Even more than I usually do

(That's from "I'll be home for Christmas")

Cookie Time

Christmas came and went without this newsletter despite my best intentions, but we’ll get it out before 2026. This year’s sugar cookies (above) were made with non-gluten flour substitute, which made them a little more brittle. See if you can spot the happy accidents that resulted.

• New England broke off of the continental US; so America got turned into a steak.

• An angel wing fell off so it turned into one of the magi bearing gold.

• Two snowmen became University of Oregon Ducks in a nod to family loyalties

• Another angel head broke off which inspired me to make two biblically accurate exemplars—all eyes and wings, a la “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”:

At His feet the six-winged seraph,
cherubim with sleepless eye,
veil their faces to the Presence,
as with ceaseless voice they cry,
“Alleluia, alleluia,
alleluia, Lord Most High!”

Books of the Year

Just under the wire I’ll be reaching my 40 book goal (logged on Goodreads). I have only been able to reach this sort of yearly goal since mostly quitting social media three years ago. (If you think you don’t have time to read, perhaps you actually do, and you might reclaim some of it by ditching your phone a few hours a day.)

In honor of that, I must highlight Careless People as one of my favorite and most important reads of 2025, a wittily told tell-all of about the leadership failings at Facebook, now Meta. Even if only half of this book were true it would be disturbing, but I happen to believe every word of it. And I can only imagine what parallel stories are taking place in real time as the AI tsunami continues to build strength and potentially suck us all out to sea.

I began the year reading Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir Lovely One, deliberately chosen as counter-programming for the second Trump inaugural in January. It was a bit long, but every word was earnest and true, which was what I needed at the time.

I’m finishing the year with Randi Weingarten’s Why Fascists Fear Teachers, which is more of an extended op-ed than an book. It’s admittedly an echo-chamber read, reaffirming things I already believe about the importance of public education and a call to action for reinvestment in civil society. But it was the right book to close out 2025.

Christmas Movie Round Up

Our house eagerly awaits new releases in the Christmas movie genre, and I rely on my partner to be up to date on the most recent titles. I call these movies “Hallmark” style films, even if most of them are not produced by that network, and I enjoy them as a cultural and political barometer rather than fine cinema. This year’s crop had some promising takeaways.

Alicia Silverstone (of Clueless fame) played a earnestly chaotic divorced mom in “A Merry Little Ex-Mas” on Netflix. Melissa Joan Hart (of Clarissa Explains It All) plays her best friend so that provided a double-dose of 90s nostalgia for me, and the rest of the cast was campily cast. This is not the cleanest plot, but snaps for the inclusion of silly gay multi-racial grandfather characters and mom getting to romp around with a hot sex idiot. Also Alicia Silverstone still looks like herself, so that was a Christmas miracle in and of itself.

A Very Jonas Christmas surprised me in multiple ways. The plot conceit is old hat—how can the brothers get home in time to spend Christmas with their families? This is a full on musical, and the brothers are better actors than I would have expected. Jessie Tyler Ferguson plays a mischievous secret Santa, and Randall Park plays their tour manager. There is a bit of hetero-family worship in play, but my partner talked me off the ledge about that dimension. Ultimately the brothers are exactly the kind of not toxic bros/dads/dudes the world could use more of, and in this sense it’s great they are playing themselves.

Laverne Cox also got significant screentime as their agent, and even more exciting, queer songwriter Justin Tranter—composer of “Good Luck, Babe” among others—made an appearance as the pianist in a ridiculous singing battle between Nick and his younger Broadway nemesis. This was a Disney film, so that tells me that even if we are losing some cultural battles at the moment, we are going to win the war.

But I must lay the true laurels of culture war victory at the feet of My Secret Santa, also from Netflix. Without spoiling the entire plot (skip to the next section if you really care), this movie delivers authentic and approachable feminism, with a white single mom saving Christmas in a creative and non-cringey way, aided by her gay brother and partner. In the end, she also lands the rich boyfriend/husband, but on her own terms, and the movie does not close at the rich family’s mountain chalet with her dressed up with hair extensions like Kristi Noem, but rather with everyone gathered in her own normal-looking apartment. When and how we turn the tide on wealth-worship in popular culture is one thing I’m obsessively keyed into, and this movie was a Number 1 release when it came out. A Christmas movie to usher in the Mamdani era.

Political Texts

This year the midterms will be upon us fast and furious before we know it. I still receive almost a dozen political fundraising texts a day, and have stopped trying to unsubscribe. The only actual explanation of this phenomenon I have yet to encounter I stumbled across earlier this year in a KQED interview featuring Stanford political science professor Adam Bonica. It’s been a while since I listened so I can’t recap the details, but the main takeaways are: 1) these tactics target mostly older and economically disadvantaged voters 2) Democratic political leaders could decide to stop these if they had the will, and 3) it’s orders of magnitude worse on the Republican side (if that is any consolation).

You can listen to “Inside the Democratic Spam Machine” here, and Adam also has a Substack “On Data And Democracy.”

Can you Give Any More?

My final thought - what money have you given to organizations or people you care about this year? Can you give any more? Even if it’s another $50, $100, or maybe $500 or $1,000 - do you actually need that in your bank account or could you let it out into the world instead?

This past year I’ve challenged myself to dig deeper on my own giving, mostly funneling money into my church to pay for long-overdue physical updates to the building. Money isn’t everything, of course, and you can also give of your time and attention, and I’ve tried to do more of that too.

As someone who manages the receiving end of donations, I can assure you that every single one does make a difference, in the impact of the gift itself and the boost to those running the organization to keep going one more day or week or month.

Cinder Mood Board

Cinder was a reluctant Santa this year. (She hates having outfits on.) Our nephew captured this candid shot and we are still working to caption it properly. Our best working on is some variation of “lapdog of exiled Russian Tsarina” but there’s also some other depth there. Merry Christmas in any case.