STACKMAS FINALE
We made it!
Thanks for coming along on this little trip with me. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to post every day without skipping (okay, I accidentally fell asleep before posting last night, but I got it done this morning?). We made it!
We are still in the nougat center of holiday festivities around here. We skipped town for Christmas Eve in time to hunker down in a torrential storm in Big Bear. We couldn’t go outside for more than a brief moment at a time (they said we had gusts up to 80mph), so it was perfect for hot drinks and a good book. I now feel quite fortified to crank it up to Maximum Merry into 2026.
I managed to evade most of the news out of the White House. Go me! I did hear that today, Christmas Day, “he” posted on his vanity social media platform over 100 times. I think we all know how that went. I couldn’t help but wonder, is there even a Naughty List? Maybe you’re wondering the same thing.
I think the answer is…not exactly. At some point, every child tests boundaries to see if they can get away with something they’ve been told not to do. That’s naughty. You’re a kid learning the difference between right and wrong and have an impulse to test it, just once, in a relatively risk-free way that, fingers crossed, won’t do any actual harm to anyone else. Maybe you give your little sister bangs, for a totally non-personal example.
But what we’ve lived through over the past decade isn’t anything we could ever call “naughty.” Even if we paid only a little attention in history class, we know what this is. That’s because most of us learned the difference between right and wrong when we were kids.
Some people, it seems, never learn or don’t care. Say what you will about 2025, if you’re the type to be found on the Nice List, then this year taught you a lot. What I’ve learned is that I’ve got my own Naughty and Nice list, but the only person on it is me. Every choice, every purchase, every word I say makes me a candidate for one column or the other.
Choosing not to give my dollars to billionaires who fund cruelty and hate? Nice. Especially when their workers are on strike.
Forgetting to hydrate? Naughty. We have way too much work to do, and we’re gonna need our water.
I know when certain people “flood the zone” to distract us from the fact that they’re on that other list, it can feel overwhelming and scary. In those moments, I hope you’ll take a breath, and that you’ll remember who you are: a person with a voice who knows right from wrong. That’s a very powerful thing to be. If it weren’t, they wouldn’t be influencing media outlets to silence voices like yours, and government agencies would not have a list of words to limit or avoid, words that probably describe you or people you care about: Black, Women, Immigrants, Latinx/Hispanic Minority, LGBTQ, Disability.
The question is, how will 2025 inform what we do in 2026? I have hope we can work together to achieve big change, even if the words for that change are on my government’s list to “limit or avoid”:
Accessible
Activism
Inclusion
Allyship
Antiracist
Clean Energy
Diverse
Equitable
Intersectional
Sense of Belonging
Thanks for helping me finish out 2025 on the Nice List,
Margo
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