And then, January 1st unfurls itself like a flag, presenting its colors to the world, a boundless number of opportunities in its wake. And with all its pageantry and promise comes an innate, deep-seated desire to make promises and pledges to better ourselves. New year -- new us.

Ah, the New Year’s resolutions --the commitments we make to self-improvement, the unattainable bars we set so high for ourselves that we can never in a million new years live up to.

Well-intentioned proclamations cascade from our mouths like water racing down a mountain: “I’m going to go to the gym four times a week!” “I’m going to lose those final stubborn 15 pounds!” “I’m going to eat better!” “I’m going to cut out alcohol!”

But more importantly, there is a Savior who embodies all of the mysticism and spirituality we fear to lose sight of with the growth of our children. An irrational birth and existence in the midst of a rational and logical world was without a doubt the inspiration for St. Nicholas and should be ours as well.

May you have a completely irrational Christmas where love blooms bright and wild in our hearts.

Nearly a thousand years after the Great Schism, ideology divides us again, causing alienation, bitterness, and disappointment.

And both sides in this contemporary conflict feel that they are justified in their choice; the more liberal side feels rooted in love and acceptance, while the more conservative faction believes that their actions are firmly established in Scripture, focused on saving souls.

Who, then, can condemn either side?

My a.m. calm is short-lived, however. In no time at all I find myself merging with Atlanta drivers onto South Fulton Parkway (South Fulton Speedway?), and that’s where the fun begins. I’m thrown into a real-life version of Mario Kart . . . no, maybe old-school Frogger is a better analogy.

And I’m the poor frog trying to pass far too many lumbering tractor trailers vying for prime position at the Amazon warehouse. Or worse yet, I’m trying to avoid one of the many arch-enemies I’ve encountered in my rush hour adventures.

Perhaps Republican Representative Matt Gaetz from Florida has best summed up the situation:

“This Congress has seen a substantial increase in breaches of decorum unlike anything we have seen since the pre-Civil War era.”

It’s farcical. Our entire system seems like a Saturday Night Live parody of American politics.

Some of our elected officials are playing the roles of childish bullies who have resorted to threats of actual physical violence to solve conflicts.

Even with all of our privacy settings checked and double-checked, it seems that our children are still extremely vulnerable and exposed online and on social media in particular.

Just how concerned and how limiting should we be about our children’s use of social media? And how about our own postings of our children? Should we ask their permission? Should we go old school with sharing pictures of our young children to avoid their images falling into the wrong hands?

Separating art from the artist has taken on new meaning in the era of Cancel Culture. Musicians, authors, and others in the public spotlight can easily find themselves canceled, their careers in shambles, for reasons ranging from innocuous comments taken out of context to full-blown egregious racism or misogyny. The line between an artist’s beliefs and their work is blurred, at best.

Just what is a devoted follower of the aesthetic to do -- blindly admire artists’ beautiful works and ignore their underlying prejudices, biases, or worse, offensive actions?

The results of the local election will be felt intensely and immediately, and maybe even more keenly than the outcomes of larger elections. New mayors and city council members will define our sense of community and shared culture.

It’s vital we make the right choice.

For me, that meant revisiting my childhood home. In an ironic twist of fate, after all my years away from Atlanta, I find myself working less than nine miles away from where I grew up and less than three miles from Hartsfield-Jackson. (I can see the planes take off and land from my classroom window!) I spent the high points of my career way out in the suburbs, and now, after my first “retirement,” I feel like I’ve come full circle.

At the end of this past school year, I felt very keenly this idea of “coming full circle,” and asked my mom to spend the day with me on a trip down memory lane. We started at my current school in College Park and then we headed south into Riverdale. We hadn’t been back in years and years. The changes were drastic and jarring.

It should come as no surprise that traditional Scottish music and bluegrass are so closely connected. The Appalachians and the Scottish Highlands are the same mountain range; millions of years ago they were once connected as the Central Pangean Mountain.

No wonder the Scottish immigrants felt comfortable settling into the Virginias, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The mountains they moved into were literally the mountains they had just fled.

On the third morning, we walked across the street and saw a homeless man huddled up, sleeping, in the alcove of the business right next to Sears. He was wrapped up in a sleeping bag with all of his belongings beside him, including what looked to be a relatively new pair of Timberland boots. Unfortunately for the snoozing man, another man who carried all of his earthly personal possessions on his back, swiped those boots as he walked by, bragging to his friend all the while.

Two months after the Supreme Court issued a monumental decision to end affirmative action and ban any consideration of race in college admissions, people are still processing just what this all means, and many are left reeling from its repercussions.

Just yesterday, the threads of an increasingly heated discussion on this topic floated through my classroom door.

“Mrs. Perkins, why is it that you people get special privilege in college admissions?”

The “redneck” mountain man stands with a bullseye on his chest, the target of many stand-up comedians and comic artists who reduce him to a caricature drowning his sorrows in a “XX” branded moonshine jug. Devoid of humanity and individuality, he finds himself party to the sole “group” that is universally socially acceptable to ridicule.

Why, though? Nobody would endorse a stand-up comedian whose schtick was making fun of whatever disenfranchised group you’d like to plug in here.

In our conservative corner of the country,“woke”culture has landed with a decided thud. Smaller towns and rural areas have, for the most part, been very outspoken in their rejection of “wokeness,” which Cambridge Dictionary defines as “being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made it his mission to fight back against the “liberal” ideology of woke culture. After having introduced the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act last year, things took a decided turn when DeSantis took off his gloves and threw down the gauntlet with his declaration that “freed African-Americans benefited from chattel slavery, claiming it would teach students that enslaved people ‘eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.’”

While not as popular as some of his other works, Cannery Row, published in 1945 but set during the Great Depression, paints a vivid picture of the fishing industry and canning industry (a way of life that is now defunct due to overfishing) . Focusing on character sketches of a diverse oceanside neighborhood in Monterey, Steinbeck included bartenders, prostitutes, immigrants from around the globe, and even a marine biologist in the story set amongst the thriving sardine canneries of the time.

It was a romanticized version of Cannery Row that I sought when I visited Monterey last month. Salinas boasts Steinbeck’s home and the National Steinbeck Center, but for me, this stretch of the Pacific represented the heart of Steinbeck’s collective work, perhaps because the novel’s opening sentence describes the street as "a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

At best, the TSA is a secretive group, with fluid and unknowable rules. One time you go through security, you have to take off your shoes; the next time, you don’t. One time (and only one time) you pass through and they tell you to take out your liquids and your precious snacks (which you clearly didn’t pack next to your quart-sized Ziploc bag because honestly, when have they ever asked you to take out your ever-loving innocent Atkins bars and cashews?).

“Hustle or “grind” culture has become a constant fixture in our collective psyche. Social media is populated with stories of people bragging about their “side hustles,” which invariably demand early wake-ups and extra hours, on top of full-time jobs. The hustlers’ posts entreat others to join them in their lifestyle, to join their ventures, to drive themselves to never waste a moment. This hyper-productivity supposedly leads to happiness? Self-fulfillment? Other than sheer exhaustion, I’m honestly not sure what it results in.

In spite of the disaster that was junior English, I signed up for AP Literature my senior year. I really have no idea why I did it; no counselor had ever suggested anything like that to me, and my parents had not pushed me into it. Okay, to be honest, it was probably because my two best friends took it. Mabel Norton (commonly known as “Mabel the Tick”) was a far cry from Patricia Robinson. She wore all black almost every day, and she was a ​very ​round woman with black readers perched on the end of her nose. My class included 14 girls and one boy, and for about three months, we all thought she hated ​all of ​us.

I admit to having been skeptical about hypnosis prior to that day. I equated hypnosis to a theatrical stage production, an act perpetrated on cruise goers to make them quack like a duck or do other crazy things they would never do under normal circumstances. Robert and I were good friends, and he had offered multiple times to put me under to help me overcome some fears I harbored. I politely declined each time.

I missed the Fourth. May the Fourth. (Or is it May the Forth?) Obviously I lived through it because I’m still here, but I missed all the opportunities to say, “May the Fourth (Forth?) be with you.”

And, equally as devastating, I missed all the occasions to be a good (but snarky) Presbyterian and respond with, “And also with you.”

I was so consumed with grading term papers and finalizing grades for graduating seniors that the significance of the day passed me by.