You may remember how on road trips the windshield used to become so plastered with bug bodies that it was hard to see through it - or how hundreds of fireflies seemed to be blinking from every patch of grass on warm summer evenings.

Many of us look to the holiday season as an antidote to the strife and struggle in the world around us, perhaps tuning out divisive politics – or at least trying to avoid discussing the latest tweets or subpoenas at family gatherings.

A Yankee Swap can bring out the worst in people. Tact and generosity go out the window; bald greed and selfishness climb gleefully in.

Fletcher – the town where I live - doesn’t have a post office. So even though I pay taxes and vote here, and my kids went to school here, my mail comes from Jeffersonville in the Town of Cambridge.

Santa Claus has already visited Johnson, Vermont. You may have missed this news, but scores of his followers did not, braving single digit temperatures and work weary parents on the first Friday night of December to meet the man himself. Some children even hand-delivered their lists so he wouldn’t forget.

According to the American Chiropractic Association, “back pain is the single leading cause of disability” worldwide. And like many, I’d “thrown out my back” before and knew back pain could be bad. But at the end of October, I became a real part of the statistic.

Like the Christmas story itself, it’s a mystery to me, how every year I buy and schlep a six foot tall balsam fir into my home and spend hours decorating it, while my British partner sits on the sofa drinking tea and egging me on.

I don’t exactly have a Vermont accent. My first language is German, and even though I started learning English in fifth grade, the accent sticks. It’s not a big deal; I can usually communicate just fine, to the extent that we humans can communicate with words and language – but that’s another story.

A few years ago, I arrived at church on a December Sunday morning to find a substitute pastor who nervously smiled and introduced herself. She invited the kids to the front before sending them to church school, and as the regular copastors normally would, asked them a few seemingly softball questions.

Nobody knows the future, but in times of uncertainty like these, what we don’t know feels like an expanding universe of dire possibilities.