Welcome to this Sunday’s Third Degree: Weekly Interrogations on matters public and private that force thinking and response. Today we target: Twelfth Night

  • Do we cause or avoid bad luck by taking down Christmas trees and decorations on or before Epiphany? Twelfth Night?
  • Wasn’t that yesterday?
  • But wait, can we use the orthodox calendar(Julian), and that makes Christmas today?
  • So, a new lease on good fortune for 12 days anyway?
  • While the 12 days of Christmas, varying by country and calendar, bring differing solemnity and frivolity, are there mind stretching lessons that come from Twelfth Night?
  • In the early days of January 1602 (maybe 1601), when Elizabeth the First attended, indeed commissioned, Shakespeare’s premier of Twelfth Night, did the comically confused, survival, love and life story speak to other, even larger, themes as was always the bent of the Bard?
  • Are those themes and tasks relevant today as we strip ornamentation and lights and labor to get trees out the door?
  • Do people and policy trees of earnest, or not, construction and decoration, deserve a casting out if proven wanting or worse?
  • Are you repulsed by the tactic of promising pretty trees, seemingly fetching to the eye and mind, but really ugly, false, dishonest and expensive?
  • Since this presidential year will provide insight, entertainment and exasperation, do such trees, defying appreciation and common sense, deserve the burn pile?
  • Is an American epiphany: Topple and toss atrocious trees?
  • Can you objectively identify those trees?
  • Are ye who yearn America’s Magi gifts willing to compete, to earn, to achieve or fail, and yet strive and strive again and again?
  • Adapting quotation from correctly titled “Twelfth Night or What You Will:” “Are some born great, others achieve greatness, while others have greatness thrust upon them?”
  • Why fear greatness?
  • Is greatness not a Magi gift given, but earned, by the deserving?
  • How do we make, much less keep, America deserving?
  • Again using Twelfth Night, can we say: “There is no darkness, just ignorance, that puzzles like the fog?”
  • Forest and trees, trees and forest, will you pierce the fog in your own self, hopefully, national interest and take down, take-out worn-out trees?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living. The actions and answers are yours.