December 22

 Good morning on a cloudy day with three days to Christmas. Since I started this the sun has decided to come out a may be burning off the clouds. 

We don't have any special plans. Once upon a time only about 15 years ago we would have spend Christmas Eve with either my sister or brother and their families and Christmas Day with which ever we didn't visit the day before. But Sister found the preps too exhausting to continue the big celebration. And non of her kids wanted to take over. Also Brother's celebration was overseen by his wife. Sister-in-law died a few years ago. Everybody on that side of the family has scattered to other places (except for his daughter who died a couple of years ago).

For Mom and me holidays have lost much of their meaning though they are still on the calendar and some people get holidays on them. When I was a child Easter, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas were eagerly awaited. And garnered a good bit of news stories in the run up. But now Thanksgiving has been almost subsumed by Christmas the season of which now seems to start on Labor Day. We stopped giving out candy several years ago because children stopped trick-or-treating here and we didn't need to keep the chocolate (which is what we gave out because we would treat ourselves with the leftover candy) on hand. I think civic and commercial groups have organized safer options.

Holidays seem to have lost their attraction and I don't think it is entirely that we have become grumpy old ladies. We have but other factors have come in: commercialization (we hate being sold to), changes in family circumstances, and the difficulty of traveling to gatherings. We don't have the room to host ourselves.

On to reading:

Unfortunately, this article on the REAL purposes of the ICE raids to closely follows my dark and suspicious mind. I have thought that Trump is setting up an internal army which will do what he wants even if the real military balks. We keep getting closer to a police state.

Just saw an interesting headline that isn't really surprising: "1 in 10 Americans want a larger defense budget; 8 in 10 Senators passed one." It isn't surprising because I can't remember a defense appropriation that hasn't added substantial amounts to the funds granted. Also, remember who is funding political campaigns.  Politicians like to tout how many "small dollar donors" they have. It is a nice track on how their campaigns might do at the polls. However the real money is in the corporate and wealthy donors who give to the PACs and whose giving is unlimited thanks to the Supreme Court.

Stray thought: I wonder how many of our "warriors" who are getting the "bonus" payments (of $1776 to celebrate the country's birthday) sporting Trump's signature will be grateful if it reduces their housing stipend since that is where Trump grabbed the money from--not from the tariffs as he claimed.

Stray thought: do you all remember the various "stolen glory" scandals of the past two and a half decades? Various politicians were challenged for embellishing their military records or even for claiming military service when they had not served. Some of the charges were true but others were even not proven or not true at all. We have another case of stolen glory on an incredibly grander scale: Trump's slapping his name on every surface he can like the Kennedy Center. And his desecration of the White House to put up the Trump Ballroom. I could go on buy don't have to. I wonder why he doesn't pull a page out of Kim Jong Un's playbook and order every American to adopt Trump as their surname. Kim simply ordered all women whose given name was the same as his daughter's to change them.

Robert Reich has a great piece this morning on aging. It had us laughing.