mid-1800's....

(Thank you, Charles Dickens)

....retailers began to note the use of Xmas by certain small Christian groups.  In order to save print space and make their flyers and advertisements easier to read, stores picked up on this term based on a very old symbol.  It also made sense because in those days many Americans could not read.  It was far easier for them to grasp than a longer word like Christmas. 

Today, in a culture where few know Greek and almost everyone has a working knowledge of English, the need for employing the symbols of faith is not widely needed.  Hence, most Christians don't know that Xmas was first used by the church and not invented as a shortcut used by merchants during the commercialization of the holiday season.  The fact that the knowledge of the real meaning of X has slipped away from most Christian teachings is a great loss.  The early Greek believers did not know the joy of worshiping freely.  they did not celebrate Christ's birth publicly.  They often paid for their faith with their lives.  Yet they helped spread the gospel to the far corners of their world.  To them, living under the sign of X - the sign of Christ - was the ultimate statement of faith.  If they could visit today's world and see the term Xmas, they would immediately understand its correlation with the Son of God.  Thus, to them, Xmas would be one of the most wonderful and powerful traditions of the modern Christmas. 

And they would also look at that shameful Grinch Alert website, and ask First Baptist Dallas to take it down. 

We Three Kings - The Demotivational Poster - Elvis Edition

Some neighbors of mine put this in their front yard every December.
I love it, love it, love it.

Even if some skeptics say he's buried in Memphis, I hope the King lives in your heart all year long, with a hunka hunka burnin' love.

Note to self: when time permits, write a post about your Mississippi neighbor's daughters who, in the mid-1970's, packaged themselves in dog crates and had themselves shipped to Graceland. And actually got inside the gate.

Merry Christmas Demotivational Poster

I created this thing last year when things were looking a bit bleak.
This year, they're worse.
Oh well. Hope'n'Change.



I hope everyone has a great Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Winter Solstice, Deer Hunting Season, etc.

Guest bloggers this week

In a few hours I'll be getting on a cruise ship and playing blackjack for a week.

(I think the boat is stopping in Cozumel, The Cayman Islands, and Jamaica. It supposedly has great food, live shows, multiple swimming pools, live music in all the bars, an ice skating rink, plus easy access to Cuban cigars. I hope everyone else enjoys them. I'm going to play blackjack for a solid week or until the money runs out.)

In the meantime, I've asked a few of my favorite libertarians (and the token House Democrat) to guest blog for me through the 28th of this month. It should be enlightening.

I've set the control panel on this site to automatically post everything that's been sent in at the rate of one entry per day. I'm really looking forward to seeing how well this works.
Guest blogger logo from here.

Merry Christmas (a little early)

I'm going on a Christmas vacation in a few days, and wanted to get this one out early. This picture seems to fit the year.


I hope everyone has a great Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Winter Solstice, etc.

Merry Christmas Again, and possibly for the last time, depending on whether I spend $75 for wireless access

We're on a plane headed to San Diego. Instead of leaving two vehicles at the airport for a week, or going through the hassles of having friends drop us off on a Sunday morning, and then pick us up on the return trip, we tried a van service.

The driver was a refugee from Iraq.

He had a copy of the Koran on the dashboard, plus a Haddith (sp?) by the seat.

Wonderful man. He turned off the radio and put in a CD of Christmas Carols for our benefit. He got a kick out of my daughter announcing that she looked forward to beating me at tennis in a foreign country.

We got to the airport, which was a freakin' zoo. Everyone travelling for Christmas and New Years. All that PLUS a higher security level.

Lots of soldiers and sailors in unform.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how many people's lives have been lost, how many lives have been disrupted, and how the economy has been slowed down with security and inspections because a tiny percentage of one of the world's major religions decided that they hated everyone who disagreed with them.

(Had to stop a moment while the plane took off....Read this week's Weekly Standard if you get a chance. There's a wonderful article in there by a P.O.'d ex-Mormon. He's got some good things to say about the ridiculous mess going on between Southern Baptist Huckabee and Mormon Romney in Iowa. Will give the guy a link on this post if I ever get a chance to find it online....)

I'm now in the "Library" of the cruise ship. It's the Princess Dawn, excuse me, The Dawn Princess sailing from San Diego. We're docked across from the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan and the wooden ship that Russell Crowe captained in the "Master And Commander" movie.

Here's another thing: If I were taking this trip prior to 9/11, security wouldn't have been so tight. I KNOW I could've gotten my own liquor onto this boat.

There are people from all over the world on this cruise. I briefly sat at the bar with a man from Jordan and talked with him for a while. Great person, except for the fact that he made his wife (in a traditional head covering) wait for him outside the bar.

If there's a point to this post, it's this: Life is a great thing. People are generally good. If you try to be a nice friendly person, they'll like you. They'll be more likable if you try. We don't need to be issuing Fatwah's against each other, we don't need to assure our team that God Won't Hear The Prayers of People On Their Team. We don't need to invent any more Hells for each other, here or in the next life. (With the exception of the person who wrote the Big Band arrangement of "Let It Snow" that's booming all over this damn boat. He's going to hell.)

Everybody have a great Christmas. Happy New Year. Hannukah. And Kwanzaa.

Merry Christmas, Everybody ! ! !

This Christmas, we're going on a cruise down the west coast of Mexico. I don't know if I'll get a chance to post anything between now and New Year's, so here's my Christmas gift to everybody that's been checking in since I started this thing in September....

Now that Charles Dickens is dead, David Sedaris is probably our greatest living Christmas writer. This is an excerpt from a story called "Dinah, The Christmas Whore" in his Holidays On Ice collection. In this story Lisa Sedaris, David's sister, has decided to bring an older female co-worker from The Picadilly Cafeteria home for Christmas. The Picadilly happens to hire a lot of former convicts to bus tables, mop floors, and help in the kitchen. At this point in the story, the Sedaris family has gotten out of bed in the middle of the night to meet Lisa's new friend.

In addition to being funny, I think it's one of the most beautifully written paragraphs I've ever read:

Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downsizing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common. At the time, though, I still believed that such a warm and heady feeling might last forever and that in embracing it fully, I might approximate the same wistful feeling adults found in their second round of drinks. I had hated Lisa, felt jealous of her secret life, and now, over my clotted mug of hot chocolate, I felt for her a great pride. Up and down our street the houses were decorated with plywood angels and mangers framed in colored bulbs. Over on Coronado, someone had lashed speakers to his trees, broadcasting carols over the candy-cane forest he'd planted beside his driveway. Out neighbors would rise early and visit the malls, snatching up gift-wrapped Dustbusters and the pom-pommed socks we used to protect the heads of golf clubs. Christmas would arrive and we, the people of this country, would gather around identical trees, voicing our pleasure with warm cliches. Turkeys would roast to a hard, shellacked finish. Hams would be crosshatched with x's and glazed with fruit - and it was fine by me. Were I to receive a riding vacuum cleaner or even a wizened proboscis monkey, it wouldn't please me half as much as knowing we were the only family in the neighborhood with a prostitute in our kitchen. From this moment on, the phrase "Ho, ho, ho" would take on a whole different meaning; and I , along with the rest of my family, could appreciate it in our own clannish way.
It suddenly occured to me.
Just like that.

Merry Christmas Everyone ! ! ! ! !