I need to take a moment to wish my mother a very Happy 78th Birthday. If there is one person in this world who deserves much of the blame credit for the wonderful person I turned out to be, it’s her.
She’s been an endless source of both inspiration and wisdom not only my myself and my siblings, but for friends and extended family. If you have a spare moment, drop by her blog and say hi.
Love you so very much, Mom. Happy Birthday.
New Years Day has always been a weird holiday for me. For much of my childhood I didn’t really understand what folks were celebrating. It just seemed like an excuse to drink and eat a lot and stay up way past your normal bed time. Not that that’s a bad reason, but the celebration always seemed to be way more than necessary for reasons as simple as that.
At the age of 45 I now realize it’s a celebration of having made it to the new year at all. Life can be rough and each year brings with it new trials and tribulations that makes arriving at the dawn of yet another year something very much worthy of the celebrations we engage in. It’s a time to remember those who didn’t make it this far and to hope for a brighter future for all of us to come.
Compared to past years, 2012 went pretty well for me. It was my first year as a full-time employee at my current job. I’ve been a contractor for most of my career — over 20+ years — and it was great to finally be a “real” employee for a change. It was also the year we said goodbye to Melvin, the Official SEB Cat. We enjoyed his company for eight years and he was as good a cat as you could hope for.
I am hopeful about 2013, but we already know that bad things are on the horizon. My father-in-law has terminal cancer and we expect he only has a few months left before we have to say goodbye to him for the last time. I am arriving at that age where losing loved ones is no longer an unexpected event, but a natural consequence of the passage of time. It’s a phase of life we are all destined to go through, but not one I look forward to. The are other smaller challenges ahead as well. This year I really need to get serious about dropping some of my weight as I am waking up with a sore back near daily now. I’ve been hovering at just under 300 pounds for too many years and it’s starting to get intolerable.
It’s going to be another year of trials and tribulations, but there will be plenty of victories large and small to celebrate along the way. If I should be lucky enough to surmount the troubles and ride the highs to find myself at the dawn of another new year in 355 more days I will once again pause to remember and celebrate my good fortune. Happy New Year to you and yours. May it have more to celebrate than to mourn.
Melvin passed away this year so I won’t be using his traditional Christmas greeting.
Instead, here’s an important holiday message from Grumpy Cat:
I don’t know about you guys, but I am sooooo fully of turkey and stuffing and mashed taters and pecan pie right now. And it was so good.
Here’s hoping your Thanksgiving was as full of good food and memories as ours was.
Jasper got bored waiting for the kids to show up.
It took some time to get underway this year — it was an hour and 20 minutes after the scheduled start time before we saw the first couple of kids — but it was a pretty decent Halloween in the end. The weather was cold and damp, but not rainy and there were plenty of trick and treaters dropping by to collect their empty calories.
We pulled double duty this year as one of the neighbors came up to ask if we’d had out her candy as well because she had to to go work and her husband wouldn’t be home in time to do the honors. She had the same problem last year and had just set the bowl out on the honor system only to have the first couple of kids who showed up clean it out completely. We said we’d be happy to do so and she dropped by with a bowl full of suckers a short while later.
This proved to be more problematic than I first thought as several kids didn’t pick up on my invitation to take a couple of items from each bowl and thought that they could only choose from one bowl or take just one thing from each bowl. As a result, we both have left over candy again even though we bought less than last year. Good thing it’s stuff I like to eat.
Here’s hoping your Halloween was as festive and fun as ours was! I enjoyed it so much that I think I’ll do it again next year.
If it’s October then it must be time for the annual “Satan loves Halloween” message from overly credulous Evangelicals. This year’s warning comes from Linda Harvey of Mission America as posted on the WingNut Daily website.
Not only does she engage in the usual demons-will-get-you nonsense, but she manages to one-up previous year’s warning by linking it to homosexuality:
2. Halloween is now the second-most popular American celebration right behind Christmas. Why the growing magnetism of Halloween? Spiritual deception on a grand scale, using every enticing trick in the book, may be at work. And such trends call for heightened Christian discernment.
This event has become a huge annual celebration in the “LGBT” world, especially for the transgender/ gender-confused folks. Their affinity illustrates some of the problem: The core of Halloween is glittering artificiality. You can be pretend to be someone you aren’t for a night, you can flirt with danger, you can divine a different destiny – but it’s all void of the love or will of God. This “seduction unto death” is enticing: Don’t be afraid, do what you want, there’s nothing to fear. It’s one of Satan’s oldest tricks. Costume parties can be fun, but these costumes dare to disguise even our very souls.
Icky gay people like it so you know it’s icky!
Though it’s not just the gays that get the guilt-by-association treatment here. Reason #1 on the list makes sure that witches aren’t forgotten:
1. Let’s be honest about the spiritual force at the center of Halloween. The modern celebration retains its decidedly occult origin. Some say the “All Hallows Eve” designation on some church calendars marks it as a Christian holiday, but an eighth-century accommodation to local pagan traditions for appeasing evil spirits is very thin gruel, Gospel-wise.
Halloween remains the highest sacred day of the year for modern witches and pagans, called “Samhain” (pronounced, “sow-een”). Some rationalize that Halloween transforms ghouls and goblins into light-hearted fun, but is Halloween’s makeover into a big joke a biblical approach? While Christians need not cringe in fear of the demonic realm, nor be overly preoccupied, neither are we to mock and scoff, cavalierly entering Satan’s territory while dismissing the danger. We are especially not to encourage our children in such recklessness.
Keep in mind that this woman, and many other Evangelical Christians like her, literally believes that demons are real and are lurking in the shadows in anticipation of your kid playing with an Ouija board so they can swallow their souls. She must lead a very stressful life worrying about nonsense like that all the time.
That said, she and her like-minded brethren are free to keep their kids safely at home on Halloween if they really want to. It’s not like anyone has ended up psychologically scarred for not having been allowed to trick or treat as a kid. All they’re missing out on is a bit of harmless fun. It just means more candy for the rest of us.
I was reading an article at NatGeo’s website titled Memorial Day: How It’s Changed, Why Some Oppose 3-Day Weekend which was partially about the history of the holiday, but also included a section on why some folks are pushing legislation to have the date moved back to the 30th of May.
It seems some folks, mostly Republicans, don’t feel people are observing the holiday with the level of solemnity they feel it deserves:
“The majority of Americans view Memorial Day as a time for relaxation and leisure recreation rather than as a solemn occasion and a time to reflect and pay tribute to the American servicemen and women who sacrificed their lives in defense of our Nation,” according to an American Legion resolution issued at the group’s 2010 National Convention.
Basically they’re upset that some folks aren’t spending the day the way that these people think it should be spent. How dare they take advantage of a three day weekend to have fun!
But they can fix that:
Instead of being part of a long weekend, the resolution asks that Congress “restore the official observance of Memorial Day to May 30 and that all American institutions toll their bells for one minute, beginning at 11:00, on that date in remembrance of those who died defending the Nation.”
Yes, I’m sure ruining a three-day weekend for everyone will suddenly make them more reverent about the sacrifices of service members.
Look, I appreciate the sacrifices that have been made by my fellow countrymen to secure the freedom we enjoy, but isn’t observing a holiday they way I feel like observing it part of that “freedom” thing they died for? For all their talk about Liberty and Freedom, the Republicans certainly seem keen to spell out how others should live their lives and if you’re not living it they way they think you should be then they’ll see if they can’t force you to do so.
I’m really sick of the false-patriotism of the flag-wavers in this country who think that they have a lock on what it means to be patriotic, but can’t be bothered to fulfill basic civil duties such as jury duty. You want to spend your Memorial Day visiting the graves of dead service members? Hey man, more power to you. I’ll raise a toast at the BBQ I’ll be attending instead.
Don’t think breaking a three day weekend will change that.
Part of what the neighbors had to put up with this year.
I did something today that I always hate doing and yet I do it every year: I took down the outside Christmas decorations.
I’m not much of a romantic, but I am very, very sentimental. Part of the reason I’m a huge fan of the holiday season despite being an atheist is because of all the wonderful memories I have of it from my childhood. The religious aspects of the holiday took a backseat to the whole Santa thing and the cliche that it’s the one time of the year when people are a little more decent to each other. A cliche I bought into as a child with each Christmas special that I watched. It really did seem magical to me as a kid and I reveled in it. When I was finally old enough to participate in putting up the decorations it only added to the excitement each year.
As with most things you highly anticipate, there’s a minor feeling of loss that occurs once it has come and gone. It’s kind of like riding a roller coaster. All that excitement and build-up and then it’s suddenly over with the memory already starting to fade along with your heart rate. When it comes time to take down the decorations and pack them away for the year it brings a definite finality to the events. You can’t even pretend that Christmas was just yesterday anymore by turning on the lights just one more time. In years past I’ve so dreaded this day that it wasn’t unusual for my decorations to stay up until into February. For years I’ve had a standing agreement with my wife that they come done by her Birthday, which is January 30th.
Of course as you get older you don’t get as excited about the same things you did as a kid and thus the let down afterwards isn’t as strong as in the past. Eventually you get to a point where your pragmatism starts to override your sentimentality. Or at least I do. Today when I woke up the sky was clear and almost cloudless with a outdoor temp of 33° – practically a heat wave for a Michigan January — so I went outside and took down all the lights I had put up back in November along with the other miscellaneous decorations. Didn’t even bother to put on a jacket. I felt the old familiar pang as I did so, but it wasn’t as bad as in years past. My reasons for doing so were definitely pragmatic. There’s no snow on the ground, as unusual as the temperature for this time of year, and I know that if I let the opportunity pass that the next time I get up the gumption to do it before the birthday deadline will probably be after it has snowed six feet and the temps are sub-zero. Better to get it done now than once the winter finally catches up with us.
But I was still a little bummed while doing it. The only lights still outside are the lanterns that have the fake LED candles in them. We thought they’d make excellent lights for the path to the back door and they aren’t particularly seasonal so they’ll stay up. My Christmas tree is still up and I’m trying to decide whether to take it down today or wait until Courtney visits us next weekend. It’s looking a little sad as the cats have gotten most of the plastic ornaments on the bottom half of the tree off to play with, but if I use the excuse of Courtney’s visit to keep it up then I could at least pretend that the holidays haven’t fully passed for one more week. It’s definitely tempting.
I think this is part of why religion has such a tenacious hold on people. We don’t like letting go of things that make us feel good. We become irrational in trying to hold onto those memories and emotions. We want to keep those warm feelings regardless of the date (or the truth). It can lead us to do foolish things like ignore global climate change or, as I did the first year I lived in my apartment in Canton back in my early 30′s, leave a Christmas tree up all year long*.
Don’t know if any of that makes sense, but I wrote it down anyway.
*In my defense I was traveling a lot for a job with GMAC dealing with upgrading computers to prevent problems with Y2K and was rarely home long enough to mess up the apartment let alone put the tree away.
It’s been a busy weekend with the family so we’re going with our annual message from the Official SEB Cat, Melvin, who says:
Never say we aren’t a classy joint around here: