Merry Christmas, 2017! We Are Blessed!

Just finished shoveling the powdery precipitation.  For all of you Currier and Ives junkies, enjoy!

At Sixty-five and change, I tend to miss the glorious Yule beauties in expectation of greater, wetter and more back-challenging avalanches, but I must admit to this Christmas Day's wonder. sunlight and bracing blizzard bite on what passes for my nose.

Christ is smiling on Chicago, in spite of its secularist silliness and sanguine savageries.

As I completed my shoveling, I was greeted by my fireman neighbor and his puppy,  "Mass at Sacred Heart (8:30 with Father Gallager)?"

"Went last night. Couldn't sleep.  We had a family get-together with my Mom at Victorian Village in Homer Glen, so I popped in at St. Christina's on the way home." I replied.

My granddaughter ( 10 months old and all eyes and thighs) gave a detailed exhibition of all of her baby-ticks, vocal ranges and snuggles to my most appreciative mother and the baby's Great-Nana.  No other gifts required.  My kids burned up Snap Chat and their app numbers recording Christmas 2017.  I had to go give thanks to God, before my native sloth kicked in.

Cold, the fireman retorted

Bracing, said I.  I had been waiting for someone to offer that observation in order to quote the great Charles Laughton from the movie adaptation of O Henry's "The Cop and the Anthem (1:29)"

Small Christmas gifts like that do more for me than a gift certificate for  a full body massage from Salma Hayek, or a guest solo in CSO's Messiah.

This day is about hope, renewal and love.  I was gifted all three of the above and only a fireman showed up on my lot this morning. I can't wait until a cop and a Streets and San worker stop by - collect from all three!

Blessed.

Neighbors, Merry Christmas ! 2017 in the 19th Ward

I am blessed.  I live and work in this wonderful neighborhood.  I live in Morgan Park and work at Brother Rice High School.  Children grow up centered, respectful  and industrious.  This is a neighborhood of families.  It is strong.

The many churches are places where these families draw their strength - Quaker, Lutheran, Methodist, Unitarian, Episcopal, Baptist and very large Catholic parishes nurture what is learned in the home.

A very hateful article by the editor of the Chicago Reader - sponsored by the Sun Times News Group and edited by Jake Malooley, the author of the piece - took the opportunity to stir up race hate for Christmas.

The Chicago Reader is a free press and has been for as long as I care to remember. It's slant is far left of center.

The Chicago Reader is only following exactly what the Chicago Tribune, Sun Times, WTTW, WBEZ and the now dead DNAinfo Chicago have done for decades without challenge.

Why challenge people who are wrong, hateful, bigoted and wildly unfair.

People in this neighborhood are welcoming - that is how journalists ooze into the confidence of people.  They violate welcome.

A very pretty female journalist found welcoming bar stools and chatty drinkers in the saloons of Mount Greenwood, in order to make a case that this neighborhood's vote for Trump was solely due to race hate,

Her editor used her dubious report to do the same,  "No demogorgon roams this netherworld, but a majority of its electorate did back the man who's been called the swamp monster: President Donald Trump. Jake Malooley editor Chicago Reader"

Demogorgon?  Homage to Statius' Thebiad or Dungeons and Dragons?  I think the later, The last pretentious hypocrite to smear the neighborhood is a wife beater.

Neil Steinberg did so after breaking bred with a crowd of 19th Ward people.  After being made welcome he insulted and villainized his hosts as Aryan Nation racists, "But if I know you — and I do — about now you’re asking yourself: “Hey, wait a second. This guy’s a Jew. Why would a Jew be looking out for the best interest of the Iron Fist of Righteous White Anger, Mount Greenwood Corps?” Neil Steinberg Chicago Sun Times 2009"

 Steinberg was just joking, when I called him on it and his hypocrisy.  Steinberg is busy equating square dancing with cross-burning this Yuletide.

I have yet to read a news alert that young people from 60655 were stealing Christmas deliveries from UPS, FedEx and USPS routes in Roseland, Gresham, Englewood, West Lawn  or Garfield Heights.

On Halloween thousands of residents strolled with their children along the 111th Street business route.  Last week they did the same for Santa's Visit - all sponsored by local businesses and Aklderman Matt O'Shea.

No violence , as in Hyde Park.

No hate.

Christmas lives here every day, unless a few reporters manage to misquote and misrepresent the good people of this neighborhood.

Merry Christmas, everyone and everyday!

Merry Christmas, Maya and Jake!

The First Nativity Breakfast - Joe's Getting It Ready

When the shepherds, the drovers and the innkeeper's guests had gotten a good look at the young girl and her baby, the one the star pointed out,  and some time before the three gents from the east showed up with gifts, they took off with their bleating lambs their lowing cattle and their curiosity for the  stuff of everyday life.

Joseph too left his wife and child, for a very short while. No abandonment, you see.  Joe was being Dad.

The girl snuggled her baby, like the lovely young girl in the painting by Irish artist Adam Pomeroy, with protective love only a woman knows, while the baby's father went about in search of nourishment for his family.

Joe's Family was broke.  Remember, the innkeeper let them stay in stable, but no where does it say he let them bunk for free. Joseph, Mary and the little guy were in town to buck up some taxes.  This was not a vacation. Joe had to use his wits.

The First Christmas Breakfast was being put together by Joseph.

What would they have?

Scholars tell us that sugar was non-existent and that honey was only in homes of the wealthy. Dried fruits, nuts and grains were the staple diet of people in Roman occupied Judea.

 Bread was made by women who also ground the grains.  Joseph would have to buy bread, or try and get someone to offer up a few crusts.

I think that he beat it out into the wild and did some foraging for figs and olives to go with the curdled milk that was probably stored in the stable with the goats.  He could dig up some wild onions to flavor up the crushed olives.

While his exhausted bride and son slept to gain strength, Joseph threw together a meal. That is what Dad's do on Christmas mornings.

Maybe it wasn't pancakes, bacon, eggs and sausage, or an egg casserole with mushrooms, onions and peppers, but would guess that the man who put his wife on donkey to Bethlehem, watched with agonized joy as his son was born, while Mary endured the many hours of sustained torture thanks to the apple eaters, made the first meal for his family something very holy.

Our everyday lives have seemed to eclipse the sacred.  Maybe the mundane, quotidian and dull things we do out love can help restore the mystery and glory of sacred.

Our Ramparts: Chicago Trib and Sun Times Share Trump-Thumping Headline

Note the diversity at Tribune Tower!


Great minds think alike . . .and so do very small minds.

Today, after President Trump's Tax Cut, both Chicago rags offer identical headlines warning that, like the internet, we are all in peril, doomed I tells Ya!  Get to the Ramparts!

The ramparts are usually the defensive walls of castles, but in Trumpophobic America it refers to the Washington Post, newspapers that hate Trump in general, or so our later-day Henry Fonda, Tom Hanks, would have us believe.

"I would not have been able to imagine that we would be living in a country where neo-Nazis are doing torchlight parades in Charlottesville and jokes about Pocahontas are being made in front of the Navajo code talkers. And individually we have to decide when we take to the ramparts.” Tom Hanks -on not bringing the projector to the White House

You see, he has taken to the ramparts against Trump and refuses to be part of a showing of The Post at the Trump White House.

Like the Olympic snow bunny who took a Brody last week after say that she will not represent Trump in Seoul, was as good as her word.  Captain Phillips will not be taking Wilson to the White House.

Here on Chicago's sandbags and barbed wire, Bruce Dold and Tom McNamee have planted their ink wells - like their master Rahm Emanuel: No Trump Here!

Voila!

Chicago Tribune - Triumphant Trump celebrates tax win — but some fear backlash

 Chicago Sun Times - Triumphant Trump celebrates tax win, but some fear backlash

With one grammatical shift - the words are identical, as are the authors of said piece: Stephen Ohlemacher and Marcy Gordon | Associated Press

Cut and Paste, approved memes, pre-caste narratives and thin-gruel opines from lightweights like Neil Steinberg, Lynn Sweet, Steve Chapman, Rex Hupke and  Mary Schmich are what has replaced Nick Von Hoffman, Ray Coffey. Dorothy Collins and Mike Royko, in this hick burg.

Only John Kass writes with independence of thought, wit and courage.



The rest of the ninnies are stringing tinsel for barbed wire and piling Kit Kats for sandbags!  Get that helmet on McNamee!  Watch for Cops, Bruce; they might be sixth col-yoom- nists!

When the shelling is over, let me know how Tom Hanks' new flicker is doing at the box office.

Got me a tax cut.