Did you have a good Thanksgiving? Get enough turkey and dressing? Did you overdose on football or reruns of old programs? Did the family behave and play nice for the oldsters?

I hope the answers to this quiz are yes, yes, maybe, and yes.

The next question: Did you survive the weekend without being overwhelmed with ads plugging hot deals on Black Friday through Cyber Monday? Again, I hope the answer was yes.

Now, we are into the official Christmas season, the make-or-break time for our merchant friends. In the words of Tom Lehrer: “God rest ye very merchants. May ye make the Yuletide pay. Angels we have heard on high, Tell us to go out and — buy.”

But last weekend, it was nice to sit on the old couch and surf the channels without being bombarded with nasty political attack ads warning us of impending Armageddon if you fail to implore your friends, relatives and neighbors to send in “just” a few hundred bucks to (here insert your favorite candidate).

For once, the Nov. 5 election showed us the polls were mostly right. They said it would be a mostly 50/50 split. The latest numbers show Grandpa Donald earning 76.9 million votes to The Veep's 74.4 million.

Despite claims of overwhelming mandates and landslide victories, no candidate got more than 50% of the vote. The latest popular vote numbers show the winner got 49.94% and the loser with 48.3%.

In Congress, the GOP won control of both chambers, but the margin is slim. This means there are no sure bets in this edition of Congress.

The incoming president and his allies are pledging to drain the Washington establishment swamp and use the military to round up millions of illegal aliens, even if it means arresting city mayors who oppose them.

Elon Musk and his allies pledge to whack the dickens out of the federal budget, but that has been tried before. The biggest chunks of the budget fund the military, social security, medicare, and the interest on the national debt. The rest of the budget is tiny compared with the big four.

Will the non-elected budget slashers attack one or all of these sacred cows?

I wonder what the imposition of tariffs on Mexico and Canada will do to the family budget. Last I checked, a big chunk of the food in my fridge was grown in Mexico and lots of auto manufacturing is done south of the border too. The great state of Maine is a major trading player with her northern neighbor with as much as 70 % of imports coming from there, while 30% of exports are sent back, according to Bangor Daily News. These commodities range from energy to logging.

I wonder what Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins, the incoming chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, will have to say about Canadian tariffs?

While the incoming administration brags about upsetting the federal bureaucracy and military, Congress must approve any change.  And the GOP margin is thin.

For instance, in the Senate, the GOP won 53 to the Democrats 47. That is a winning margin if all stick together. Collins and her Alaskan pal, Lisa Murkowski, have been known to buck the party lines and oppose the incoming GOP president. Former GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is no fan of the incoming president, either. While Mitch is stepping down as conference leader, he will still swing a big stick as chair of the subcommittee on military spending and the powerful Rules Committee. The Senate votes could stop some of MAGA's grand plans.

The House GOP margin is even closer than the Senate. Although a few seats are still unclear, it looks like they won 220 to 214, but those numbers are likely to change. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz resigned his seat after being tapped for Attorney General. That brings the margin down to 219. Two other potential cabinet appointees, Elise Stefanik, to be UN Ambassador, and Mike Waltz, named as National Security Advisor, are likely to resign after they are confirmed. That brings the margin down to 217. We all saw the way the Republicans stuck together(?) during the last congressional session, so it looks like the proposed major changes are not a slam dunk for the administration.

Already, the Gaetz AG nomination went down in flames after the Senate Republicans turned thumbs down on him. Three other nominees face a rocky road. They are ex-Fox second-string weekend anchor, Pete Hegseth, tapped to be Defense Secretary, Tulsi Gabbard, the potential Director of National Intelligence, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to run H&HS.

The next few weeks could feature a bitter political contest, most of it taking place behind closed doors, as the traditional GOP legislators and the MAGA faction butt heads.

The winner could determine the course of our nation. And, the brawl might be a doozy.