It is soon to be Christmas. Merry Christmas! If we were in the British Isles, I’d wish you a happy Christmas. I’ve always been partial to wishing a blessed Christmas. Regardless, may you have a day with warmth and some time with those close to you.

“Merry” is not a word we use often. “Eat, drink, and be merry” seems to encourage excess. I like the origin of words. Merry comes from the Old English “myrige,” meaning pleasing or delightful. It is related to “mirth.” Mirth is another word we don’t toss around much.

With all this wishing of merriness, it’s as if the very purpose of Christmas was to be happy. No other day of the year is so focused on joy. That is certainly true for us Christians. The birth of our savior in a stable under a star? What’s not to like about that? Even for those less religious, Christmas is a day of good feelings and cheer. Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Grinch came around after all.

Unfortunately, things like sadness and loss and suffering don’t follow the calendar. It is part of being human that we will have days that are hard. If the roll of the dice says one of those falls on Christmas, we won’t feel merry, no matter how many gifts we open or cookies we eat.

If you or someone close to you is struggling with pain in this season, it could even be more difficult if you are surrounded by festivity and bright lights. No one is trying to make you feel worse. But the contrast between your heaviness and others’ lightness might pull you deeper.

I have discussed a phenomenon with others my age. It seems that as we move into our sixties, more and more people close to us have burdens. Part of that is a matter of advancing age for our peer group. Health problems of all sorts appear on our radar. Conditions we didn’t even know existed when we were young become part of our vocabulary.

Age is a factor, but it’s also that our circle has grown. As you go through life, you acquaint yourself with more others. Job, neighbors, organizations each add to your list to care about. If you have children, they and people in their lives get attention. Then, there’s grandchildren if you are so blessed. And on and on.

The bad things that can and will happen in life have more opportunities to touch you. I said to Pam that it is getting hard to keep track of all the ailments among our friends: hips, knees, heart, carpal tunnel, eyes, hearing. Bodies wear out. We know that; we just haven’t ever lived through it before.

Physical suffering is only one type. That might be the easier pain to deal with. There’s a giant range of emotional and relational anguishes one can experience: divorce, family splits, children rebelling. Again, none of these care that it is the Christmas season. Christmas carols won’t heal those wounds.

I wrote about the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of my brother’s death. Dean died of a brain tumor the week I graduated from high school. He was sixteen. I was eighteen, a terrible age to deal with such a thing. I’m using this space to do some delayed processing.

I thought about the Christmases around his death. Christmas 1973, it was becoming clear that efforts to heal Dean were failing. No one talked about that. The holiday came as if under a cloud. Dinner, gift opening, Christmas Mass all went on with pall over things.

The next year Dean was gone. We had shared Christmases as children with all the wishing and giggling and playing with new toys. Those were past. Now Dean was too. The metaphorical empty chair was in his place.

Later, I became a parent. Like all of you with children, none of us can imagine losing a child. It’s incomprehensible. But it happens. For such a mother and father, I suspect Christmases become a vessel of memories of that child that are opened each year with sadness no matter how many years have passed.

Whenever there is a death of someone close to us, we talk about how in the year following we experience our first of everything without our loved one. Not only Christmas, but the first Easter, the first Thanksgiving, the first summer picnic with that empty chair. Time heals, yes, but not quickly.

Two families in our farming community will be celebrating Christmas with the slow work of healing present. “Celebrating” doesn’t feel like the right word, but Christmas will come regardless.

Frank Ziegler was a farmer near Fairfax. Frank’s capacity for friendship covered a large geographic area, with many friends from Sleepy Eye. His was a face that so easily held a warm smile that it’s hard to picture him without. In his final days, as he was fighting his own physical battle, he reached out to me after an accident I was in. It was like him to be concerned about another with his own diminishing energy.

Mary Jane Hoffman was a farmwife and mother who lived nearby. Those simple descriptors, “farmwife and mother,” are filled with so many duties and responsibilities that volumes could not tell their story. As with most successful farms, the wife is exactly one half of the equation. Mary Jane was partner with Marty on the farm and mother of six wonderful young men.

For a long time, Mary Jane and Marty and their family sat in front of me at Sunday Mass. In the way one can watch a family grow in a small town like ours, I saw over the years children added and growing up. Things always looked under control as the boys sat mostly behaving in their pew. But you knew there had to be chaos finishing chores, getting everyone dressed and into the car.

I referred to our farming community. Losing people like Frank and Mary Jane is like pulling a thread from the fabric. We are of the same generation, and this will be common in the years ahead. Young people will take our place. But there will be less of them on farms if the hundred-year trend continues.

Back to the beginning, I wished a merry Christmas. “Merry” is nice; we all want to little merriment. But it’s not realistic to be merry every day. As joyous as the son of God coming to Earth is, it was also a step on the way to Calvary. Joy and sorrow are always blended in this thing we call life.

No matter our circumstances this Christmas, we take time to reflect. It is a season of love, and each of us can commit to bringing a little more love into an Earth that so desperately needs it. That is joy to the world.

Ever since the death of Bambi’s mother, I’ve known that I don’t like to watch violent or gory things. Pictures stay in my head and won’t leave.

The last couple of weeks, I’ve intentionally let my guard down. My mind is filled with terrible, bloody images. They are of Palestinian children suffering the consequences of the bombing of the Gaza Strip. “Suffering” is too weak a word.

Daughter Abigail is a Human Rights Officer for the United Nations. She is currently working in Colombia. After several years in Central America working with the poor, oppressed, and often endangered, she is acutely aware of how awful human beings can be to other human beings.

People who do her work around the world are connected, intensely and immediately, with social media. As of this writing, sixty-nine of her co-workers have been killed in Gaza. That number is likely higher when you read this.

Through Abby’s feeds, I have seen a stream of the dead and injured in Israel’s bombing campaign. The only thing comparable to the images that most of us might have seen would be that of an awful car accident. When bodies are torn apart and opened and parts severed, it is more than gruesome.

As you know, this round of violence was triggered by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. That was appalling. An Israeli response began forthwith. We knew it was an action that would be followed by a reaction, as predictable as a sunrise.

In both action and reaction, civilians haven’t just been in the line of fire; they’ve been targets. I grew up watching war movies where soldiers lined up and charged each other. Modern warfare doesn’t offer such polite killing. A bomb isn’t as selective as a sword.

I write this in a moment of time. As of now, 1,200 Israelis were killed and 8,500 Palestinians, most of them women and children. The latter are not “numbers reported by Hamas.”  They are from multiple international organizations.

Gaza has a disproportionately young population. Decades of conflict and living under Israeli siege has reduced the lifespan there. So, whatever the number dead when you read this, it will be nearly half children. I have come to tears seeing video of a child screaming in agony. Most of us would. We should.

This in no way makes excuses for October 7 and the Hamas attacks. That was despicable. But so many of the commentaries I’ve read want us to see this as black and white, or white and black. Maturity gives us the ability to see gray.

We need to know that October 7^th happened in a context. UN Secretary General Antionio Guterres said that terrorism never takes place a vacuum. We are not defending the terrorists by wanting to know the history of this region. Decades of illegally taking land, bulldozing homes, and forcing Palestinians to live in armed encampments hasn’t been an effective way to avert violence.

It is not anti-Semitic to hold Israel to a standard we expect of democracies. Bombing an entire apartment building of innocents because of a possible tunnel is not right, no matter the country doing the bombing. Shutting off all resources to hospitals treating the victims of that bombing multiplies the wrongness.

It’s also likely American tax dollars paid for the bomb. That means you and I are involved. Again, welcome to a complex world.

The word “proportion” is tossed about. When there is anger and rage, we don’t think of proportion. But as awful as October 7^th was, it can’t justify the slaughter of many thousands more innocent people. It is impossible to claim four thousand dead children were responsible in any way for October 7^th. If there are no limits to human behavior, we are less than humans.

Many Palestinians are Christians. So even if you accept this as a blow to Muslim terrorism, it comes at the cost of many Christian lives. Jesus himself was from the Palestinian people.

It is a cycle of violence. Those are a lot easier to continue than to stop or even decelerate. A generation of young people who watch their parents and siblings massacred are more likely to succumb to the cycle than to stop it. Israel could be laying the groundwork for an attack upon that nation twenty years hence when the surviving children of Gaza are grown. Israel’s prime minister said, “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.” It will.

History doesn’t exactly repeat itself, but there are echoes. One can make an analogy between events in the Mideast and something that happened here. It is not a perfect comparison, but there are echoes of the US-Dakota War of 1862. In each, a group of men attacked innocent people in reaction to intolerable conditions. Horrible things happened.

I thought of that because of a recent article in the Journal about a speaker at a Junior Pioneer meeting. Junior Pioneer members are descendants of settlers who were here at the time of that conflict. I am a member. I am proud of my heritage. I am also not scared to see my ancestors as imperfect people, not unlike me.

The headline reports that the speaker accuses the Minnesota Historical Society and other modern historians of a “a political agenda instead of facts.” Near as I can tell, a “political agenda” is one that doesn’t match his. His talk then proceeded to be extremely political if you define that as reflecting a bias.

His primary “fact” is that a large number of white people were killed, and smaller number of Dakota were killed. If you take simply the number murdered in those few days in August 1862, that is of course true. But to present those as the “truth” is to show someone a handful of walnuts and say, “Here is a forest.”

It is a torturously inadequate understanding. According to the speaker, consequential efforts to understand the behavior of the Dakota warriors are misguided and biased against white people. Indians bad, settlers good. For decades, the US-Dakota War was called the Sioux Massacre, so there is historic precedent to that view.

Those events, like all events, occurred in a context. Good history is understanding that and growing our view instead of shrinking it. That requires depth of thought, living with complexity, and maturity.

Yes, only one hundred Dakota men were killed. But what came before and after? Beginning with the first white settlers, Natives were given two choices: become like white Europeans or go away. Finally, when the continent was taken, the descendants of all the tribes that had been here were put on reservations. They have since lived lives that are poorer, unhealthier, and shorter than whites. That’s a fact you can look up.

According to the article, the speaker received a standing ovation. If the Junior Pioneers exist solely to honor our pure and white ancestors who were victims of the savages, I will gladly rescind my membership. If our reason for being is to celebrate the defeat of the redskins as if this were some John Wayne movie, I’ll step away. Perhaps you wish to expel me. You can keep my dues.

If the Junior Pioneers are not afraid of seeking whole understanding and complete truth, the forest instead of a handful of walnuts, I’d stay.

This time of year, I spend a lot of hours unloading soybeans and corn headed for our bins. First, I pull the wagon up to the auger perfectly so the grain will flow into the hopper. Then I back up and do it again if it’s not perfect. I start the tractor, turn on the auger, and open the wagon door. It’s all about timing. I’ve done it a million times.

There’s lots to keep track of, more if we’re drying corn. Things that are predictable are favored. One thing I’ve counted on for forty years is that my Farmall 400 tractor will start. The 400 has had many roles on the farm. Among them is “auger tractor.”

By the magic of power take off, the 400 gets the auger turning and lifting grain up to the bin top. We bought a new Westfield sixty-foot auger to pair with the 400. There they are, working together, a shiny new auger with a faded old tractor. It’s like a May-September relationship.

My dad bought the 400 new. A while ago, I wondered how old it was. Using the serial number and internet search, I found that our 400 is almost exactly as old as me. I was born in February 1956. Within a month or two, that’s when our Farmall 400 was manufactured in Rock Island, Illinois. It’s one of 40,000 made there from 1953 to 1956.

The 400 has been around my whole life, but knowing we are the same age caused me to look at the old tractor a little differently. He (or is it she?) is like a sibling that I grew up with. We did a lot of stuff around the farm. There are good memories and some not so good. The bad ones involve mud and manure.

Now we’re growing old together. I’ve spent more time with that machine than all but a few humans.

My father Sylvester bought my tractor sibling from Evan Implement, the predecessor of Miller Sellner in Sleepy Eye. The story goes that my dad was dealing with Art Miller on the purchase. They went to the Evan bar for a drink and final bargaining. I wish I could go back in time to hear those negotiations.

A new Farmall 400 in 1956 cost around $3,500. My parents weren’t flush with cash then, so they likely had to borrow. They had five older kids plus a baby me. Like all farms of the time, there were cows, pigs, chickens, lots of manual labor, and not great profits.

Oddly, $3,500 is close to what I could sell the 400 for now. Of course, $3,500 in 1956 bears no similarity to $3,500 in 2023.

It was one of the first tractors my dad bought. This was not many years after the transformation from literal horse power to mechanical power. It’s fascinating to think about those years around World War II when horses and tractors shared the countryside. Like technology now, there must have been early adapters and late adapters. Picture a farmer on one side of the fence with his two quiet draft horses pulling a single gang disc and a farmer on the other side, with his tractor roaring.

Our 400 did tillage in its early years. By the time I remember, it had turned over those duties. It was still planting, four rows, and picking ear corn, two rows. Those also were given over to bigger tractors. But the trusty old 400 retained all sorts of odd jobs around the farm.

Wrapped around our 400 is a Stanhoist loader with a trip bucket. It looks to be the same vintage. That used to come off when a four-row cultivator went on. Now the loader stays on year-round. It gets called to push and move anything and everything.

The seller of the 400, Art Miller, is several generations back now at Miller Sellner. Grandsons and a great grandson continue. Norb Sellner would have been the first mechanic to work any fixes the 400 needed. Son Dave and grandson Jeff followed him. Granddaughter Tricia is in management and accounting, probably not something you’d have foretold 1956. Jake Trebesch is a young mechanic who has an affection for old equipment and a tolerance for old farmers.

Occasionally you see a repainted tractor from that era in a parade. At times I thought to restore our 400 in that way. I doubt Pam would have thought it a good use of our resources when we didn’t have a lot of money.

Now that we could afford it, I’m not sure I want to see my longtime partner decked out in candy apple red. I suppose I could dye my hair and whiten my teeth, too, but why? The red that our 400 was decades ago is now a venerable rust-red, almost brown. It’s comfortable in its look, as I am in mine.

There are still 400s around. If you look up used ones on the internet, there’s everything from painted up models, to ones that look functional like mine, to some that are being sold for parts. There are 400s in tractor graveyards and, yes, some that have been scrapped for iron.

As I stand watching the flow of corn into the churning auger hopper, I listen to the Farmall 400’s four cylinders chugging away. There is time while the wagon empties. I talk to my mechanical workmate in my head.

Me, “So how long are we going to do this?”

400, “Till the wagon’s empty.”

Me, “No, I mean how long am I going to grow crops and auger them with you?”

400, “What do you mean? That’s what we do.”

Me, “We have done that a long time. But some day I won’t be here.”

400, “But you put gas in my tank. You can’t go anywhere.”

Me, “As long as Miller Sellner has people to work on you, you’ll keep running. Parts for me will get too expensive someday. Maybe you’ll go work on another farm.”

400, “There’s other farms? Do you think I can plow again? I liked plowing.”

Me, “I don’t know about that. We’ve had a pretty good run, though. Maybe there’s tractors in Heaven.”

400, “What’s Heaven?”

Me, “Oh, it’s a place where nothing breaks down, machinery is shedded every night, and the engine oil is always fresh.”

400, “That sounds nice.”

Well. Here we go. The Twins are in the playoffs.

Too many teams make the playoffs now, as baseball tries to be like the NBA. But that’s not the Twins’ fault. And they won the worst division in history. That’s not the Twins’ fault either.

Given the ignominious streak, you can be excused if you temper your excitement about the upcoming series in Minneapolis. You could have been born the last time the Twins won a playoff game and graduated from high school.

But this year could be different. The top end of the starting rotation is very good. The bullpen has interesting pieces. The young hitters are feeling their oats.

See! See what I did right there! I was hopeful and optimistic. I was willing to throw my affections onto the bandwagon. Despite the twenty-year drought. That’s what a fan does.

If you’re a fan of a singer, that artist could have all good songs. Every song could be a winner. If you’re a fan of a sports team, half of us will be on the losing side. We engage our emotions, knowing wins will feel good and losses will sting. It’s a weird tradeoff.

Last January, I wrote about getting on board with the Vikings despite their own cursed playoff past. The 2022 Vikings won a gaggle of games in the last minute and had all sorts of momentum. I am a fair-weather football fan, and last year’s Vikings season was 70 degrees with a pleasant breeze. Then came their playoff game, and a cold rain fell.

I’m an all-weather baseball fan. As such, you ride the waves up and down. Sometimes it makes you woozy. Being a baseball fan is not unlike a marriage. It’s every day with that person/team. They drive you nuts some days, and others you love the heck out of them. The marriage analogy fails when you go from year to year. Every season, the Twins’ roster is different. Every year, Pam is Pam with some minor adjustments.

This Twins’ team is really like no other in my lifetime of fanning. They’ve had consistently good starting pitching this year. Outside of a couple months of Johann Santana and Franciso Liriano in 2006, the Twins have historically been a team that hits well and pitches not so good. The hitting has been above average on a sixty-year arc that goes from Killebrew and Oliva, through Carew and Puckett, past Mauer and Morneau, right up to Buxton and Sano.

OK, it’s not a perfect arc.

The bullpen has been at times a pock-marked minefield and other times a blossom-filled meadow. The evolution of Jhoan Duran to high end closer has been enjoyable. His fastball averages one hundred miles per hour. Couple that with the “entrance” the Twins’ hype machine put together, and it’s just plain fun. Maybe his arm will fall off someday, but we’ll live in the present.

The 2023 Twins found ways to score runs, more as the season wore on, and young players brought energy to the lineup. They also set the all-time record for strikeouts. Baseball has existed for a century and a half, so that’s something.

If you follow baseball, you know that an increasing number of strikeouts has been a trend. It goes back to some weird analytical notion that homeruns and walks are worth pursuing at all costs. Even if that cost is walking back to the dugout with your bat in your hand.

Old guys like me remember when striking out was embarrassing. I can still picture the scowl from my Leavenworth Bi-County coach, the irascible Billy Groebner, when I struck out. Billy had been a good player a generation before that. Billy would have quit baseball to shovel pig manure if he struck out as often as Joey Gallo.

Long before the playoff losses of this century, there was the disappointment of losing the 1965 World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers. I was nine and in the fourth grade at Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s. World Series games were played in the afternoon back then under God’s bright sun and on God’s green grass.

Sr. Ducshesne was our teacher. She was a young Franciscan nun, and looking back I can only imagine how difficult it was to face that room full of little Catholic kids every day. I remember her as kind. Dear Sr. Ducshesne let us bring transistor radios to school to listen to the World Series during breaks.

That led to me standing in the parking lot after school with my radio pressed to my ear as Sandy Koufax struck out Bob Allison to end the seventh game. My 9-year old self was crushed. Somehow, I picked up the pieces and plowed ahead these 58 years since.

I was a teenager when the Twins got swept by the Baltimore Orioles in 1969 and 1970 in the first Division playoffs. That was an exceptional Oriole team: Buford, Blair, Frank Robinson, Powell, Brooks Robinson, Johnson, Etchebarren, Belanger. I can’t tell you what happened yesterday, but that lineup sticks in my head.

The Twins won the World Series in 1987 and 1991. Unfortunately, I was boycotting because they were playing in the Metrodome, where plastic and Teflon displaced God’s grass and sun. I ended my boycott when kids came along who needed to see baseball despite the tawdry environment. Missing those two World Series was like being separated from your wife while she wins a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize.

Regardless, here we are, and we need to break this eighteen-loss curse. First, someone get in touch with Tom Wheeler. Tom hosts KNUJ Radio’s Dinner Bell Hour every day from 11 to 12, as fine a radio show as can be found on the dial. Tom needs to play the Win Twins Polka as a prelude to the game. Marv Masterman and His Orchestra recorded that classic in the Sixties.

When Tom plays that this morning, it will be our own virtual musical tailgate. The collective intensity from all of us bouncing up and down to the Win Twins Polka will create an energy wave that reverberates across the state, focusing a surge at Target Field. Pablo Lopez, Max Kepler, and Matt Wallner might not understand why they feel a mysterious boost as they take the field, but they will.

We can do this.