The Winter Solstice, 2020
Mamacita says: Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year. It’s also the first official day of winter.
I love thinking about how the planet and the universe affect our lives, pretty much dictating when we wear a coat, turn on a light, and a kazillion other mundane – or are they? – activities that we call life. The earth under our feet is spinning faster than we can comprehend while simultaneously hurtling around a ball of flaming gases, yet we do not feel it and take for granted the beginning and ending of each day and night, and even consider it routine. That there are people who are not lost in wonder at the majesty of all of this both saddens and gobsmacks me. Because how can they not SEE it?
I Really Miss My Dad At Christmas
Mamacita say: I really miss my dad at Christmas. I miss how he would lie on the floor under the tree just looking at its beauty and wonder. I miss how he would pick up and shake every package and guess what it was, and he was usually right. I miss how he would pretend to be so surprised when he opened a present from little-children-us, which added to the excitement of Christmas. I miss how he took the tree out in the back yard and hammered together a huge wooden stand that wouldn’t let the tree fall over if a child happened to pull at an ornament. There is a role of wrapping paper I still have that I wrapped his gift in, that last Christmas. I will never part with it. I miss how he would read “A Christmas Carol” to us and explain all the customs and traditions and some of the big words to us – Dad was a wonderful reader. Thanks to Dad, I’ve known what a doornail was since before kindergarten, and how if Marley was dead as a doornail, boy howdy he was really dead. I still remember every single poem, song, and explanation he made. Whenever I read or hear a poem by Robert Frost, I think of my dad, and his voice explaining whose woods those were and why the man stopped there. I miss the sound of his hushed voice on Christmas Eve, late at night, as he examined the toys from Santa that he and Mom were placing around the tree for the two younger siblings after we had all gone to bed. Dad was a man who loved Christmas. Which is partly why I love Christmas. It brings my father back to me, just for a little while. I can close my eyes and see him there, by the glowing tree, like a child himself, loving it all. I really miss my dad at Christmas.
The Battle Between Good and Evil
Mamacita says: Life on earth has always been a battle between good and evil, no matter how much we like to believe there’s a grey area in between.
For the past four years, Americans have been subject to the rule of evil, and we’ve had to watch helplessly as people we loved and respected crawled out from under their rocks and supported adultery, harassment, lies, disrespect, selfishness, childishness, entitlement, mockery, smirking, soft porn, and disregard for others to a degree never before imagined by people who were even a little bit good. Nobody is perfect, but in January, we will no longer have a very, VERY hellishly flawed bloated baby-“man,” a porn actress, a mommy’s boy sycophant, and Mommy Herself, a woman too pathetic and paranoid to allow her husband to sit in a meeting with another woman, in the White House.
We will have not merely a breath, but a regular gust of fresh air, still flawed but not hellishly so: an educated, literate, kind actual gentleman, his educated, literate, kind First Lady who is actually a lady, their educated, literate VP, and the VP’s husband who is proud of his wife, trusts her judgment, and is unafraid of anyone, male or female, that the VP might need to meet with. all of whom understand how our government is supposed to work, and who won’t surround themselves with needy, feeble-minded family members, suck-ups. and people who will need to be professionally pardoned in order to stay out of prison.
For four years, I’ve had a hard time understanding how God could have allowed these people to be elected, and I’ve grieved that there were really this many clueless people in our nation who shared the values that have filled the White House while pretending to be Christian even though their idol was the very opposite of any kind of religious values.
Sam Levinson’s mother used to say, “You can’t sit at two weddings with one fanny.” And you can’t claim to be an honestly religious person and support the kind of values we’ve had to endure these past four years. One or the other. THOSE values or real values. And people we know and love have chosen, and there are broken hearts all over America.
In January, our country will, after four years of moral darkness, see a light. It will take a long time to “fix” the nation after four years of deliberate destruction, but I am confident, with God in control again, that it will be done. The real Americans will make sure it’s done.
