America! Christmas! Two Amazing Sonnets December 24, 2025December 23, 2025 I love Christmas and I love America. AMERICA! The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Is there anything more beautifully American than that? (Other than “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?) The current administration, with Republican assent, has rewritten its last lines to read: “Send not your poor, your garbage (etc.) . . . for if they come, we will greet them with unspeakable cruelty” — as documented in this “60 Minutes” exposé Team Trump blocked from airing Sunday. If you have time for context (and if that bootlegged copy hasn’t been blocked, too, by the time you click), start here instead. CHRISTMAS! I have loved it for as long as I can remember. Not for its religious aspect . . . I’ve never believed He walked on water (or that Moses got God to part the Red Sea or that Santa Claus is real) . . . but for its spirit of love and kindness, generosity and joy, innocence and wonder. A friend’s holiday card wished me “love, peace, and kindness” and chose this sonnet as her text: Love is Not All by Edna St. Vincent Millay Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would. Wishing you, too, dear readers, love, peace, and kindness. YET MORE FUN WITH HYMC Up another $2.50 to $27. If you sold some HYMC 25 January 2028 calls Monday at around $14.50, as suggested yesterday, consider replacing them with the newly-added January 2028 37 calls that give someone the right to buy your shares for $37 instead of $25. I did that, taking a $2 loss on the 25’s . . . but giving my shares $12 further to run before being called away. If HYMC were above $37 by the time the calls expired, you’d have that $37 plus the $14 or so from selling the calls . . . so $51 in all on your original $2.50 investment. If HYMC somehow drops to zero (which seems unlikely), you’d still have the $14 or so for which you sold the calls.