I must have been nine, maybe ten, when four guys and an accordion destroyed Christmas carols for me forever.

In the spirit of the holiday, and in defiance of the greater narrative, here are a few of the things I’m grateful for this year.

Quitting social media means losing touch with friends and family and missing out on local news, especially in rural areas.

At this time of year, we pay for our shimmering green summers and picture-book snowbound winter days with long stretches of damp and grey and chill.

They’ll have a costume parade through town. Hundreds of kids, all brave and silly and hepped up on Twizzlers, with fangs and wings and claws. I wonder, I always wonder, how many of them have already had to contend with real monsters.

If a carbon tax of $40 a ton were levied, and every red cent of it turned over directly to every American with a valid Social Security number, the resulting incentive to lower carbon emissions would probably spur more clever efforts by power companies to green the grid than even the most stringent EPA regulations.

A couple of weeks ago, somebody started duct-taping creepy white supremacist flyers over my wife’s campaign signs. “You will not replace us,” the flyers blared, over a photo of a white couple with a baby.

Just about everything you can buy at the annual Cauliflower Festival in Margaretville is local, except the cauliflower.

I’ve discovered since then that Ivan is something of a Rorschach test for people. Sometimes they think it’s cute that he had a name. Sometimes they’re delighted that he had a nice life on a farm down the road, where he had friends both bovine and human, and pretty much did whatever he felt like. But mainly, it seems, a lot of people are horrified.