It's that time of year again.  If you live in the northern hemisphere, your days are dark, and if you live in the U.S. your president-elect is the type of guy to wage war via Twitter.  Annihilation seems so near.  You might live in a place with a bitter wind and/or lake effect snow.  You might live in a low grade structure where you can feel the air outside through the wall.  You might be pining for that Bowie concert you never got to go to.  You might have lost a loved one this year.  You might be looking at 2017 with desperate longing as well as utter fear.

Well, take heart.  Have hope.  Hope is what this time of year is for.  Just when you think the days will never be bright again, when you think you've always gotten to the office when it was dark and left when it was dark, the world shifts back the other direction.  Not literally, of course, we might actually feel that, but seemingly, for us it does.

I'll tell you now that I'm an atheist.  I do not believe in god or Jesus or the holy ghost or Allah or Zeus or Huitzilopochtli or any of them.  But today isn't the day that I wax about theology.  Today is the day that I proclaim:

I FUCKING LOVE CHRISTMAS!!!

I do.  I love it.  It's my favorite.  Most of my friends like Halloween.  Dress up.  Get Candy.  Be ghouuuuuuuulish.  Nah... not for me.  Gimme CHRISTMAS!!!  Give me bells and Tchaikovsky and furry hats and trees and Christmas lights!  I like the loot!  I like the pretty wrapping paper, and crumples of tissue paper stuffed in bags.  I like everyone's favorite foods that just appear in the kitchen at work.

And I love hope.

We live in a hard, dark, cold world.  We live in a world where some assholes get to do whatever the fuck they want and the rest of us have to fucking deal with it.  But every year, at some time we all get together and put stock into hope.  Into the baby Jesus, if you want.  Or the Apple Keynotes.  Whatever floats your boat.  But get with it.

Get with hope this year.  Get with potential.  Get with possibility.  Know that that darkest, longest night is it.  It's the last one.  And then we get to go back home to summer.  We will be redeemed.

Christmas is hard for a lot of folks.  If this is your first Liberalis reading, you won't know, but my parents have both left this world.  This is my 18th Christmas without my mom (blam-o on that ratio, 18:18), and the 5th without my dad.  So, I get it.  Christmas can really suck.  But this year, this year of all years, imagine that first beam of sunlight in the morning.  Sit in the quiet of your place in the twinkle of a string of lights, and think of one amazing thing (we have a robot on Mars!  wombats poop squares!!!), and take heart.  Have hope.