No Pennies, No Thoughts—Christmas!

The last ever US penny was minted on November 12, 2025, and my last ever expressible thought occurred at approximately the same time. I can’t remember what it was. It must not have been unimportant. It was certainly unfit for polite company. Decrees led to both cessations; the former was enacted by Executive Order and the latter compelled by the relentless intervention of Those Who Have My Best Interest at Heart.

Many people are saying they don’t want to hear the truth and I can’t bring myself to lie to them. So, whatever. I’m tired of throwing rocks at the sun. It hasn’t improved my pitching arm one bit. Far from it. I’m going to have to get my shoulder looked at by a specialist. It feels dislocated. No biggie. It only hurts when I type.

But, hey—Christmas! Am I right? I come to you in peace (and pieces). All hail a ubiquity of tunes and a gauntlet of glucose! I am full of heartjoy as I contemplate the annual frog march down Memory Lane, which is paved with broken ornaments. November 12 was also my mother’s 95th birthday anniversary, which she missed by 21 years. She was a relentless beacon of cheer during the Merrie Olde Holidays. I believe I was an adult before I discovered that turkeys are not made of balsa wood.

But I don’t mean to be thoughtless. Seriously, I am determined not to ruin Christmas again for the one person who still loves me. “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” doesn’t have to be a dirge. Not everybody’s appendix ruptures while Gene Autry’s Christmas album is played on endless repeat from the nurses’ station at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. That was a fluke, bless Gene’s heart! No, I’m fine. I wonder what the playlist will be when my gall bladder decides to go blooey. ’Tis the season to ingest one’s daily stick of butter, after all. I can hear Mariah Carey warming up.

Some prefer tobogganing while my own winter sport is Feast Avoidance. If I see olives in a dish and spray cheese on celery, I clear out at speed. I flee at the merest hint of a gherkin. And beware the deadly Venus Pie Trap! If only one could be convivial by proxy! I hate to say that I miss the pandemic, with its banquets by Zoom. Without the saving boon of a virus, refusal to mingle and gorge feels aloof.

If I could but romanticize slurping ramen over the sink by candlelight, and make that part of solid Holiday Tradition! That scene was never taking place in those lovely Thomas Kinkade cottages that always looked on the brink of combustion. No one has that many candles. Was Kinkade a shill for National Grid? Not so much the Painter of Light but the Painter of Utility Consumption. When the electric bill comes to a Kinkade hovel, I imagine it accompanied by a note from the International Space Station. We can see your house from here!

But I’m not antisocial (much) or even (very) agoraphobic. My low profile during the Jolly Season results from a distaste for gloopy food combined with Stuck-Home Syndrome. Also it comes from a reluctance to express my thoughts (which, as you can tell, I have none) and an unwillingness to engage with those who think they have thoughts but have merely borrowed talking points from the local propaganda shop. (Ours is next to a Dollar General.) I have worn out my own brain with thinking and can’t begin to withstand another checklist of contention. I won’t debate you. I’d rather put ol’ Gene back on the turntable.

Let me interject here that I’m terrible at gift-giving (please don’t call it “gifting”). My Yuletide-brightening mother somehow hated every present I ever tried to give her and, being candid, told me so. Eventually, I quit the game of “What will so-and-so like?” and overturned the board. I am extravagantly grateful when receiving gifts because I know I can never properly reciprocate. (That foible undermined my first serious relationship but—thankfully—not the second. “If I want something, I’ll buy it for myself,” says my wife. We were made for each other!)

I may not eat your pecan pie (made with real lard!) or distribute expensive baubles as proof-of-love tokens or pound Christmas songs on the piano (as I did as a mediocre musician-for-hire years ago), but I am big-hearted enough to embrace humanity with as much empathy and compassion as I can scrounge. This year it has been immeasurably difficult to muster that warmth when others seem always ready to fight and to hurl accusations and epithets. It would be nice to pause the conflict so that people aren’t screaming at each other or, worse, estranged from each other. I feel that estrangement most keenly this season.

A friend recently said he really couldn’t dredge up any empathy for hateful people. I replied: “I have empathy for drunks even when I’m sober. Hate is its own addictive intoxicant and I’ve felt it at times, very powerfully. I don’t want to give in to hate right now, even if it’s ostensibly righteous and seemingly justified. Someone has to stay sober at this party. When everybody sobers up, they’ll have to own up to what they did while under the influence. We still may not feel chummy. But we’ll all have to get on with our lives and together try to rebuild what was destroyed.”

A bent penny for a fragment of thought: I propose a cessation of hostilities, much like the Christmas Truce of 1914. Of course, after a brief respite during which the English and Germans exchanged gifts and played games, they went back to murdering each other as they were under orders to do.

Let’s say for Christmas 2025 we lay down our cudgels and offer each other heartfelt Compliments of the Season—and then I’ll scurry back down below my parapet for my nice Christmas ramen.