The Daily: 1 December 2025

Well, here we are in the last month of 2025. Does anyone else find it strange that we’re a quarter century into the 21st century? There are adults who were not alive in the 20th century. The oldest millennials are in their 40s. Few people alive today have adult memories of the prosperity of the post-War years (and memory is probably a generous term for what they do recall). It’s been 25 years since 9/11, 20 years since Hurricane Katrina, 17 since the Global Financial Crisis, and almost a decade since Trump foisted himself upon the country (with substantial collusion from the press…). Peak oil came and went in 2018. Facebook went embarrassingly Meta in 2021, and Musk broke Twitter a year later effectively ending the brief ascendency of social media. Five years ago, the world was holding its breath, masked and isolated, learning horrible words like intubation and dyspnea. Russia and the Ukraine have been at war for nearly four years, and war in Gaza has been more or less ongoing for over two years. Here in Vermont, we’ve been in recovery from epic flooding and then historic drought for the better part of the last 30 months. And the [less than] United States is coming up on the end of one year, one quarter of the four-year term, of the second Trump fiasco, a year that has redefined incompetency and corruption.

And yet… we’re still here…

Outside my window, the world is white. It has been snowing since Friday morning. It is likely to keep snowing sporadically for the remainder of the week, if not the year. It’s also very cold for this early in the winter, more like late January than early December. The polar vortex is well and truly saggy. In the brief periods without heavy cloud cover, the temperatures are forecasted to drop to single digits (°F) and possibly fall below 0°F. And that too is likely to remain true for the rest of the year.

It is the perfect weather to be home, in body and mind. Yesterday was St Andrew’s Day, Stir-up Sunday, Boy Bishop Day, Tree Trimming Day, the first Sunday in Advent. While Thanksgiving marks the opening of the winter holidays for Americans, the rest of the world tends to view St Andrew’s Day as the beginning of the Christmas season. With nothing better to do in this snow, I tromped up to the attic and brought out the festivity. Most of all, I craved light. It’s been weeks since we’ve had much sunlight. Most days hardly get brighter than a dim twilight, and that only for a few hours. Day length, the total time between sunrise and sunset, is a few minutes over nine hours right now. The earliest sunsets, at 4:11pm, start on Wednesday. It’s fully dark before I get off work. So holiday lights were in order.

I have two small fake trees. I know that sounds uncharacteristically unecological of me, but a few years ago I did the math. If you must have a tree (and I’m not saying you must), there is less oil burned in buying one well-made plastic tree that will last 8-10 years or more than buying a cut tree each year, most of which are shipped long distances. In any case, I have two small fake trees. One came pre-lit, which I don’t think is a good idea. The lights will go long before the tree is worn out. But for now it all works wonderfully. The other is more of a half tree with a “real wood” trunk and no lights. It is going on ten years old now and still looks pretty good, good enough as a vehicle for lights and ornaments anyway.

I put up both yesterday. The bigger one is in the dining room and gets most of my forty years of foraging for odd ornaments, the bulk of which come from New Mexico and have a distinct Land of Enchantment feel. There are jackalopes and coyotes, boots and chiles, tin retablos and painted pottery, Zuni Storytellers and Hopi Clowns and Navajo silver-work. The topper is an old cowboy hat. I also put my bubble lights — thirty years old and still mostly working — on this tree.

The small tree is tucked into a corner of my office. I call it the la-di-da tree because it sort of adheres to a theme. Sort of. It has glass acorns and glittered pine cones, white birds and white reindeer, and blown glass balls in ivory and rose and pale pink. The lights are cool white and fire-engine red. It takes forever to fluff out the wired branches and string the lights on this tree, but I like the light it gives to my writing space — which is also where my exercise bike and treadmill live. And I am a sucker for pretty…

This year, I also hung snowflake “icicle” lights on the big window in the dining room and a long strand of warm white balls in the back entry, the main door to my house. Both of these are on timers and will come on a few minutes before I get home so I am no longer fumbling my keys and barking my shins in the darkness.

So my house is merry and bright now. Just like it always is this time of year. I suspect it will always be like this every year to come, or at least as long as I feel up to carrying the bins down from the attic. And it’s not just decor. There is a continuity of abundance in all aspects of my home life. This weekend, I also roasted a butternut squash, as is my usual wont at this time of year, and turned that into bread. I made a vat of lentil, wild rice and mushroom soup, with a few of the weirdly homonim-shaped purple carrots from my garden and some garden onion and garlic. There is cranberry sauce and home-made yogurt for my oatmeal, and I made about two gallons of stock from the turkey Son#2 roasted on Thanksgiving. I still have bins of apples and potatoes and many more pumpkins and winter squash, including one enormous Blue Hubbard that I bought from a local farm stand the Sunday before Thanksgiving. And with all the draft-plugging I’ve been doing, I can sit down to a lengthy meal and not even feel a little chilly despite the weather out there.

I can’t help but compare the abundance and serenity of my personal life to the ongoing chaos and collapse in the wider world. I almost feel guilty sometimes, though I got to this point through hard work and conscious effort to prepare for just these times of extremity. It’s worked better than I would have predicted, better than most people would expect. Yes, the Yuletide decor is largely legacy and represents more of an investment in plastic and electric wiring than I’d like. But most of what is in my home, what makes up this home, is old and made mostly by hand, mostly locally (though I did move all my New Mexico stuff across the country… so it’s no longer “local”… but neither am I). My food is nearly all bioregional or just plain local at this point with the exception of nuts and spices and tea. My clothes are resale and refashioned, with some even made from locally produced materials, though most fleece has to be shipped to Maine for cleaning and carding. (Vermont investment opportunity?) My comfortable life is proof that localizing and degrowth are perfectly possible, preferable even. Most days I hardly notice the chaos. I have to make an effort to keep up with the outrage… and I find that I just don’t want to…

I want all the outraged folks to learn from this. Walk away now. In fact, run. Do whatever you can within your community to pull all your needs within that small boundary. This benefits your community as well as you, building strength and resilience in your place and creating networks of reciprocity. Which is what life is, even human life. And when enough people are living in these islands of coherence, then the chaos will simply evanesce. There won’t be an audience. There won’t be a market. Nobody will need it.

Truthfully, nobody needs it now. We are bombarded with messaging telling us that we will wither and die if we don’t keep this system going. Because even the message-makers know that nobody needs this system. The only thing it’s really good at is making a very few people very rich. The stuff it produces is cheap crap that costs far too much and wears out far too soon. The life-style it engenders is one of disease and anxiety. There are no moments of beauty and calm. No just being. No living. Yes, there will be vast “fortunes” lost when this system dies, but what good does all that wealth do now? Even to those who have it. Money may buy some needs, but only those that are for sale within the system that uses money, most of which things do very little to feed or shelter a body.

We all know that much of the best in life is not available for money. But what is not commonly understood is that the best of life is rather easily acquired with a little bit of work and a lot of care. You may not know this if you are too plugged into the system and its perpetual propaganda. So, maybe a first step is turning off this machine you are reading and go do something beneficial. Or just assess… I spent many years trying to figure out what my needs were and how best to meet them. I still do regular check-ups.

However, the most beneficial decision I made came mostly by happenstance. That was moving to Vermont where there is thriving local industry and food production and a strong sense of community. Vermont is a first person plural. I didn’t know all that when I bought my house. I only knew that I could afford the house and that it had a wide variety of local amenities within walking distance. But maybe those were critical clues to the sort of human-scale and human-supporting society that is Vermont.

The best part of living here, of being home here, is that it takes up all your time. There is always something going on, something to keep you involved in reality and unplugged from the system. I have to make an effort to pay attention to the wider world. Recently, that just doesn’t feel like a priority. Of course, I’ve been sick. But even if I had been feeling better, there still would be little reason to want to tune in to the wider world. I don’t have that great a capacity for outrage. And there are so many more interesting things in my life. Enjoying the garden. Walking in the woods. Playing and listening to music. Watching the skies. Talking with my neighbor. Producing, preparing and eating good food. Laughing with my sons. Bookclub and knitting club and pub quiz night. Reading, reading, reading!

If I had any advice, it would be to find or create a community like this out of whatever setting grants you the most serenity. I know not all of you want to live in a small town; you need a more urban milieu. And some of you prefer your neighbors to be a mile or so down the road in every direction. But in all of these places, humans have created community in the past and will inevitably create community again in the future. I happen to think that small is better ecology, provided a good bit of diversity in skills and perspectives. But this isn’t the only path to healthy happiness. Really, any path leading away from this system and toward your physical locality is a good path.

And that path leads home. Where you may not have snow, you may not have Yuletide sparkle, but if you are reading this, you probably are preparing yourself for the end of the year. The end of the first quarter of the 21st century. You’re probably wondering where the time went… Well… there was probably a lot of living. None of which made the headlines. All of which was more important to you than anything in this crumbling system — which, for most of you, has been crumbling for your entire life.

While you carry on quite admirably!

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025