Opinions

As the full moon rose in the east, black-eyed peas soaked in a bowl on the kitchen countertop and turnips, picked at their peak, thawed in the sink. The sky was filled with stars; the temperature was cool; the night was bright.

I will be home in time for Christmas. It’s always a little hard to leave Mexico, and leaving right before the holidays is perhaps the hardest. The giant Christmas tree just went up in front of the church last night. Thousands of handmade tin stars hang over the streets, embedded with colored glass beads and lit from within. The poinsettias (or “nochebuenas”) decorate the windowsills. There is a concert every night of the week. It is hard to leave, in the middle of all this celebration, to return to our own Christmas up north, where the weather is so very different.

“He’s on vigil,” my husband, Peter, said, watching our cat, Felix. Peter, who never had a cat before Felix, has become the resident cat expert. Of course, he has a sample size of one, so all his generalizations about cats are based on Felix. I had quite a few cats before Felix, so I feel in a better position to say what kind of cat Felix is. Felix is a lively cat -- he is the most playful adult cat I’ve ever had. He is not a lap cat and does not like to be carried around. And he is a fussy eater. The first two make sense, since he spent his early life on the streets. The fussy eating is just Felix. He seems to think that, since he was scooped up off the streets into the lap of luxury (not the literal lap, you understand, because laps are much too confining), he deserves nothing but the best.

In the past, just the mention of UFOs would elicit a myriad of comments and humor; Santa’s sleigh on a test run, Mork from Ork, a mortar shot off the bat of Barry Bonds or Mark Mc-Gwire, or some movie.

I preach against cynicism during the Christmas season. And then, shortly thereafter, I fall victim to it. After receiving more than my fair share of Christmas cards this year--which is such a delight--I must confess that I am completely opposed to the computer generated, one-size-fits-all Christmas letters which tell of the tremendous successes of every family you ever met.

Susan H. Lincoln celebrates the holiday season by releasing her second book, “When the Pink Clouds Come Out,” a collection of newspaper columns spanning the decades. If you’ve enjoyed her columns featured within this newspaper, you can purchase a copy through Amazon.com.

It is an unusual living situation, in many ways. My husband, Peter, and I spend almost half the year down in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. We had a terrible experience in another town (an absentee American owner with a filthy rental) and we came running back to San Miguel, desperate to find a place to stay any place that was clean and halfway affordable. And that is how Jorge found us.

Recently announced as the next Border Czar, Tom Homan, 63, has the look of someone not to be poked. Incoming 47th President, Donald Trump, saw something in the Big Dutch he liked, years before he took office. It was Barack Obama who first hired him in his administration.

We didn’t travel to Colorado to snow-ski or to Aspen to enjoy the view, but we did make a six-hour trip to Birmingham, Ala., to visit relatives in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.