On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the UU church I attend has its annual bread communion, where members bring homemade loaves of bread and during the service people choose a piece to eat in a com communally. This year’s sermon prior to the breaking of bread together began with the idea of decolonizing Thanksgiving as a way of bringing our lives into better alignment with our values. From that came a discussion on developing a personal practice of deepening gratitude. One way is the ritual of giving thanks before eating. Which leads me to this annual diary...
Tonight is the thirteenth exploration of this song (I’ll put the links to all priors at the bottom). I put it on replay while considering personal, local, national and international events of the past year. After getting my first draft saved, I reread the old ones. I’m very pleased they don’t all read as mere copy pastes except for the initial explanations, especially since posting the same diary thirteen times surely must be against the Rules of the Road! Sometimes my thoughts go in similar directions but other years bear no resemblance to one another. Let’s see what 2025 says, first the verses then the chorus:
As we come around to take our places at the table
A moment to remember and reflect upon our wealth
Here's to loving friends and family, here's to being able
To gather here together in good company and health
I’m really looking forward to this year’s gathering around the table. It will be the five members of Casa Brillig (while K1’s partner isn’t yet an official member, he’s family and counts as that and not a guest) plus five members of my best local friend’s family and THEIR bonus guest! We’ve shared Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve with these people for so long I can’t remember NOT doing so. K2 will be driving home from college on his own for the very first time, and we haven’t seen him since August so are very excited.
We will gather grateful for a warm, heated space in which to do so… our heater has been acting up and we actually spent the past three days at a chilly 54F. We’ll be grateful for all members present being in relatively good health. My friend and I will raise a glass to our missing bestie J, who left this world far too early last spring from pancreatic cancer, and Casa Brillig will toast Mr. Brillig’s father, who also died last spring.
May we be released from all those feelings that would harm us
May we have the will to give them up and get them gone
For heavy are the satchels full of anger and false promise
May we have the strength to put them down
I’ve spoken before about the correlation between stress and blood sugar control… stress from anger or insomnia leads to increased cortisol levels and increased cortisol levels leads to higher blood sugar, which leads (in my case at least) to bigger feelings and a harder time managing them, which leads to stress, and the cycle continues. It literally is a matter of life and death for me to keep it ALARA: as low as reasonably achievable.
Like many of you, I suspect, I’ve been carrying a lot of Feelings since last November. About the return to power of the person least likely to be entitled to hold the office of President. About the MAGA electeds and appointeds that have decimated our federal government and committed untold acts of what in any other timeline would be grounds for removal from office. And most of all, about the American people who made this all possible by their Election 2024 choices and who STILL support the authoritarian regime. Members of my family, especially.
This summer, someone dear to me asked me to try to be less angry at ::gestures all around:: because it seemed I was NEVER letting it go. I really have tried. My daily tasks on my little self-care app Finch now include mindfulness, breathing, and before-bed calming activities. I can’t yet say I’m strong enough to be successful, but I am trying.
May we wish the best for every one that we encounter
May we swallow pride and may we do away with fear
For it's only what we do not know that we have grown afraid of
And only what we do not choose to hear
I’m fairly sure this is the first year I haven’t been able to find a way to speak about ‘doing away with fear’. I’m in my early 60s. I don’t really remember the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights protests and the violence therein. Until this year I’ve never known fear like this administration has brought to bear on us. To be clear, I know I am in general not who the armed extrajudicial thugs masquerading as “law enforcement” are looking for. But when I went to Toronto last May, I wiped my phone of everything nonessential, keeping just enough for it not to “look” wiped. I moved as many of my friends as I could from regular texting platforms to Signal. As an officer in my local Democratic committee, I made sure we had cameras on our driveway and doors.
I have but a smidgen of the reasons to fear that my Black and brown, documented and undocumented neighbors do. I have resolved to be the person in between them and danger, if it comes to that (so far, I have not been in a situation where that was necessary). But ALL of America has reason to fear and it is NOT “what I do not know”… I am very, very well aware of what it is I fear. This administration… and the people who admire it (like this local twit who called ICE down on a local car wash)… they’ve shown daily who they are and what they want, and I cannot just let it go.
So this year I’m taking this verse as aspirational. To try to assume good intentions from those around me, and to spend more time listening. I don’t wish ill upon those around me (don’t come at me with “but what about HIM” because I am a fervent stan of Team Cholesterol and that’s all I’ll say). And to do what I can to do away with the fear MAGA followers have of damned near everyone and everything by educating where I can, even if it’s just to plant a seed of doubt in the FOX and NewsMax party lines.
As we bless our daily bread and drink our day's libation
May we be reminded of the lost and wayward soul
The hungry and the homeless that we have in every nation
May we fill each empty cup and bowl
Right before I sat down to write this Mr. Brillig and I delivered our two bags of food, holiday goodies and gift cards to the central location where they’ll be checked to make sure everything is there then delivered to hundreds of needy families [Edited T-15 minutes before publish: just learned the total was 244 meal kits and another $3000 for families that don’t have access to kitchens to be able to eat]. I tallied the bill for those two bags of food (I wrote about the shopping list here) and realized it was approximately the same price as the fancy CSA Turkey we’ve been ordering for the past ten years. I don’t regret either my turkey choice OR helping two families have a special meal. What I regret is how many hungry and unhoused people we have in this country who may get a meal on Thursday because it’s fashionable to give charitably between mid-November and Christmas Eve, but who have hundreds of OTHER days where there is insufficient food.
I’m also contemplating how many of the people we depend on to raise, harvest, process and provide the food we eat have been terrorized, abducted, and deported. Who are afraid both to go to their jobs AND to go to the store to obtain food. What is happening to these people is obscene and should not happen in any civilized country.
What happened and *continues to happen* in Gaza and in Ukraine. The situation for women in Afghanistan. And in so many other countries. It needs to stop, so we can focus on people not governments, on people not greed.
May nothing ever come between or threaten to divide us
May we never take for granted all the gifts that we receive
Being ever mindful of the unseen hands that guide us
And the miracles that cause us to believe
It is far too late for the hope that nothing will come between us. We are a divided nation, and our communities and families have been riven. My own extended family has not been spared, and just this fall I became aware that several members are FAR further along the MAGA path than I had known. And yet, I am hopeful that one day they may open their eyes and see. As I mentioned above, planting seeds of doubt will hopefully lead to a miracle of awareness.
I don’t take for granted anything that I have today. Three weeks ago Mr. Brillig and I marked the 26th anniversary of his last chemotherapy session. And last week was exactly one year since my friend J was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She’d hoped for years, and got months instead. My back has alignment and disc issues, my hip hurts, and tomorrow morning I go see how badly the stress of the last six months has affected my A1c. And yet every morning when I wake up, I’m grateful to have done so. Not to sound like the last scenes in either A Charlie Brown [Holiday] or How The Grinch Stole Christmas, but the best things in life don’t come from stores or bank accounts (although the latter is helpful with Verse 4 above). They come from the people we surround ourselves with, and this Earth we call home. From the rainbows and auroras that make magic above us and the plants and animals we share our space with.
[CHORUS]
May the light of love be shining deep within your spirit
May the torch of mercy clear the path and show the way
May the horn of plenty sound so everyone can hear it
May the light of love be with you every day
I cannot quell my fear, but I can love. I cannot abide your cruelty to others in this country, but I can hope for a day when you see the way. I cannot feed everyone but I can feed some. And I’m glad to walk this path with all of you.
::presses Save Draft:: ::rereads the past few years’ diaries::
[Prior diary list: 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024]
Welp. Indeed, this one definitely came out different. Part of me would like to scrap this, and cut/paste a Greatest Paragraphs list from my prior diaries, the ones where I was far more eloquent and hopeful and sure the world would be better. But one aspect of my writing this annually is to see what the song pulls out of me, so that I can take it into consideration moving forward. This one feels more like despair and less like hope, but already I’m thinking “but wait, what about….”. Those WhatAbouts likely will be fodder for future diaries.
For now, I’m off to figure out what I’ll be serving for dessert on Thursday. Mr. Brillig has a purple sweet potato pie in process, and I’ll be making a bilayer chocolate mousse for folks, but because of my keto dietary requirements I can’t actually EAT those. I have a recipe for keto pumpkin pie I’ll be making, and who knows what else. I hope you have good food in store this week, with good company or good solitude if company isn’t what you want or have access to.
As we head to tonight’s Tops, what’s on your mind?
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Top Mojo for yesterday (Sunday), November 23rd 2025, first comments and tip jars excluded. Thank you mik for the mojo magic! For those of you interested in How Top Mojo Works, please see his diary on FAQing Top Mojo.
