The photo on the holiday card sent out this year by my husband, Frank, and me shows the pair of us at the ancient Greek theater in Taormina, Sicily, where we went in September. The image came out more grainy and low-res than we wanted. It looked better in the digital mock-up when we were designing the card. As on the dating apps, the online pics outshine what you get in real life.
The yuletide light verse on the back of the card, though, is one of my better efforts, if I do say so myself. As has become the custom, the words can be sung to a well-known Christmas carol.
God rest ye merry, gentlemen
And girls and gays and theys!
From Mass., where Transcendental men
Ate oysters from the bays,
We send you cheer
Another year —
Or, if we may rephrase:
Here’s some tidings of comfort and joy!
What a year, oy!
Hope the next one’s full of comfort and joy!
The news is bleak,
You’re past your peak,
And life is full of woe.
Your BP’s high,
You fear AI,
And Harvard lost its dough.
But Frank and Zac
Still have your back
Through thick and thin — and so:
Take these tidings of comfort and joy!
Lest we annoy,
We sending tidings of comfort and joy!
This is the seventh December we have mailed a carol parody to our loved ones. Because Christmas songs are a finite resource, I recently floated the idea of winding down the series, but Frank vetoed that notion. So I guess there will be an eighth installment. If you’ve got any good rhymes for “Wenceslas,” feel free to send them my way.
And speaking of my waning creative powers, what say we take this opportunity to look back at some of my least objectionable bits of writing from this year that’s rapidly drawing to a close?
Of course, there are about 3 weeks still remaining in 2025, so I suppose it’s possible I could churn out additional chunks of prose worthy of inclusion on the below list. To avoid complicating the situation, though, I promise not to write anything memorable between now and New Year’s.
10 Things I Wrote This Year
TRAVEL
- a pizza pilgrimage to New Haven, Conn. (published March 7)
- a quixotic quest to find the best travel pillow for long flights (pub. June 17)—by far the most-read thing I wrote this year
- a slightly stalkerish survey of Taylor Swift sites in Rhode Island (pub. July 21)
- a purplish parade of Prince places in Minneapolis (pub. Sept. 3)
- a ballsy blow-by-blow of a visit to Sicily’s “penis bar” (pub. Sept. 19)—located not far from where our holiday-card pic was snapped, incidentally
THEATER
Coastal Design, a short play about failed artists cracking wise and being gay (write what you know), published by Apricity Magazine in April
THIS BLOG
- Finishing the Hat (posted Feb. 14): on Sondheim
- Ill-Advised Summer Sweater (posted May 16): on unbearable heat
- Paper Towels (posted May 29): on loyalty
- Gay-Ass Coffee-Table Books (posted July 3): on gay icons
Thanks for abiding my nonsense for another year. Have a great 2026! I’ll probably spend far too much of it trying to find a way to make Good King Wenceslas have something to do with “VP Pence’s loss.”
Don’t worry—I’ll figure it out. In the meantime, happy holidays to you and yours!
Indirect Objects 