Climate Changing Christmases

I HAVE ALWAYS loved Christmas. The decorations, music, parties, good cheer. Awakening early on Christmas Day in early childhood and discovering a pile of beautifully wrapped presents with my name on tham beneath a real, apline smelling Christmas tree all lighted up helps set the tone for an entire lifetime of Christmas love. Now, I no longer have occasion to exchange gifts with anyone. My family members and I agreed to suspend the practice years ago, and everybody is still happy with the decision. When you approach retirement age and realize that you have a house full of at least five times the amount of material things that you really need tends to frighten some seniors into toning things down a bit. I amone of those. I light up my house with colored lights, and it looks good. No tree for me and my cats. Yesterday, Christmas Day, I never left the house, and I enjoyed teh day as much as ever, as much as when I was en years old. I am glad that this indoctrinated love of Christmas has remained with in me, and hope and trust that it will so remain for a few more years. I can remmber onw and only one white Chrstmas during my lifetime, an inch or two of snow falling on Shristmas morning when I was in my early teens in the late sixties, around 1967 or 1968. In those days it snowed several times every winter in my lower midwestern American locale, usually three or four inches which melted within a couple of days, sometimes a rare one ot two foot snow atorm. Now, it rarely snows here, and hasn't for years. Schood age children undoubtedly cannot remember the climate the way it used to be. On Christmas Day our temperature got close to eighty degrees, and never fell below sixty at night. Shirt sleeve weather, suitable for April or May, not late December. Whether I prefer the old or the new cliamte depends on what day you ask me. Spring-like Christmases have a certain appeal for me, but on the other hand, cold weather has never really impeded my outdoor activities; its the sharp winds and ice which really get in the way. The week of December 21-28 most of the United States is enveoped in a big heat wave, except for the ice and snow storm making its way through the north and on back east. The week of unseasonably warm weather, because of its timing and duration, seems weird, somehow unnatural. And, verily, unnatural it is, if you make the philosophical assumption that modern human civilization, with its technology and industry is not necessarily what nature had and has in mind. The president of the United States is actively trying to reduce and slow down the developed of sustainable energy sources, such as wind and solar energy, which the confused old man sees a harmful to the United States, and is trying to reignite the fossil fule industry, almost as if said president is a secret member of some suicidal death cult bent on the extinction of the human species and all life on Earth. The environmental policy of the Trump administration and the entire Republican party, and presumably conservative America generally, consists, for all appearances, in a dogged determination to end all life on Earth. Only twisted minds embracing destructive political policies could actually strive towards this goal,of resisting any and all measures to save ourselves. When one takes a close look at today's conservative environmental ideology, as articulated by the Republican party, human suicide is clearly its predictable result, if not its stated intent. To defeat this culture of denial of reality will require the sustained effort of millions of people wise enough to consider eighty degree Christmases highly alarming, if rather pleasant.