Gen. George Washington and his Continental Army troops faced freezing rain, snow, and high winds when they crossed the Delaware River on Christmas night in 1776, but reenactors found fair weather on Christmas Day this year. The event celebrating a turning point in the American Revolution drew an estimated 5,000 people to the river’s banks in Washington Crossing, Pa., and Titusville, N.J., after organizers canceled the crossing the previous two years because of bad weather.

The holiday season is a time for extended family reunions. A huge one came earlier this year for Japanese Americans smiling and embracing in the Holiday Inn lobby here. From the lobby’s leather couch, 90-year-old Bacon Sakatani gazed at the gathering from under bushy gray eyebrows and a Korean War veteran’s cap. His wrinkled skin, stretched over high cheekbones, crinkled with the smile of a thankful grandfather watching his loved ones gather.

Polarize might be 2019’s Word of the Year and publishing meme. Sitting to the right of my MacBook are recent books from two leading academic presses: Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (Princeton) and Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford). What do we need to know? That polarization occurs when one side demands rapid social change and the other refuses to give in? When mass media ignore Biblical objectivity and celebrate subjectivity, that turns opponents into enemies? 

Until this year, the first 20 pages of Witness by Whittaker Chambers (Random House, 1952) comprised the most brilliant preface or foreword I’d ever read. Chambers, who had crossed over from Communism to Christianity, explained that Communism is “man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’” And gods play to win, as Chambers goes on to show during the next 788 pages, which are good but not as good as the beginning.

Sweden, despite what you’ve heard from some Democratic presidential candidates, is not a socialist land. As even Wikipedia tells us, “The vast majority of Swedish enterprises are privately owned and market-oriented.”

Sweden is a vast welfare state, with income taxes up to 57 percent and a value-added tax of 25 percent on most purchases. That’s still not the same as socialism, where governments own all but the smallest enterprises and return to workers the food, lodging, and medical care that will enable them to show up to work the next day, and at some point retire. 

Nigeria’s Cross River state is one of the country’s prime tourist destinations, with its lush green trees, dew-covered hills, and cool tropical climate.

Located on Nigeria’s southern coast, Cross River is home to multiple resorts and attractions. In Calabar, the state capital, a bronze statue of a fisherman with his hook in the mouth of a fish symbolizes the vibrancy of the port city.

But the waterways also speak to a dark history. The Calabar River served as a transit point during the transatlantic slave trade that began early in the 15th century.

The accumulation of 20-plus years in the same house can be intimidating—not so much from the plastic bins stacked on garage shelves, but from the little stuff, the mementos that weep when you think about pitching them. Do you have boxes of old photographs under the bed or in the closet? Vacation pics from the Grand Canyon or that collection passed down from Great-Aunt Susan that never got labeled (who are these people)? As I was sorting through my last box of photos, and categorizing them to put in another box, it struck me that none of them were more recent than 2008.