Dez Reads. Holiday Mischief.

Winter may be settling in, but the news cycle hasn’t cooled off.

Mark here. The temperatures have dropped fast over the last couple of weeks, and suddenly it feels like we’ve fully stepped into the holiday stretch. It’s that time of the year when the days shorten, and everyone starts trying to carve out time for family and festivities before the year closes.

This week, Anne Marie Malecha leads us off with a raccoon who partied a little too hard in a Virginia liquor store, delivering one of the best wildlife mugshots of the year. MaryGrace Lucas follows with a look at how workplace fashion has evolved and the biases that haven’t.

Phil Bogdan weighs in on the uproar over spray-painted Christmas trees, defending the right to holiday décor in all its forms, while Katie Runkle brings a thoughtful case for big families through the lens of siblinghood. And Nathaniel Beach closes us out with a deep dive into Ken Burns’ The American Revolution, and why long-form history still matters.

Stay warm and enjoy the upcoming holidays. Thanks, as always, for reading along with us.

Here we go.

The Boozy Bandit of Ashland.

NYT. A Drunk Raccoon Passed Out in the Bathroom of a Virginia Liquor Store

Don’t worry, he’s okay.

After breaking and entering through the ceiling of an ABC liquor store in Ashland, a little trash panda taste-tested rum, moonshine, peanut butter whisky, vodka, and eggnog. He drank like a millennial at a pregame power hour circa 2001. I’m impressed his hangover only lasted a few hours.

While social media is usually the armpit of the internet (or worse), I’m grateful for stories like these. A special thanks to Chief Jeff Parker of Hanover County Animal Protection and Shelter for his picture-perfect shot of the raccoon passed out between a trash can and the loo – and his clever caption, “I’m just going to lie down here (hic) for a second.”

Listen, I can’t blame the guy. Times are tough, we’re short on joy, life is expensive, and sometimes you just need something to take the edge off. Cheers to you, little buddy!

– Anne Marie Malecha

From Blazers to Blue Jeans.

WSJ. How Workplace Fashion Has Changed Over the Decades

The Wall Street Journal’s piece on how office fashion evolved over the decades is a really fun and visual read. Photos show developments like new fabrics and the invention of “casual Fridays,” allowing us to ditch fancy hats and blouses in favor of comfort.

The photos reminded me of a personal maxim: Don’t tell anyone how to look.

It stems from my time working in cable news, when colleagues expressed disgust and complained to network brass about female reporters showing bare shoulders on air.

I was baffled. We prided ourselves on telling stories from all walks of life, yet within our own workplace, my colleagues still applied the ol’ blazers = credibility bias.

The truth is, clothes do not make a colleague, journalist, source, or story more or less worthy.

If you focus on the packaging instead of the person, you’re going to miss out on the kinds of independent thinkers who decades ago figured out you shouldn’t need a fancy hat, a tailored blazer, or a pair of heels to do excellent work, deliver results, or earn recognition.

And that is likely to cost you more than you gain from a self-satisfying sartorial slight.

– MaryGrace Lucas

Fir Real?

NY Post. Christmas tree farm ripped for selling ‘horrific’ spray-painted firs

I do not wear Christmas on my sleeve. You will not see animated figures of Santa and his elves getting all impish and spry on my lawn. At best, I’ll string up a short row of white icicle lights along the top of my garage and call it a day.

That said, I do like Christmas décor; and I respect my neighbors’ rights to decorate their homes, no matter how gaudy-slash-jolly their yards or living rooms may look. But apparently, some people don’t respect others’ expressions of Christmas cheer.

A family of Christmas tree farmers in New Jersey was recently chastised for bringing a little more color to Christmas trees – with the help of latex-based paint. Some called this “poisonous” and “horrific.” Bah! Who are they to judge others’ sense of good Christmas décor?

They could be starting a movement. Charlie Brown’s sad little Christmas tree might have been ridiculed at first, but look where it is now: on sale at Amazon and enjoying a sweet, sweet 4.7-star customer rating. Good grief!

These Christmas tree farmers had the gumption to try something different. It may not be uplifting for everyone, but it will amp up the merriness and cheer for some like never before, and I applaud that.

– Phil Bogdan

The More, the Merrier.

The Free Press. I Have Six Siblings. It’s the Greatest Gift in the World.

I came across a Free Press article about siblings the other day. It gave a compelling, yet very simple argument for having a big family – not religion or the birth rate crisis but the magic of similarity and shared experience.

Jillian Lederman shares her life as one of seven children. She says her parents wanted a “big life”. That’s one thing to call it. Words like expensive, chaotic, busy, difficult, and impossible flooded my brain. Then, as I kept reading, they were replaced with a different vocabulary set: beautiful, happy, exciting, rich, and fulfilling.

Amongst her writing about their Edy’s ice cream and toaster waffle birthday breakfast tradition, she captures it best with this sentence: “It’s only natural for humans to crave people who understand them instinctively, to whom they don’t have to explain themselves. But I’ve never had to crave that feeling: I have six people who know by heart all the quirks of my childhood, because they lived them alongside with me.”

Whether you’ve known the joys she writes about or not, try making it easier for your future family. Give them the gift of siblings.

– Katie Runkle

The Revolution, Reframed.

PBS. The American Revolution | All Episodes Now Streaming | Ken Burns

Over the holiday weekend, I was scrolling through social media while drowsing off from the turkey, and I saw a post arguing Andrew Jackson would win any presidential fistfight. I went down the rabbit hole and realized this makes sense, considering he’s got an entire Wikipedia page dedicated solely to his “extracurricular activities.” I learned that before he was a brawler in the White House, Jackson was a half-starved teenage POW in the Revolutionary War, slashed by a British officer’s sword and imprisoned in the Carolina backcountry.

As controversial as Jackson’s presidency was remembered by history as, I never really considered his pre-presidential life as an American during the Revolutionary War. Luckily, my interest in the era of America’s fight for independence coincided right when famed historian Ken Burns released his highly anticipated The American Revolution documentary on PBS. If you’ve ever seen a Burns documentary before, you know you’re in for 1) a full day’s worth of content with his 10+ hour programs, and 2) the most in-depth and well-told recollection of the most impactful moments of U.S. history. Burns won’t waste viewers’ time with glorified myths of George Washington standing upright on a small boat crossing the Delaware River. He’ll deliver honest and hidden details of the events that took place during this time in history. His style turns the Revolution from a tidy high school textbook chapter into a story that feels raw and oddly close to the present.

This is a long program, as are most of Burns’ documentaries, the kind you actually sit with over a few nights and let the politics and arguments about what America should be really sink in. With PBS fighting to fund slow, ambitious projects in a world of quick hits, The American Revolution feels like proof that public media can still make space for deep, thoughtful history instead of background noise.

– Nathaniel Beach

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