It's been a typically hectic year in these parts — always behind schedule, always pushing ahead with just that little bit less than the perfection we'd like, for the sake of pushing ahead. But the time always comes whether we push or not, and the more it comes the more I continue to find that Woody Allen is basically right: Eighty percent of success is showing up. If Dr. Saturday falls flat on its face in pursuit of the other 20 percent, at least it showed up. Thanks for showing up to read it this year in record numbers.
There are as we speak many unemployed coaches and academically ineligible seniors and other unhappy people in the world, and my wish is that you are in the places and with the people who remind that you are not one of them. Christmas and its attendant fuzziness can feel like a burden in more ways than one, but in those moments when the cold and dark and sudden financial burden are overtaken by glad tidings and visions of sugar plums and loving families and so forth, well, that stuff really works.
And if, on the odd chance that you find yourself without any of the above today, whatever you have to do, there's still time to come up with something, even some little thing — a call, a card, a song, a short drive, a long drive — to do Christmas right. Better late than never.
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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.