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Boxing Day and Economic Justice

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment


Boxing Day is a largely but not exclusively British tradition of gift-giving to the poor after Christmas Day. Some sources trace it to the medieval obligation of the lord of the manor to provide certain necessities each year to his peasants and serfs. It was not charity but duty, including cloth, flour, and other necessities of life. Another tradition is to empty the tip jar at commercial establishments and divide the money among the firm’s workers. In both cases, it was not charity but earned cash or goods, much like the Christmas bonuses that many firms share today.
Both traditions exist side-by-side. In fact, it is now observed more as a shopping day than a giving day, although both can be combined. The notion that the profits of the firm should be shared with the workers who made it possible is less and less popular in our winner-take-all free market society, but the Christmas bonus is a remnant. In the 19th century, the practice of emptying the church alms box on Boxing Day (also known as the Feast of Saint Steven) and Victorian influences shifted the emphasis to post Christmas charity as the coldest days of winter were just beginning.
Both of these kinds of giving and receiving are issue of economic justice, the only holiday for which that is the primary focus. What do we owe to those who earn low wages doing essential work, or to those unable to support themselves? A poem for Boxing Day

A Holiday for Justice

One day a year we follow feudal Lords
In earned and festal sharing of the wealth
Created by many, but possessed by few.
It is not a time of charity
But limited admission that
Abundance is the work of many hands.
In modern times, earned sharing seems to be
A voluntary act of charity
Begrudged when it is often fairly earned.
What do I woe? To whom is payment due?
Our what do others deserve but not receive?
Justice is not charity. May we
All receive more than we deserve,
And in gratitude, pass it forward.

First Day of Christmas

~ purplesage41 ~ 3 Comments


For many of us it may be the last day of Christmas. But in Colonial times and beyond, Christmas Day itself was a solemn religious holiday, followed by eleven days of parties and celebrations of various kinds. It passes through New Year’s Day and ends at Epiphany, traditionally the date of the visit of the three kings or three magi, depending on your preference. For me, the first day of Christmas is fairly quiet. My family, or most of it, has come and left after much food, gifts, conversation, board games, home repairs by my son-in-law, and general being together.I spend the rest of the aftermath days until the new year reading some of the many books and doing one of the many jigsaw puzzles I always get for Christmas, un-decorating, and walking in the winter wonderland.

Two poems for the after days,, the first from Howard Thurman and second from me.
The Work of Christmas
When the song of angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas beings:
To find the lost
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among the brothers,
To make music in the heart.

Christmas 2024
The Christmas myth is rich and warm
Amidst the bleak of winter.
A baby, humbly born
Yest destined to become
A guide unto the nations.
Shepherds, angels, kings
A star in the East
All come to welcome him.

And so we celebrate—
Family, like Mary, Joseph and Jesus
Community, like shepherds, angels and kings
Gifts given, gifts received
Like modern day Pandoras,
A year ago we opened
A box labeled 2024
It was a hard and fear-filled year.
As we approach its end
We celebrate the gift of hope
That casts out fear and welcomes joy.

Welcome Yule

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

A popular expression among some Christians is “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Yes, there is a connection, but The season is the reason why the choice was made to celebrate the unknown date of his birth at this particular time of year. Before Jesus, there was Saturnalia, and Diwali, and Hanukkah. The common thread is the holiday that falls this Saturday, December 21st, the winter solstice, known since ancient times as the festival of Yul or Yule. It celebrates the shortest day and the longest night of the year as the northern hemisphere turns away from the sun..
In Celtic and other traditions, the story goes something like this. The Sun God is born at Yul and grows to manhood. His companion through this travel in the Triune Goddess, maiden Bridgid, Mother Danu, and the crone, who has various names. He courts the maiden in spring, and she becomes pregnant with the sun god. At summer solstice the sun is a the peak of his powers and the goddess she is radiant with a child in her womb. The Sun God begins to decline and dies at the winter solstice even as a new sun god is born. The crone is renewed as the maiden, and the cycle begins again. Or at least, that’s ‘the mythical story that underlies the holidays that enable us to reconnect with he rhythms of the turning year.


Here is a solstice poem:
This ancient holiday
Marks ending and beginning


The seed is still beneath the earth
Preparing to emerge from its cocoon
At Imbolc or beyond.
Yule calls us to take rest in darkness
To hibernate, reflect, and be prepared
To bloom once more.
Let us not hasten through
These cold short days
Spring will come soon enough.
There is no spring without winter
To prepare us or rebirth.

Let Me See

~ purplesage41 ~ 3 Comments


I am a member of the silent generation. I think we World War II babies just got lumped into the Silent Generation, because we weren’t so silent. We were in college in the sixties along with the first batch of the Boomers, and we did our share of protesting and demonstrating. As we grew older, the challenges we were addressing didn’t get much response until those challenges started hitting the Boomers. Birth control. Menopause. The glass ceiling. Equal pay for equal work.(Yes, I’m sure the guys had issues, but gender issues were petty hot in those days.I can only speak for my own gender on health issues!),
For the past ten years, as my ability to read the fine print or thread a needle or see well enough to drive at night has diminished, there was no response from the larger society adapting to our needs. But now that the Boomers are having the same challenges (both genders, except maybe the needle part), perhaps we will see some awareness that changes are overdue.
Here is my list of grievances around which I wish to peaceably assemble (during daytime hours) and seek redress as I am promised by the First Amendment. Well, it promises I can complain. It doesn’t say anything about fixing things.

  1. Low contrast signs, pictures, etc. My congregation has a lovely tasteful sign outside. It is painted beige with white lettering. Most people can’t read it, not just old people, but sharper contrast does keep us reading longer. Hey guys, if you are looking for patrons or customers or employees, consider the legibility of your signage.
  2. Shrinking print size on everything from cooking instructions of foods to operating manuals to instructions of taking medicines, both prescription and over the counter. In case you haven’t noticed, those people with deteriorating eyesight are among your biggest customers.
  3. Night driving, night meetings, SUV headlights string at us directly in our smaller, low to the ground vehicles. I know that big hulking SUVs are already not designed with consideration for those who share the remaining space of the road, but car designers and insurance companies might have an interest in headline design that cause episodes of blindness in oncoming drivers. And voluntary organizations might want to consider offering more daytime gatherings, events, etc. for that age group who are often the bulk of their market. Matinees. 5 pm meeting instead of 7ish. It’s not just the night driving, it’s also a tendency among my fellow octogenarians and their trailing septuagenarian Boomers to feel their energy droop at the end of the workday or former workday. I have seen some signs of awareness of time-of-day issues in scheduling events, but it’s only a trickle so far.
    Is this a government issue? Maybe the car safety and the print size on drugs. But shouldn’t the market be responding to consumers? Is there any competition left? Instead of big meals or big Macs or big bargains how about offering customers or members big signs (with contrast) and big print?
    Oh, for the golden days of my youth when I did battle to allow girls to wear Bermuda shorts on campus and protested the war in Vietnam. I know I should be saving the earth and making it safe for democracy, and I do my best, but I could do better if I could drive safely at night and read the fine print.

Fact, Myth, Truth and Santa Claus

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Fact, Myth, Truth and Santa Claus

Thursday marked the beginning of a long season of our individual and collective reaction to cold and dark. Some of us want to cocoon. Some will party until tomorrow starts earlier in the day. Some of us suffer through seasonal affective disorder and get depressed. So it is no wonder that we have more stories, songs and holidays that we observe to fend off the cold and dark until light and warmth return. In case you didn’t start counting, Thanksgiving is followed in rapid succession with the spending holidays—Black Friday, Small business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday if you have any money left. A short break interspersed by family, friend s and organizational parties and parades until we reach Christmas, Boxing Day, football tournaments, New Years Day, Epiphany or Three Kings Day, Martin Luther King Day, and ends with the Superbowl and the Celtic holiday of Imbolc with the first signs of spring. In between are holidays from other traditions, Hanukkah and Diwali in particular.
It is unfair to the season not to tell retell the old myths, while at the same time it is a challenge for those among us who don’t connect with the myths, just the facts, ma’am. Life invites on an endless search for truth and meaning. Sometimes truth is meaning, sometimes truth is facts, but the best truths are those that emerge from the marriage of myth and fact.
Most myths are grounded in some facts or experiences. Consider Santa Claus. The original Santa Claus was Nicholas, Bishop of Myra. He supposedly put gold coins in the stockings of three virtuous young women so that they might have a dowry to find a husband and avoid the possible life of prostitution. These are the facts, more or less. Elves, reindeer, chimneys, those are myths. The truth that emerges from fact and myth is the spirit of generosity, an understanding that the world is or should be a safe and loving place.
Small children are concrete thinkers and having a concrete embodiment of faith and hope and love and kindness and generosity that works until…like Adam and Eve, they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and are forever changed. When they recognize that the facts don’t square with their experience, or their logical brain. Some discard the myth and are angry with their parents for a while for misleading them. Others cling to their faith despite all the evidence to the contrary. Out of this experience we hope there will arise an appreciation of myth and the broader horizons that come with accepting myth as a carrier of meaning.
The central myth of the season is the story of Jesus’ birth. Fact: Jesus was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem. But it had to be Bethlehem, because it was important to the myth, emphasizing Jesus as a continuation of the House of David. The registration for tax purposes that sent a pregnant Mary to Bethlehem to deliver was NOT a fact.
Jesus was certainly born in a Jewish family and preached and taught and was crucified. Those are facts. Angels, shepherds, wise men, manger, are embellishments. They are myths. Myth is a carrier of deeper truth, the lessons taught in parables, the bearers of inspiration and hope in a time or darkness, not just winter. Jesus was probably born at some other time of year, but winter had other advantages when the church chose a date to celebrate his birth. December was a way of connecting the Jesus story to the experience off birth and rebirth and hope to the solstice winter Yul myths. It was also a time of year when the despair among God’s chosen people over the Roman oppression coincided with the cold and dark of the winter season. Jesus was the original Christmas present.
The other gift bringers are myths, probably even more mythical than the nativity story and the Santa Claus story. Most of Europe, including the British Isles, has a gift bringer. La Befana I Italy. Mother Holle in the ancient British Isles, Father Christmas in more recent times, the Three Kings on Epiphany in Hispanic cultures.
Drawing a strict line around fact, truth, and myth as three separate entities will oversimplify the rather complex painting of the world we live in, whether in our bodies or in our heads. Biblical literalism is a prime example. If the Bible was dictated by God and is inerrant, then it represents a God many of us can’t related to or identify with. But when we discard it as irrelevant, we throw out the baby with the bath water. Our right brain resonates with the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Moses and Aaron, Ruth and King David, the Maccabees and Jesus and the apostles.
Myths are not just religious. We have myths in our culture, as do most cultures. Johnny Appleseed. George Washington and the cherry tree. The peaceful gathering at Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1621. All of them embody facts, real facts, not alternative facts, but embellished by imagination to provide a picture that conveys a truth, an insight into how we think the world is or should be. We still call the appearance of the sun in the eastern sky and disappears in the west as sunset and sunset, even as we learn at a fairly young age, that the motion is that of the earth, not the sun. It is a fact that we see the sun appear on our horizon, but it is a myth that it rises and sets.
The season or darkness, cold, and myth is upon us. While every season has its myths, the winter has more as we sit by the fireplace and retell the old stories…Oops that is so 20th century. Update: when we turn on the TV and watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, or The Grinch, or It’s a Wonderful Life. These modern myths carry the same messages of hope, and faith, and love, and a light beyond the darkness. May this be a season of hope and joy, of reflection and renewal, for each and every one of my readers.Thursday marked the beginning of a long season of our individual and collective reaction to cold and dark. Some of us want to cocoon. Some will party until tomorrow starts earlier in the day. Some of us suffer through seasonal affective disorder and get depressed. So it is no wonder that we have more stories, songs and holidays that we observe to fend off the cold and dark until light and warmth return. In case you didn’t start counting, Thanksgiving is followed in rapid succession with the spending holidays—Black Friday, Small business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday if you have any money left. A short break interspersed by family, friend s and organizational parties and parades until we reach Christmas, Boxing Day, football tournaments, New Years Day, Epiphany or Three Kings Day, Martin Luther King Day, and ends with the Superbowl and the Celtic holiday of Imbolc with the first signs of spring. In between are holidays from other traditions, Hanukkah and Diwali in particular.
It is unfair to the season not to tell retell the old myths, while at the same time it is a challenge for those among us who don’t connect with the myths, just the facts, ma’am. Life invites on an endless search for truth and meaning. Sometimes truth is meaning, sometimes truth is facts, but the best truths are those that emerge from the marriage of myth and fact.
Most myths are grounded in some facts or experiences. Consider Santa Claus. The original Santa Claus was Nicholas, Bishop of Myra. He supposedly put gold coins in the stockings of three virtuous young women so that they might have a dowry to find a husband and avoid the possible life of prostitution. These are the facts, more or less. Elves, reindeer, chimneys, those are myths. The truth that emerges from fact and myth is the spirit of generosity, an understanding that the world is or should be a safe and loving place.
Small children are concrete thinkers and having a concrete embodiment of faith and hope and love and kindness and generosity that works until…like Adam and Eve, they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and are forever changed. When they recognize that the facts don’t square with their experience, or their logical brain. Some discard the myth and are angry with their parents for a while for misleading them. Others cling to their faith despite all the evidence to the contrary. Out of this experience we hope there will arise an appreciation of myth and the broader horizons that come with accepting myth as a carrier of meaning.
The central myth of the season is the story of Jesus’ birth. Fact: Jesus was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem. But it had to be Bethlehem, because it was important to the myth, emphasizing Jesus as a continuation of the House of David. The registration for tax purposes that sent a pregnant Mary to Bethlehem to deliver was NOT a fact.
Jesus was certainly born in a Jewish family and preached and taught and was crucified. Those are facts. Angels, shepherds, wise men, manger, are embellishments. They are myths. Myth is a carrier of deeper truth, the lessons taught in parables, the bearers of inspiration and hope in a time or darkness, not just winter. Jesus was probably born at some other time of year, but winter had other advantages when the church chose a date to celebrate his birth. December was a way of connecting the Jesus story to the experience off birth and rebirth and hope to the solstice winter Yul myths. It was also a time of year when the despair among God’s chosen people over the Roman oppression coincided with the cold and dark of the winter season. Jesus was the original Christmas present.
The other gift bringers are myths, probably even more mythical than the nativity story and the Santa Claus story. Most of Europe, including the British Isles, has a gift bringer. La Befana I Italy. Mother Holle in the ancient British Isles, Father Christmas in more recent times, the Three Kings on Epiphany in Hispanic cultures.
Drawing a strict line around fact, truth, and myth as three separate entities will oversimplify the rather complex painting of the world we live in, whether in our bodies or in our heads. Biblical literalism is a prime example. If the Bible was dictated by God and is inerrant, then it represents a God many of us can’t related to or identify with. But when we discard it as irrelevant, we throw out the baby with the bath water. Our right brain resonates with the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Moses and Aaron, Ruth and King David, the Maccabees and Jesus and the apostles.
Myths are not just religious. We have myths in our culture, as do most cultures. Johnny Appleseed. George Washington and the cherry tree. The peaceful gathering at Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1621. All of them embody facts, real facts, not alternative facts, but embellished by imagination to provide a picture that conveys a truth, an insight into how we think the world is or should be. We still call the appearance of the sun in the eastern sky and disappears in the west as sunset and sunset, even as we learn at a fairly young age, that the motion is that of the earth, not the sun. It is a fact that we see the sun appear on our horizon, but it is a myth that it rises and sets.
The season or darkness, cold, and myth is upon us. While every season has its myths, the winter has more as we sit by the fireplace and retell the old stories…Oops that is so 20th century. Update: when we turn on the TV and watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, or The Grinch, or It’s a Wonderful Life. These modern myths carry the same messages of hope, and faith, and love, and a light beyond the darkness. May this be a season of hope and joy, of reflection and renewal, for each and every one of my readers.

All Saints Day

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

We, the living, are keepers of the memories

of those who came before

We all had parents, teachers, siblings, friends

Who are no longer present

But will live on as long

as we remember them.

We share the memories of good people

Who made a diffeer3nce in our common life

Great men and women whose prophetic voices

Called all back into covenant

With earth and fellow humans

and all living things..

Remembrance is our yearly payment

on the debt we owe

to those who blazed the path

on which we tread.

.

Hallowe’en Nostalgia

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

The darkness begins

The faces of carved pumpkins

glow from lighted candles.

Children ring the neighbor’s doorbell,

costumed, in search of treats.

Or so it once was.

Today this holiday is sanitized for “safety.”

Fear of the dark is banished

by noisy crowds on sugar highs

costumed not as ghosts and devils

but TV characters and superheroes..

Without the fear and mystery of darkness

Without the silence in which to hear

the voice of nature once again

How can we claim our rightful role

As partners, not overlords

Of the turning earth?

To Endorse, or not to Endorse

~ purplesage41 ~ 2 Comments

Both the Washington Post and the LA Times refused to endorse a candidate in the current presidential election.  I don’t know much about the Times, but I have been a faithful subscriber to the Washington Post ever since it became available online. I like their games, their news coverage, their columnist. Their owner’s cowardice, not so much.

Jeff Bezos is a bottom-line kind of guy.  He knows that Harris is the only person fit to serve in this office. If he doesn’t know that, he’s too dumb to own a major newspaper, and I don’t think that’s the case. It’s a matter of pure self-interest.  If Harris is elected, she will not take it out on him because—unlike Trump—she is a fully functioning adult. She doesn’t suffer from toxic masculinity. If Trump is elected, he will make sure that Bezos pays for his failure to make the Nazi salute.

Unbridled capitalism is a recipe for societal disaster.

Saving Social Security

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

There are a lot of small steps that could be taken to save Social Security.  Raising the retirement age is not such a hot idea. It penalizes workers who work in more strenuous and low wage jobs, often accompanied by lower life expectancy. It assumes that all potential retirees ae equally able to continue working even if they are in declining health (but not bad enough to qualify for disability). 

Let’s explore a couple of options that would shift more of the cost to those who need Social Security least. First, remove or at least greatly increase the cap on how much of your wages and salary are subject to social security taxes.  Second, put a cap on the amount of your income that is counted toward determining your benefits.  And finally, rethink the COLA.

The first two are not complicated.  There has always been a cap on the amount of earnings that are taxed, although there is no good reason for it. Higher income workers often have additional non-wage, non-salary income that is only subject to ordinary income tax, not Social Security taxes.  Average workers seldom do. Those who don’t work at all but live off their income from capital don’t contribute anything. Whatever happened to the social part of Social Security, which suggests we are all in this together?

For 2024, that cap on social security taxes is set at a wage and salary income of $168,600, adjusted each year based on the percentage increase in average wages. I don’t see any particular need for a cap, other than lobbyists for wealthier citizens appearing to have the ear of Congress. But if there is a cap, it should be set at something like 80th percentile of wage and salary income. (That’s the amount that has 80% making less and 20% making more.)  That way, when people get outrageous salaries for heading a nonprofit, a corporation, a university, or a football program, they will be carrying a fairer share of the cost of keeping our old folks out of poverty.

We don’t want the very wealthy to get more benefits just because they increase their contributions, so the wage /salary base used to compute the monthly check should be capped at some at something like the 60th percentile of the individual’s average wage and salary income used to determine benefits.

Lastly, the COLA or cost of living adjustment , which is based on the inflation rate for the 12 months ending the previous June 30th.  COLAs are a great engine of inequality.  In South Carolina, pension reform a decade ago included a cap on increases..  We state retirees get a one percent increase every year regardless of actual inflation, but there is a cap is of $500. That’s one percent of $50,000. Any pension greater than that gets the same $500 a year raise.

Think about it.  Jane’s Social security benefit check is $2,000, just a shade above the average of $1907.  average, about $1900.  Dick’s check is the maximum of $4873, which we will round down to $4800 for easy calculation. . Both must contend with higher prices for housing, groceries, and insurance. This year’s 2.5% COLA gives Jane $50 more a month while Dick gets an extra $120.  The percentage gap between their incomes is unchanged, but percentages don’t pay the electric bill. The dollar gap has risen from $2800 to $2870, and that gap grows year after year.A cap on the COLA like South Carolina’s (about $5 a month) would be more equalizing. Or setting the cap at the COLA percentage of the average benefit and give that to everyone, which would do ven more fot those at the bottom of the scale. Let’s think creatively here!

After we survive the election, let’s go back to thinking about how a civilized society that believes in fairness would shore up Social Security with more revenue and slower growth of overall benefit, with the scales tipped toward the lower half of the income spectrum.  And January is not too soon to get started. We can call it The Other Project 2025.

Voting Matters

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

There is a meanness in our world

Driven by lust for power, greed for wealth,

Is life a zero sum game

Which we can only win when others lose?

Collaboration, once an honored act

Now seen as sleeping with the enemy.

This pettiness is armed

With powers of destruction and confusion

Never known before.

Technology weaponized in the media

Can destroy social networks

A nuclear blast to the web of community.

Where is the yellow brick road

To lead us through the evil wood

into a world of peace and harmony?

Elections matter.