Happy Holidays to all of my readers at Hati and Skoll. Once again it is a both strange and trying time; so I hope that everyone stays safe and healthy and perhaps our troubled world will be in a better place next year!

I thought I would share a photograph that I took of the Ice Cream Store on Bear’s Neck in the little village of Rockport, MA a couple of weeks back. These days are dominated by the suffocating darkness of the Winter Solstice. It is dark, cold and damp. Massachusettsians will nevertheless think of the joys of ice cream. Ice cream brightens everything. According to the International Ice Cream Association New Englanders chow down an average of 22.8 quarts per person annually, compared to the national average of 15.1 quarts. I have been unable to determine if there is a coincident higher occurrence of gallstones in New Englanders.

This time of year we decorate with lights, but it is not merely a vain attempt to create a small shiny spot in an otherwise bleak landscape but rather it is an insistent optimism in the future.

As Voltaire put it

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.