So Many Stories, So Little Time.

As is the custom in this household, tonight we light the first candle and then I treat myself to a glass of 12-year-old Redbreast. It’s a long story. My old friend Sid explained it this way once at Congregation Emanu-El when some stranger asked him about me: Well, as you know there are several traditions in Judaism. There’s Reformed, Conservative, Orthodox, Ultra-Orthodox, and Irish Catholic.

Weather and ferry sailings permitting, in my holiday rounds I’ll be popping in on my ma and my brothers and some Afghan comrades for Yalda (شب یلدا‎) around a fire and a Christmas tree. Yalda goes back a long, long time and it’s a big deal in the Persian universe. It’s like New Year’s Eve, a celebration of the triumph of light over darkness, a victory we wish for everyone back home this season.

It’s beginning to look a lot like. . . I’m Substack’s worst photographer.

I’ll be holding the fort through the holidays in my column space at the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen, but no double duty like this past month, let me tell you. I hope to spend as much time as I can get away with just goofing off around home and being lazy. Which is what the solstice time should be for. That, and being happy.

Now here’s a thought for a Christmas gift, if you do that sort of thing.

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Anyway, a change of plans. . .

I had a long weekend newsletter lined up but I decided to leave it all in notes for now. For all the jollity of the season it’s also the Time of Ghosts. It’s biological and chemical and strange, and it goes back thousand of years to a time when it made sense to slow down, tuck in, and hibernate.

That’s not so easily done nowadays, so a lot of people get really sad around this time of year and there are probably quite a few people among Real Story subscribers who have to endure the disorientation. I fight it myself. I’d only make it worse today by surveying the bleak geopolitical landscape, the ongoing miseries in Iran, Ukraine and China, and the weird developments in the stories I’m working on.

Just know this. As I insist on pointing out, no one foresaw the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. Nobody saw the Arab Spring coming. None of the usual experts predicted the uprising in China that we’ve managed to get only a glimpse of because of the Beijing regime’s capacity for censorship and information control. Last month the same experts were expecting the Iranian people to blow off a little steam and go back to having the Khomeinists run their lives. That’s not happening.

It’s usually the bad stuff that’s expected to persist, and quite a few of us here in the Northern Hemisphere these days are thinking, Damn, I’ve had quite enough of this. And we will have had enough, because this coming week the days will begin growing longer.

Slowly and imperceptibly, the sunrise in the southeast will be earlier, and sunset later. It’s snowing out there right now but the next thing you know I’ll be out with my pals roaring around the backroads on my 1977 Triumph Bonneville T140E and all will be well with the world again.

Years ago, there was this Jewish kid who was born in a stable around Bethlehem. Years before that, the Maccabees of the Holy Land (not Ireland the other one) rose up and threw off the cruel yoke of their Greek-Syrian overlords. A few centuries before that, in what is now Iran, the people were drawn to the light of the uncreated spirit Ahura Mazda, the Lord or Wisdom, when the nights grew shorter, and the springtime began its slow return.

Or so they say, anyway. What do I know. I’m mainly looking forward to a glass of Redbreast and the company of people I love when I’m not writing year-enders and what’s-to-comes for the Post and the Citizen this week and next. With a newsletter or two for all the news I couldn’t fit in print.

In the coming year I hope to make some changes around this place. I expect I’ll try harder to stick to a schedule of mid-week newsletter and long weekender, maybe launch a regular podcast of conversations with interesting people, bring in more guest posts, that kind of thing. If I can find the time. We’ll see. Let me know what you think, in comments below this post.

In any case, chin up everyone, and thanks for subscribing.

Go Maccabees!