Society

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

Best wishes to everyone celebrating Christmas.

I am in Chicago with the family for Christmas with my 90-year-old mother Angela.  We got our wish this year for a white Christmas with a few inches on Christmas Eve.  The Chicago Bears completed the perfect Christmas by winning on Sunday. Even though the Browns are the worst team in the country without a single win this year, none of us made any assumptions given the record this year.

 

 

 

75706_415843048470592_965859015_nWe took my Mom to St. Mary’s of the Lake for midnight mass (though it is no longer actually at midnight and end regrettably at 11 pm).  This is my childhood church where I have literally spent every Christmas of my life. It is a gorgeous church and I love the fact that it is now part of the tradition of my four children.

Last night, I made our traditional Cioppino soup — a tradition started by my late father, Jack Turley. I hated the soup as a kid so fate has left this tradition to me. I am now as addicted to the soup as my father was.

I cook the beef as well as the Yorkshire pudding, horseradish. and other traditional dishes for the dinner.  We will have the entire family clan over to the house. A total of 29 this years.

Despite the latest loss of the Bears, we are all in good cheer and it is wonderful to be home in Chicago.

The Turley family wishes everyone a happy and safe holiday. I will be toasting our blog family tonight and give thanks for the wonderful community we have created at this site.

Best wishes,

Jonathan Turley

60 thoughts on “MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!”

  1. Glad the Christmas branding by the Trumps wasn’t delivered to the public until after the 25th- The Tiffany and Ivanka Trump selfies in bikini tops at Mar Largo blowing puckered kisses to the camera, with O Holy Night playing in the background.

  4. Merry Christmas to everybody! I spent Christmas Eve helping my Mom cook a bunch of stuff. And Christmas Day at her house with a lot of family. As usual, my aunts implied that I must be a depressed lesbian, because I am single and won’t date, and won’t reproduce. They mean well, and I prepare myself for all that, and don’t get drunk sooo I can maintain my composure.

    It was a fun day, and interesting, but I came home and am now with my cats. I hope everybody else had a Merry Christmas!

    Squeeky Fromm
    Depressed Lesbian

    1. Squeeky – my depressed lesbian friend. 🙂 It probably will not you feel any better, but my wife spent the better part of tonight annoying my nephew by questioning him why he was still living with his parents, why he was still unemployed after 20 years, etc. In China, singles hire a member of the opposite sex to be their bf, gf for the holidays. There is a whole pricing schedule. 🙂

    2. Squeeky, simply explain to your family that you have many admirers who enjoy your poetry, your quirky sense of humor, and appreciate your insights into a broad variety of subjects.

  5. I’m very sorry to see Christmas leave us. I find Christmas to be inspiring as a fertility rite, with the evergreen tree serving as a phallic symbol, the festive hanging spheres and strings of lights and tinsel representative of testicles and semen, and the decorated wreath symbolic of the vagina. Christmas has never quite been the same for me once I’ve grasped the underlying Freudian meaning of the celebration.

      1. David Benson – I have never gotten a partridge in pear tree for Xmas. Actually, my love has never gotten me any of those promised items from the famous song about the 12 days of Christmas. I have decided that the 12 days of Christmas are actually a commercial fraud.

        1. Yes, but there are still 12 days until the wise men arrive.

          Actually, the church arranged this to interfere with Saturnalia.

      2. The celebrations of Christmas today involving trees, wreaths, and the like were actually pagan in origin and had nothing to do with the 12 days of Christmas. But you would not know this, Benson, because to you, ignorance and stupidity are badges of honor.

        1. Well, I knew this from the middle 1950s when I was studying German for the first time. There were little essays about the customs to translate from High German.

    2. Ralph Adamo – you have spent waaaay too long at the eggnog bowl. You are starting to lose contact with reality. 🙂

        1. There are more things in heaven and earth, Benson, than are dreamt of in your Leftist philosophy. To one who is such a stranger to reality, you, of course, could never know this.

          And now for something completely different. FYI, virtually no special effects have been used here.

      2. Paul, I’m a choclaholic. However, I do frequently substitute alcohol around this time of year.

        1. Ralph Adamo – I am a chocoholic myself but I have been very good except for last night when I slipped badly. Somebody gave me a jar of chocolate goodies and I went through them all in one sitting. I will pay for that, but it was worth the beating. 😉

      3. Yes, I totally did not need that visual. It may ruin me for wreaths for the rest of my life! 🙂

        2. CCS and Paul. You should not let symbolism interfere with conscious perceptions and enjoyment of objects. Painter Georgia O’Keefe even abandoned her splendid abstract paintings because too many analysts referred to the symbolic meaning of many of them.

          But, as Freud himself said (sort of), “Sometimes a vibrator is just a vibrator.” 😉

          https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://shop.whitney.org/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/d/p/dp-394243-22.jpg&imgrefurl=http://shop.whitney.org/georgia-o-keeffe-music-pink-and-blue-medium-26-x-22-2-in-print.html&h=1000&w=1000&tbnid=UoAGvjahVFI3zM:&tbnh=151&tbnw=151&usg=__ncKGJ3aieGqixOUzD9eEAhSUQJk%3D&vet=10ahUKEwi31pH716jYAhXK44MKHRAHCfEQ_B0IgQIwDA..i&docid=ZwZ9NCrJe1hKoM&itg=1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi31pH716jYAhXK44MKHRAHCfEQ_B0IgQIwDA

          1. Ralph Adamo – I did not know that Clinton could make that cigar vibrate. I read the Lewinsky transcripts and learned more than I wanted to learn about the supposed sex life of the President and his intern, including that the President had genital herpes (which was not surprising considering the number of women he was reported to have bonked, both willingly and unwilling). However, I don’t remember anything about it vibrating. 🙂

  7. The Pope is a joke…
    He’s a joke all the way!
    From his first prayer at breakfast to his last dying day.

    So give us a leader who speaks from his heart.
    And not some bozo who only speaks farts.

  9. What happens when a fly falls into a coffee cup?

    The Italian – throws the cup and walks away in a fit of rage

    The Frenchman – takes out the fly, and drinks the coffee

    The Chinese – eats the fly and throws away the coffee

    The Israeli – sells the coffee to a Frenchman, the fly to a Chinese person, buys himself a new cup of coffee and uses the extra money to invent a device that prevents flies from falling into coffee.

    The Palestinian – blames the Israeli for the fly falling into his coffee, protests the act of aggression to the UN, takes a loan from the European Union for a new cup of coffee, uses the money to purchase explosives and then blows up the coffee house where the Italian, the Frenchman, and the Chinese, are trying to explain to the Israeli why he should give away his cup of coffee to the Palestinian.

    1. And now for some Christmas related news. The classic movie “It’s A Wonderful Life,” written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Frank Capra, with story by Philip Van Doren Stern, and starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Read, has been found to be sexist and misogynistic. No, this is not a joke, unfortunately. There is no end to the insanity that is Leftism. http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/20/opinions/sexual-harassment-culture-christmas-opinion-costello/index.html

      1. In future Christmas segments, I shall explain why “Miracle on 34th Street” must be banned as racist and why “The Nutcracker” must be banned for its Islamophobia.

      2. Jiminy Cricket, what a couple of cranks Costello was interviewing. “Men are going to be more careful?” Yup, that’s an understatement. Men are going to run as fast as they can from shrews like that woman in the clip, and by extension, away from normal women also. I’m sorry, but the feminists need to stop conflating all touch and labeling it as sexual harassment. Humans are social animals with a developmental need for physical contact. I don’t want to imagine the state our society will be in after these femi-Nazis have ruined it…..we’re all going to be scared to even make eye contact with each other for fear somebody will start screeching and pointing like Donald Sutherland in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

  10. Good you are with your sweet mom. Thank you for the hard work you do. You to me are very balanced Mr Jonathan. I don’t miss Chicagoland even though it is a great place to live..

    Have a great Holiday and best of health!

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