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Early Christmas

We’re sure lucky to live in the Flathead

By Mike Jopek

A week after returning home to Montana from our annual East Coast family visits, we got the call saying that Dad fractured his femur and needed surgery to pin his bones back into place.

He rehabbed after surgery and Pam flew back to spend Christmas with her father, who will need some short-term help hosting the holiday while tending to household chores.

Now that we’re spending Christmas Day on opposite ends of the country, we celebrated early. We got a solar panel from the Flathead Electric Cooperative; their payment plan is great.

The coop’s Solar Utility Network is Montana’s first community solar project. We’ve wanted panels on the farm for the past 25 years, so this is a baby step toward our goal of energy independence. Our panel is in Kalispell yet transmits its small 360 kilowatt-hours of power annually into the grid.

Our new HEPA air purifier for the farmhouse has been actively scrubbing the indoor air and made it a whole lot better. It will use plenty of that new investment we made into the solar panel.

We exchanged exciting and practical gifts for middle-aged farmers. Panels and purifiers are better than socks, licorice, and chocolate. We’ll see how they perform over the years.

Earlier this month, we tended to the year-end rush to secure healthcare tax breaks and selected the insurance plan that decently protects us. The Health Care Marketplace is much better and the tax breaks can be significant.

Congress apparently held its year-end Christmas celebration with industry; one gift lifted the 40-year-old export ban that kept our crude oil stateside for domestic use. Soon rail cars and tankers will be shipping our limited crude worldwide, politically traded in Congress for a paltry five-year tax break for wind and solar.

People like my dad spent a lifetime hauling crude stateside to secure cheaper gasoline and energy independence. Hopefully, people won’t reminisce how gas was $2 a gallon at the end of 2015.

Christmas is days away and many Montanans would be hungrier if not for the great efforts of the 200 food pantries statewide. The Montana Food Bank Network estimates that 144,000 people statewide live in food insecure homes. These seniors, families with kids, veterans and working people cannot afford to put enough food on the table.

The food panties across the Flathead are busy and any donation of cash to the people-feeding organizations in Columbia Falls, Kalispell or Whitefish is always helpful.

In Whitefish, the North Valley Food Bank continues to be active giving much food to hungry locals. Started in a Whitefish garage in 1977, the food bank has sprouted a great new facility. What it and the rest of the food pantries in the Flathead needs are large donations, like fresh fruit and veggies or any amount of cash so the no-profit can purchase food wholesale.

The federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program offers food stamps to 58,000 Montana households. SNAP is a federally funded program that has sadly become a political punching bag for ideologues. Hunger should less political.

With Pam in Florida, I’m spending Christmas week with friends while keeping the home warm for pets. December is a time to enjoy the outdoors and catch up on some chores. With the ski hill and lake just minutes away, it’s easy for most people to get out and enjoy nature.

We’re sure lucky to live in the Flathead and not some other place on the planet. In a lot of ways it’s a crazy world out there, beyond the valley. Soon Pam will be home again and it will be time to place the annual seed order for next year’s crops.

Merry Christmas, Flathead, through thick and thin be kind to one another. Be joyful, life on earth is a finite resource.