Yuletide Hash
A year-end blend of takes, thoughts and musings
Radio stations that have been filling the airwaves since Labor Day with Burl Ives and his musical Christmas ilk will soon be back to their daily diet of Taylor Swift, already in progress. That, as David Gruber fights for TV airtime with any number of franchise fitness outlets, asking us to make a New Year’s resolution to take up a little less space in our pants.
Those, my friends, are the certain signs that our season of good will toward others is coming to an end. Crispy Christmas trees will soon be at the curb, at least for those of us still celebrating with the live pine option. Ready or not, 2026 is upon us. It used to be funny to joke about how long it would take to get used to writing the new year on our January checks but then again, you probably haven’t written a check since the Packers were last in a Super Bowl (more on them in a bit).
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The calendar changes, but loose ends remain from ‘25, among them a $1.7 billion Powerball jackpot that’s just lying there, waiting to be won as I tap this out. There’s that new property tax bill just waiting to be paid, one that in some cases packs a hefty hike thanks to a recently approved local school referendum. Maybe ‘26 will be the year the folks in charge can figure out why more and more boards of education have to keep asking voters for more money at the ballot box. Such events used to be rare. They’re now as common as autumn leaves and a lot more costly to deal with.
When you aren’t watching “Christmas Story” or “It’s A Wonderful Life” this holiday season, you may be diving into your laptop or cellphone to see what’s billed on some social media platforms as “The ‘60 Minutes’ segment they don’t want you to see,” that being the piece about immigrants held at an infamous El Salvador detention center. CBS News head Barri Weiss spiked it just hours before it was supposed to air Sunday night, citing the lack of on-camera response from anyone in the Trump Administration. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi says it was cleared by network lawyers and its standards division, that she’d asked for White House/Administration comment only to get no response. “60 Minutes” aired another story in it’s place Sunday nightand, to no one’s surprise, the spiked piece is now online for all the world to see online, showing up (at least for a while) on Canada’s Global Television Network. A journalists’s job is to tell the truth and to get all sides of the story. A lack of response or a terse “no comment” from one of the players involved hadn’t been enough to keep a story off “60 Minutes” in the past. Will the piece make it to the legacy network’s traditional broadcast platform in the new year? Will “no comment” be enough to keep other touchy, uncomfortable “60 Minutes” investigations on the shelf in the new year? Is a network boss’s decision to “spike” enough to kill said story, or does it just get fresh life as an Internet ‘pirate piece?” No matter what, a sure way to make something can’t-miss and viral is to tell someone they CAN’T see, hear or read it.
Closer to home, we’ve blurred the line between Wisconsin’s two seasons—winter and construction—as orange barrels dot our fruited plain this cold-weather season, no where more so than along the perma-busy stretch of I-94 between downtown and State Fair Park.
More closures are coming as the footprint of a project that’ll take a stunning EIGHT YEARS to complete expands, meaning a child born in the new year will be, what, in second or third grade by the time the job’s done. That should be time enough for the Wisconsin DOT to issue a fresh study, telling us that the newly redesigned roadway is (shockingly) no longer safe, wide enough or is in some other way so badly flawed that (aw, shucks) they’ll just have to come back and remake it again. Spoiler alert: no matter how wide the freeway, there comes a time when it’s deemed no longer wide enough.
Between the sporting lines, we have a banged up Packers squad still trying to secure a playoff berth, an effort that continues despite the fact some of their best players are out for the year (Micah Parsons among them) and others are dinged up so as to make their immediate availability uncertain (Jordan Love and his backup QB). A continuing theme in 2025 is Green Bay’s inability to play four complete quarters of football, much less hold on to or build upon late-game leads. Neither trait is usually found among clubs that end up hoisting Lombardi trophies.
The Brewers have yet to make any big off-season moves but the buzz that turned into a roar as summer became fall in ‘25 continues this Hot Stove Season, comfort and joy abounding among fans who like the club they have while hoping the front office has a move or two up its sleeve to fluff the roster before Spring Training. Savor every pitch, hit, bad call and long ball as the upcoming season may be the last to start as scheduled, what with talks set to begin on a new collective bargaining agreement where players and owners have to come to terms on how to do business moving forward. The guys who run the teams want a salary cap for those who play it. Trust me, it’s gonna be ugly before agreement is reached, whenever that is.
The Bucks, on the other hand, continue to struggle without the injured Giannis Antetokoumpo who’s seen more often with “Kohl’s Mom” than he is on the NBA court thanks to nagging injuries.
Never a good thing for our local hoopsters when this guy is in street clothes, someone who is certain to be the subject of more breathless “he’s-not-happy-in-Milwaukee” ESPN click bait reports until a trade out of town happens, even though Giannis says he wants to stay here. Never let the facts get in the way of potentially going viral.
So it goes in a world of multiple platforms, where any of us have access to a global audience with the right kind of content and a simple mouse click. The stories of our lives don’t wrap up as one year ends and a new one starts. The good and the bad follow us as we flip the calendar page (calendars ARE still a thing, right?) and we’re left no choice but to live in the reality we share. That means controversies both real and contrived. Conspiracies aplenty, as we try to get our heads around the cold, hard randomness of our daily existence. The “news cycle” that used to moderate our consumption of headlines has gone the way of the typewriter. In its place—a full-blast fire hose of information, some of it true and a bunch of it sketchy, at best. Fatiguing as it may be, it’s on us to sort it out and, more importantly, to balance our current event diets with intel from a variety of sources, not just the echo chambers that affirm what we want to believe.
All this, as we live and die with the Packers, hope for the best for Bucks, and navigate a never-quite-done-always-under-repair interstate system en route to the nearest theater to see “Song Sung Blue,” Hollywood’s salute to the legendary local church festival duo “Lightning And Thunder” (how many of you are shoving Hugh Jackman cellphone selfies taken during the star’s Milwaukee foray into the faces of your relatives this Yuletide?).
Here’s to 2026. And, as we like to say in these parts most if not all of any year, “At least it’s not snowing.”