Best wishes to everyone celebrating Christmas. We are celebrating our four children, extended Turley clan, and, of course, Luna. So far, Christmas has avoided the series of unfortunate events that made last year so … well … memorable.
Yesterday, we went to the Christmas market in the loop and got potato pancakes and other delights. Unlike the arctic weather of last Christmas, it was perfectly balmy this year in the 40s and 50s.
My mom is 96 and going strong.
Last night, I made our traditional Cioppino soup — a tradition started by my late father, Jack Turley. It is a spicy mix of mussels, shrimp, sea bass, clams, crab meat, and other ingredients. I have previously written how I grew up hating the soup but the tradition fell to me when my father became ill. I am now as addicted to the soup as my father was. When I make the soup each year, it continues an indelible connection to my Dad and best friend.
We spent this morning trying to keep Luna out of the stockings given her suicidal fetish for chocolate.
We will have roughly 30 tonight at my Mom’s house off the lakeshore. I will be making the beef, gravy, Yorkshire pudding, and fresh grounded horseradish sauce. We also have a great Bûche de Noël (or yule log cake) and other delights for dessert.
The Turley family wishes everyone a happy and safe holiday. I will be toasting our blog family tonight and giving thanks for the wonderful community we have created at this site.
Best wishes,
Jonathan Turley
I’m anxiously hoping you will post of the recipe of your father’s Ciopinno soup. I have all the ingredients you mention in your Christmas message except for clams. I’m wondering if I could substitute geoduck instead of clam ?
Ben Ellison
What would home be without you? Everyone is truly blessed. I hope your New Year is differently eventful.
God bless you & yours forever.
Merry Christmas!!
The good side of America 🙂
Belatedly, Merry Christmas to all !
Merry Christmas Jonathan! I sincerely hope it is a wonderful one!
I view you as a national treasure . . . A living monument to clear thinking, based on a truly intimidatingly great volume and breadth of knowledge.
Thank you. My life is richer for “finding” you.
Best Christmas wishes to you too Professor Hurley. I enjoy reading your columns, and seeing you on TV. Listening to you makes me think! Gold Bless you and your family.
Merry Christmas to Prof. Turley and his family, and also to the great readers of this blog! God bless you every one!
Cindy
… and to all, a good night.
Merry Christmas professor Turley and to everyone else.
America Feels Like a Codependent Household
Lance Morrow, Wall Street Journal
Dec. 25, 2023 1:21 pm ET
America feels like an alcoholic household—crazy with grievance, accusation, irrational rage, screaming in the middle of the night. The children lie in the dark, wide-eyed, listening. In the morning, the family comes downstairs trying to pretend that everything is normal. There’s a lot of pretending: The southern border isn’t wide open; unpunished crime is social justice; the president of Harvard deserves her job…..
Things aren’t normal. Everyone knows it. The country doesn’t quite recognize itself. America has gone astray in a strange new landscape. It’s a different America all right…..
Republicans persist in the charade of their debates, though Mr. Trump doesn’t show up. Why should he? Instead he itinerates from one MAGA rally to another, his rhetoric growing more baroque and feral. His enemies are “vermin,” he says, using Joseph Goebbels’s term for Jews. He promises, if elected, to unleash on his enemies—meaning about half the country—the shock and awe of his wrath.
The Democrats, increasingly divided, sleepwalk toward their own disaster. They pretend, but don’t believe, that their 81-year-old president and his vice president—a pressing existential problem in her own right—have performed so brilliantly during their first engagement that they should be booked for another four years.
This isn’t quite American democracy but the 21st century’s travesty of it. All three branches of the federal government have one way or another become disreputable. The president’s approval rating is down in the 30s. Congress is almost picturesque in its dysfunction….
In the 21st century’s universe of screens, the effect is hypertrophied: Fantasy replaces reality. Technology empowers hallucination…
Are things that bad? Drunks can get sober. Countries can change. But not without brains and faith, not without abandoning the compulsion to lie and the weird self-righteousness that addiction begets. .
https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-feels-like-a-codependent-household-division-polarization-politics-303c8c9a
Anonymous: Thanks for posting that article from the WSJ.
May God bless you and your wonderful family this Christmas and into the coming year.
Merry Thank God Christmas Is Almost Over
MERRY CHRISTMAS!