Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Moosedeer and Mistletoe: A Christmas Open Thread

With those dulcet tones gracing the conversation it is time to get right down into the holiday spirit.

Feeling Yuletidian? Fiscalclifftonian? Looking forward to Christmas dinner, New Year’s Eve, the beginning of another solar cycle and a Presidential Renogeuration?

Deck the halls with boughs of holly and don your gay marriage apparel, the season is upon us!

Consider this a Ho Ho Hopen thread.

Bumped by Peter to continue the festive spirit


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 25 Comments

25 comments

  1. Chris Blask

    Though, from this atheist’s point of view, I recommend Christmas for all. Ho Ho and old Kris Kringle, its a pan-theological holiday as far as this infidel is concerned.

    -ho ho ho!

  2. janicket

    As an aging atheist who’s seen more than 60 of the things come and go, I regard the holiday in its current American incarnation as primarily a shopping, socializing and gluttony frenzy in any case, with top layers of sentimentality about family “togetherness” and fleeting concern for the unfortunate to make it palatable for the less nakedly amoral among us.  Genuine religious devotion has a vanishingly small part to play in the whole carnival.  So any phrasing of the season’s sentiments, whatever the degree of expressed religiosity, is equally fine by me.

    Oh, and a merry “Bah, humbug!” to you, too.

  3. Adept2u

    Of course I am, and the baby has it going on and is getting a combination Christmas/Hanukkah translation he’s cleaning up.  Of course he’s only into the boxes this year but it sets up the precedent.   Now on a more trippy note, and only of interest to those who follow the ufo Adept, I caught one on my cell phone yes I did,

    http://adept2u.blogspot.com/20…

    I put the youtube in the ole blog I wrote up when I was coming out.

  4. Cheryl Kopec

    Not only in terms of the liturgical year, but also in my life — between things, waiting, a bit unsettled. Living in the tension.

  5. HappyinVT

    I’ve just about had all the holiday spirit sucked right out of me.  Justthisclose to telling my employer to f**k off.  Ho ho ho!

    🙂

  6. fogiv

    busy busy busy, finals week, holidays, work, work, work

    soon there will come rest. sooooo tired.

    relax:

    miss ya, lova ya

  7. Broke and Unemployed

    “fiscalclifftonian” Haha, I lol’d at that.

    And Happy Holidays too, but don’t tell Bill O’Reilly I said that. I’ve always seen Christmas as more an American (or perhaps global, secular) holiday than a Christian one anyways. Since I’ve been Broke and Underemployed for a long time, Christmas is more about friends and family for me than malls and presents. It’s about eating cookies, drinking beer, and being merry, not about Black Friday melees and credit card bills.

    Glad to see the Moose is still here and doing well. Speaking of melees, I was banned from that orange website. I was pretty angry about it at first, taking my grievances to Twitter. But I have no regrets. I never asked for reinstatement. Since I felt I did nothing wrong, there’s nothing to apologize for. Back in the real world, life goes on.

    I guess an early New Years resolution is to spend less time in the artificial world of the Internet and more time on more tangible things that matter. I’ve paid less attention lately to the toxic environment of national politics and more to what’s happening in my own town.

    There’s a lot of things that my DINO city and county gov’ts are doing that I don’t like, so I think it’s best for me to try and do something about that. I may have to accept for now the things I cannot change in the country as a whole, but help change things where I can at home. Hey, all politics is local, and sometimes local movements can grow.

    Also, I’m a number cruncher, not a politician. I’m trying to finish my engineering degree, focusing on water and sewer systems, so I think one of the best ways I can contribute to society is to help make sure people have clean water to drink; millions of people around the world don’t have clean water, and many die each year. I hope when I get my degree I can find a way to use my skills to make the world a better place.

    So I’ll try to check on the Moose more often when I’m on the Interwebs, and explore more diverse and happier corners of the internet now that I’m free of that orange place.

    Errrm… sorry, I guess I wrote a wall of text there. I haven’t really had a place to vent in the past month besides 140 character snippets on Twitter.

    Merry Christmas, Moose. May your days be merry and your beer be cold and plentiful.

  8. Peter Jukes

    Obama wept. So did I to hear this story again, and again.

    In Europe we have massacres once in generation, like Otoya or Dunblane. In the US, every six months or so. Today a Chinese man went crazy and slashed 22 kids. All survived. But not in Connecticut.

    This isn’t about politicisation. It’s about common sense.

  9. DTOzone

    of walking into a mall, movie theater, restaurant, subway car, or any public place and thinking “where’s the best place for me to get out if someone comes in here and shoots up the place?”

    Because I do it all the time.

    Guns, man I have one, up at our family home in Vermont. I hate the damn thing. It’s loud, it’s scary, and it hurts my wrist when I shoot it. But I have it because if an ax murder breaks into my house, it’ll be 40 minutes before a cop shows up.

    But when I go to the range to shoot, I inevitable end up shooting next to some ZZ Top wannabe who practically cums (excuse my blunt speak) every single time he shoots a bullet.

    Our fetish for guns, for murder, for death, for killing, its what’s destroying us. Gun control is basically an admittance that we can’t do anything about the death culture. When I was a teenager, all my friends were obsessed with the game Doom. I hated it. First of all, you had to shoot dogs, and if that wasn’t bad enough, when you shot them, the dog cried like a real hurt dog. That’s not cool! Second, I really didn’t need to see that guy’s head blow up when I shot him, but its cool I got a 1,000 points for it. Third, can we stop being entertained by gun fights on TV and how many people get killed in a movie and by what horrible circumstance. They may be just fake characters on TV, but these characters are human beings with mothers, fathers, talents, etc. Presumably, they were babies once, toddlers, children. I assume someone loved them, or still does. We can celebrate life rather than trivialize death?

    I believe we can be a country with guns and few murders, but if we can’t do that, we need to be a country with few guns.

    What we cannot be is what a lot of my gun nut, Republican-supporting friends, think we should be. What we are, a land of crazy people with guns whom we can’t control. This is unacceptable.  

  10. janicket

     

    When you’re ringing out the old year and ringing in the new,

    Be it hanging out with old friends

    goofy

    Or snug inside, just two

    two

    Let your spirits lift, be merry; let nothing you dismay

    ‘Cause life will see to that, no doubt

    So while you can, make hay!

    hay

  11. Peter Jukes

    Christmas almost coincides with the winter solstice, historically known as St Lucy’s day.

    Four hundred years ago, perhaps less than a quarter of a mile from where I live, the poet John Donne sat down and composed an elegy to his dead wife – one of the most moving poems in the Engish language, here read with even greater verve and feeling but that lost lamented Welshman, Richard Burton


    John Donne – A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day by poetictouch

  12. Chris Blask

    This is the fifth Christmas the Motley Moose has celebrated. There have been babies born since then who are beginning their school careers, grandchildren have come along and many Moose have moved around the country and around the world. We have seen Moose with new careers, Moose with new loves and Moose with ever refreshing outlooks on life.

    I want to wish all of you – active Moose, lurking Moose, Moose missing in action and missed until we see you again – a very Merry Christmas wherever you are with whomever you love.

  14. janicket

    Last spring, my Thoroughbred Ben came up three-legged lame on turnout, with what turned out to be a torqued suspensory.  There ensued over a month of stall rest and gradual expansion of carefully calibrated exercise, not to mention lots and lots of vet bills.

    And now?  It’s deja vu all over again.  Looks like he’s managed to torque it again – same right hind fetlock attachment – in the comfort of his own stall, on Thursday’s dark and stormy night.

    Derek Cavatorta, lucky fellow, had emergency coverage this evening and came through the spitting snow to check out the horrifyingly immobile TB I found at bedcheck.   After history and exam, throughout which Ben was his usual sweetly placid self, we settled on the suspensory as the likely culprit.  Not good, but better than a broken pelvis or severed spinal nerve.  So Ben got a shot of Banamine and a good rub of Surpass, and I finally got to creep home through the whipping snow.

    I’ll be heading over to the barn in midmorning to check on Ben and update Derek.  Assuming the diagnosis isn’t altered by what I find, he’ll give me my instructions for the convalescence.  So I can look forward to another course of stall rest (with my Morgan, Commander, also confined to keep him company, no doubt), Surpass, bute, and tincture of time – but I hope Ben won’t require cold hosings this time!  Not in January, please please, not in January….

     Photobucket

  15. DeniseVelez

    you celebrate (or don’t)

    I’m planning to enjoy my mid-winter break from school cleaning my cluttered house, catching up on non-academic reading, doing some beadwork and other craft stuff.  

    Thankfully I’ve finished grading papers and getting grades in which were due the day after Christmas.

    Best wishes for health in the year ahead which is what I hope for myself…these old bones and bad back suffer more each year in the cold months.  

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