the ocean

I’m going to let you in on a little secret, and it’s not the one about Hillary Clinton using Jell-O Pudding Pops to brainwash the stars of High School Musical on Ice into joining her underground puppy-eating cabal. No, this secret is about me, and for once it does not involve Taco Bell and its consequences. You see, I have long hidden from you all the fact that I frequently write my annual holiday letter while my college-aged neighbors two doors down are still homoerotically playing beer pong on their no-longer-up-to-code roof deck and Instagram influencers at $60 pumpkin patches in horrifically oversized hats have blessedly not yet intruded on our consciousnesses. I tend to plan ahead, as anyone who has ever been fortunate enough to experience my fully-sourced and annotated vacation itineraries can attest, and the Holiday Season^TM itself has a tendency to be a bit, you know, packed with unnecessarily reimagined Nutcrackers and surprise visits from cousins who nicknamed you “Raccoon Godzilla” when you were ten. So I would craft this particular missive early, taking great care not to reference, for instance, Lindsay Lohan’s eyebrows in Freakier Friday or the International Left Handers Day rager I just attended.

But not this year! I won’t pretend I was doing anything super glamorous in August; a brief perusal of my Outlook puts me at hot events like “Museum with Mom” and “Get RX and Contact Solution.” But it was enough to keep me from churning out the sub-Claymation Christmas Celebration-level sentiment and humor likely inadvertently plagiarized from mid-‘90s Dilbert comic strips that you all have come to expect. So now I write during the actual holiday season, with the halls fully decked with Target impulse purchases and a festive cup of eggnog filling the bottom of my trashcan with its Salmonella-resplendent mucous. It really is the most wonderful time of the year, isn’t it? People are just a little bit nicer, from the legally blind Lyft driver who nearly runs you over but doesn’t scream curse words at you and give you the finger to the subway pervert who remembers to don his holiday best before “accidentally” grinding into you repeatedly all the way from Edgewater to the Loop. Things move just a little bit slower, particularly if you are talking about the checkout line at Mariano’s where a woman in a sweatshirt that is either made of or covered in cat hair is arguing with the cashier about her expired coupon for canned yams. And there is magic in the air, if also likely sulfur dioxide due to our crushing dependence on fossil fuels. So color me inspired, and also very, very white, since there is only sun in Chicago for approximately three days of the year.

We did start 2025 out in sunny Florida, though, on a family trip to Disney World at what is indisputably the single most crowded point in its already agoraphobia-inducing year. I would compare the Orlando airport to a third world country, but that term is hopelessly outdated and also I have to feel people in Bhutan are much better dressers. Regardless, it was really fun to experience the thrills of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (not a euphemism for a sex act) and Rise of the Resistance with my niece and nephew, as well as the gentle boredom of Spaceship Earth. After that, I had lots of glamorous work travel to places like Newark, New Jersey and Ypsilanti, Michigan, where I housed an appetizer sampler as a meal whilst dining alone in a Buffalo Wild Wings after falling down the embankment that separated it from my hotel. If that doesn’t give people the confidence to entrust their most sensitive white collar matters to me, I don’t know what will.

Anyway, the year flew by, and not because I wrote about when it when it was only 2/3 finished as in previous years. Here’s to enjoying every minute and looking forward to a happy and healthy 2026!