Dear patient reader,

I hope all of you can get some R&R and do some interesting things during the Christmas holidays. We will shorten the release time. Most weekdays, we will get daily links and 2 cross-posts or “replays” from our archive on Monday, January 3. Nicholas Corbishley will be released next week. When they report on Sunday and Monday, we will have some new materials from Lambert and Jerri. I’m not sure what Lambert is doing with Water Cooler; I hope it’s mainly about taking leave or hosting some opening the rout.

However, our diligent moderators Jules and Katiebird will be on vacation from tomorrow to January 3. We want to keep comments open, but only Lambert and I are on duty. This means that comments received when we are not on the grid will take a while to be reviewed and released. Sorry for this, but the alternative is to turn off comments completely, as we have done in the past review holidays.

Please maintain good behavior. Because Lambert and I also need to rest, I know I may be more impatient with less-than-ideal behaviors, for example, when they are not common sense, they are stated as if they are facts, so evidence support, homework, thread hijacking are needed, Record breaking and other forms of malicious debate. I would rather not have to put coal in the socks of some readers!

And stay safe!

An old holiday favorite:

Maybe this will be a new one: