This past Christmas my wife, concerned, asked me, “James, when should we start making tamales (a Christmas tradition started by our mothers)?  Cindy and her family, and Aunt Isabel just called and said they weren’t coming to help us due to the heavy snow fall.”  I told my wife, “well, it’s 3:30 pm, let’s get started.”  As I looked at the 25 lbs. of masa (corn dough) and the floating hojas (corn husks) in a large pan I said to myself, “Gino, you’ve got your work cutout for you!”  Folks, within time I was slapping the masa on the hojas like “Taz” the whirlwind Tasmanian devil.  After 5 hours of slapping masa on hojas and helping my wife put the large pots of tamales atop the stove I saw light at the end of the tunnel.  Around 8:30 pm, my wife sampled the first pot of tamales and gave me a thumb up sign, meaning that the tamales were done and tasted great!

Around 9:00 pm my daughter, Cecilia, her husband, and our grandkids, who live a couple of blocks from us showed up.  “Dad, where’s Cindy and Aunt Isabel?”  I told Cecilia that her cousin and aunt weren’t coming due to the snowfall.  “Well, I invited a close friend and her sons to come see how we make tamales.”  Soon, my daughter’s friend and her sons showed up.  Needless to say, we had a full house and soon everyone got into the spirit of Christmas: chatting, exchanging gifts, and eating tamales.

After everyone left I noticed that my wife was sort of heartbroken.  She said, “Gino I can’t recall Aunt Isabel and Cindy not spending Christmas Eve with us.  It just doesn’t seem the same without them.”  Later, I checked on google and found out that the last time it snowed on Christmas in Fort Worth was in 1926.  Folks, that was 83 years ago!  By now some of you are wondering, “what’s up James?”  Well, what I’m up to is, “what’s all this nonsense about global warming?”  Seems that whenever a catastrophe (earthquake, tornado, hurricane, ice storm, volcano eruption, flood, tsunami, etc.) occurs, environmentalist global warming fools try to make us believe that humans exhaling CO2, automobiles, lawn mowers, cows breaking wind, coal, grilling hamburgers, light bulbs, etc. is creating greenhouse gas which is destroying the planet.  Folks, I’m not a scientist, but I’m aware that during summer here in Texas it usually gets hot as hell, and during winter, it can get cold.  One does not have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out!

In Dec. 1983 (17 years ago) I was a judge for a Water Board election held at a local school.  I remember that the day was a beautiful almost spring day.  I recall seeing my young daughter, Cecilia, then 12, skating in the school’s playground in shorts.  Prior to closing the polls I told my wife I was going home to shower to go play music that evening.  As I walk home from the school I noticed a strong cool wind.  After I showered and walked back to the school it was freezing.  My friends, that night the temperature went down to 12 degrees and get this, it stayed that cold for 12 straight days.  The extreme cold weather killed almost all the trees in my neighborhood and many throughout Fort Worth.  To illustrate how cold it got, Fort Worth’s own Lake Worth froze over, to where cars drove over the lake on the ice.  Any of you recall these environmental wacky people then talking about global warming?  No, they were saying back then that we were going to have another Ice Age.  Man, can these idiots make up their minds!  I might add that in Dec. of 1983, San Antonio, Texas had a record 13-inch snowfall that to this day has not been broken.

Just recently I saw in the news that Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, claims the devastating earthquake in Haiti occurred as a result of the U.S. Navy launching what is known as a tectonic weapon.  He says this time it was only a drill but the next time it will be used to destroy Iran.  Now folks, who is goofier, the Venezuela president or the environmental wacky ones?

In Galveston, back in Sept. 8, 1900, the island of Galveston was underwater which was caused by a killer category-4 hurricane that took the lives of 6,000 Texans.  Hey wacky environmentalists check this out:  Before the era of the Model T, gasoline-fueled vehicles had still competition from steam-driven and electric cars.  In fact, of the 4,200 cars built in the United States in 1900, only one-fourth employed internal combustion engines.  And of the approximately 8,000 automobiles on the road, most were steam-driven.  Now come on and argue with me environmentalists that the automobile was the cause of the Galveston killer storm.

As I write this piece, there is a record setting blizzard tagged as “Snowmageddon” in Washington D.C. that has dumped over 20 inches of snow.  Get this; it’s been several decades since Washington D.C. has had this much snow.  Boy, I bet those liberal Democrats, who are in bed with the “sky is falling environmentalists” are for once wishing “please give us some of that global warming!”  Though I feel sorry for the difficult time residents of D.C. are facing, I hope the storm keeps the politicians in all our government’s branches from conducting any business (which consists mostly of taxing the heck out of us).  I feel that as long as the blizzard continues, it will give us U. S. taxpayers a very short and well-earned tax break!

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