Just a heads up: I’ve got a short story to be published at Spillwords Press for their Christmas at Spillwords collection this upcoming Saturday, December 20, 2025! St. Nicholas Goes to His Eternal Reward imagines what it must have been like for the real St. Nicholas to enter heaven for the first time. I hope the readers of this blog care to read this at Christmas. Merry Christmas! Happy Hannukah! Tip Top Tet! Crazy Kwanzaa! A dignified and solemn Ramadan!

You might wonder how this stance sits with my previously stated position that Christmas sucks because it’s a harbinger of mandatory commercialism, whereas Halloween is an opportunity for optional fun. Well, Halloween has now been thoroughly captured by the forces of joyless commercialism, and I started celebrating Christmas in September with Christmas in Pandemonium coming out before Halloween even got started. Having sold out like the Who, I’m now part of the Machine. Resistance is futile. Happy Holidays.