Man, isn’t the first week after the holidays a drag? Congratulations to you and yours for restarting the great lurching locomotive that is picking up your routines again after the New Year’s inertia. But before we finally turn the corner to 2026, there are a few excellent holiday links worth one last consideration, essays and reports that popped up during our culture’s downtime. Far be it from me to hold those away just because the ball dropped and the lights and trees have (probably) been taken down.
1. Take, for example, this Christmas reflection on the “arms” race that is gift giving among NFL players. Sports Illustrated did a double feature back in December highlighting the unspoken rules and traditions around Christmas gifts (and end-of-season gifts!) that pro football players exchange. According to the article, around 2009, NFL players’ salaries ballooned, and as a result, the normal gift-giving traditions we all take for granted became vehicles for status, appreciation, teamwork, and character. The more expensive and outlandish the gifts, or the more thoughtful and targeted the gifts, the more appreciation the team would show to each other.
Many see the significant uptick, the second turning point to now, as starting in the mid-2000s. The most commonly cited “best” NFL gift of all time is when Tom Brady gave each starting O-lineman an Audi Q7 — current price range $53,000-ish to over $85,000 — after New England won every regular-season game in 2007. The 2010 season marked another significant increase, tied to salary bumps. Same for every season starting with 2018.
Cars, samurai swords, luxury fountain pens, expensive jewelry, wine for every player on every team in the whole division … This year, Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence was gifted a set of silver grills — jewelry worn over the teeth — that required players to sneakily acquire the player’s x-ray records from his dentist. It’s all positively Roman in its opulence and reciprocity and expectation, as any readers of John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift will certainly recognize. That doesn’t mean, however, that the gifts don’t convey a sense of genuine brotherly love:
This out-of-control arms race on gift spending in pro football isn’t likely to end, ever, but especially any time soon. Will future quarterbacks buy future linemen their very own houses? Put linemen’s children through college? Space travel? All seems far-fetched. But so did the current landscape 20 years ago.
As a 37-year-old starter, [Rams Quarterback Matthew] Stafford hasn’t looked too far ahead. He does give the modern definition of the bar involved. “The box for that is, like, What would you not get yourself?”
Lipert, the giving expert, hears this and says, “It’s all about how [gifts] emotionally connect.” He struggles sometimes around Christmas or other gift-heavy celebrations, when he hears people say that giving no longer matters, that it’s all marketing and there’s no significance. Christmas is approaching, and the nativity is central to how Americans celebrate that holiday. And Lipert says the central element of the pivotal nativity story in the Bible is three kings and the gifts they carried. One, gold coin, was expensive. The other two — frankincense and myrrh — were not. But they symbolized spirituality and mortality, respectively.
Thoughtfulness mattered, even then.
To pair with this article, see SI’s companion piece, where they deduce 20 unwritten rules for how to give gifts as an NFL player, with input from 25 current and retired players. Among them: “17: Ten of those 25 who responded to SI said they found some teammates too cheap. 18: None would name the teammate in question, which is not allowed.”
2. If NFL players are maxing out their gift exchanges, Kathryn Jezer-Morton is maxing out her friction. That’s her resolution in 2026, as she explains in the Cut, where she makes the observation that escapism is becoming harder and harder to escape. As frustrating as relationships, boredom, and problem solving may be, the friction they cause is the stuff of life.
According to the emergent ideology of Silicon Valley, most people would prefer not to be human; they’ve demonstrated this through their revealed preferences in the way they use the apps they’re being sold. That’s all the proof that tech companies need to invest as much money as possible in friction-elimination tools that effectively dehumanize users.
This is especially evil because our love of escaping is one of humanity’s most poetically problematic tendencies, and now it’s being used against us. A friend of mine, a father of two young kids, admitted to me that the high point of each day is sitting on the toilet with his phone. We really are like this (dads in particular, and don’t be so defensive, Dads), but that doesn’t mean we need to be like this 100 percent of the time. We’re foie gras ducks being force-fed escapism.
Once we’ve adopted a habit of escaping from something, whether it’s Uber-ing dinner five nights a week or using AI for replying to texts, the act of return, which is how we might describe no longer using a tool of escape, feels full of irritating friction. In these moments, we become exactly like toddlers in the five minutes after the iPad is taken away: The dullness and labor of embodied existence is unbearable.
Friction here, of course, is another word for suffering, though KJM tries to distinguish between the two. At the risk of disagreeing with her, if we understand friction as the kind of minute, irritating suffering that exists in everyday life, we may be better equipped to handle it for what it is. It’s a very theology-of-the-cross idea to suggest that the freedom from suffering we desire is not found through escaping friction, but embracing it. (See Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation no. 22, and also, “The Vanishing Gifts of Boredom” via Christianity Today)
3. I agree with Kaitlyn Tiffany: Let’s stop talking about the moon. Her exploration in the Atlantic about how the media ecosystem has taken moon-cycle reporting to the extreme was validating, describing the whys behind news sources insisting I pay attention to every super-blood-wolf-Christmas-winter moon that comes my way.
“The beauty of the moon is it keeps coming back,” Jarvis said. Writers can write about the moon doing what the moon does again and again, for the rest of time. “It’s a waste and stupid, but it’s harmless,” he said. “Nobody gets offended by the supermoon.” They don’t, that’s true. But I told him I have been a little offended by the cynicism — by calling on the huge and wonderful moon to serve such a small and silly purpose as generating clicks. He seemed to sympathize. He agreed that a case could be made that these stories are somehow cheapening the cosmos. “You’re hyping the moon. It doesn’t need any hype.”
Exactly. And that means the inverse is also true. Who cares if we hype the moon? The moon is unaffected. The moon is the moon forever. Our hype glances off it and does less than the tiniest meteoroid. That sturdiness and predictability are exactly why we turn to it so often in this desperate business. Internet traffic is “very mysterious,” Caitlin Petre, an associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers, told me when I called her to talk about the important question of whether it’s okay to exploit the moon for our petty ends. Even with the advanced metrics that most newsrooms have access to now, you often end up guessing about the desires and interests of an undefined “audience.” But the moon is the rare topic about which there is no guessing. People love it.
Petre, the author of the 2021 book All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists, pointed me to a famous 2011 study that found that stories evoking anger, anxiety, or awe were shared more often than other stories. Of those three emotions, awe is clearly the most ethical to try to elicit. “I guess I would say, in the annals of all the things that news organizations do to chase traffic, writing about the moon is probably one of the best ones,” she said.
It’s a helpful corrective to my exasperation: Awe is indeed a fine emotion, and better to evoke that than anger or anxiety. Even the apostle Paul says the moon is awesome. “There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory. So is it with the resurrection of the dead.” If the glory of the moon is an argument for the resurrection for Paul, maybe I’ll suffer the ubiquitous reporting and enjoy the moon with a little less resentment.
4. In humor this week, a new report confirms, “The Best Time to Get Your Life Together Was Five Years Ago, According to Everyone Who Knows You“:
A comprehensive new survey has concluded that the ideal moment for you to have gotten your life together was roughly five years ago. Not now, not next year, not after one more reset or reinvention, but a very specific window in the past when you were already tired but still had “potential,” and people hadn’t yet adjusted their expectations downward.
The study clarifies that this moment varied slightly depending on who was asked. For some respondents, it was right after you graduated. For others, it was when you got that job you later quit, or that relationship you “weren’t ready for.” But all participants agreed on one thing: Whatever you are currently doing does not count as getting your life together.
The report strongly advises against dramatic gestures, such as moving to a new city, starting a new project, or announcing a bold new plan. Data shows that these actions briefly convince others you are “serious this time,” before confirming, within six to eight weeks, that nothing fundamental has shifted. Journaling was also dismissed as “mostly decorative.”
Analysts stress that your situation is not the result of bad luck, the economy, or circumstances beyond your control. These factors were adjusted for. The findings suggest instead a rare but persistent condition in which self-awareness coexists comfortably with inaction, allowing you to articulate your problems clearly while remaining completely stationary.
Also good for a chuckle: “Grand piano just okay” and “Slinky tired of bending over backwards for your entertainment.” And Sheep Detectives (above) looks delightful too.
5. When Bono speaks about peacemaking, I stop to listen, because what usually comes is a thoughtful and Spirit-filled reflection. His latest in the Atlantic is a pragmatic pitch for peacemaking between Israel and Palestine that makes the case for freeing Marwan Barghouti, a policy matter that I don’t have the expertise to comment upon. But you cannot read Bono’s plea for peace without encountering “the ministry of reconciliation” oozing throughout:
There are reasons that, more than 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, we are still talking about the “Irish peace process.” We may or may not be a sentimental people, but it is without question an unsentimental word, process. No one writes poems about process. No one sings ballads about it. The fact that we Irish continue to talk about peace through the prism of process is a sign of how hard it is not just to make it but to maintain it. One of the hardest parts — the hardest part — is engaging with your enemies. Even, or especially, the ones you consider most dangerous and have locked up, you thought permanently, in your prison cells. […]
Paramilitaries do not take marching orders, or even polite requests, from pacifists and think tanks. They do not lay down their arms at the suggestion of those who never took up arms themselves.
It’s a brutal fact but a fact all the same: Credibility accrues to those who stood at the barricades, who risked their lives for the cause, and — sorry to say it, but this is the world as it is — who committed or at least condoned acts of violence. For someone like myself, who condemns political violence even in the service of a seemingly just goal, it requires a painful leap — an extreme sort of transcendence — to agree that individuals like these have any role in the future, never mind a leading one. Without the assent of the war-makers, there is no peacemaking.
In Ireland, whether on the Republican or Unionist side, it was paramilitary leaders who had earned the authority to bring their people to the table or maintain their loyalty and patience through the many privations of peace — the difficulties of daily life, reconstruction and reconciliation, the building of new institutions and habits of mind. They became part of a brave and disparate group, led by John Hume and David Trimble, that brought peace to the island of Ireland. It’s a process that’s still in process.
One of the hardest lessons of the Christian faith is that the whole “love your enemies” bit isn’t just some sort of ethical truth in the universe but a reflection of God’s love to his rebellious and enemy-filled creation (more on this below ). And the trouble is that there is no peace or reconciliation without that pesky injunction. It’s a pillar, not a decoration. The mechanics of peace — peace in Ireland, peace in the Holy Land, peace with God himself — require some sort of grace and cooperation with our most despised foe, and there’s just no other way around it. What else is the Christmas story but God crossing a cosmic no-man’s-land to extend peace to those who would crucify him?
6. The last word this week goes to Ephraim Radner, whose reflection on Goddity (a mashup of God and oddity) at First Things on the Nativity and the Incarnation ties together a number of important themes. The limits of natural theology, the limits of sentimentalism, and the transcendence of God beyond the metaphysical — all these point to a God whose odd choices for weakness, poverty, and death on the cross demand the world’s bending to him and not the other way around. God did not become a small baby because Small Things and Babies are inherently good, but in choosing to follow Jesus as a small baby, the world’s addiction to power and strength is undermined and rejected. The difference, explains Radner, is everything.
The reality of the true God (versus a god of principles) is not about having Jesus confirm or valorize one’s insignificance. Hence the great and to some extent novel thirteenth-century Franciscan focus on the Nativity and its rustic setting — crèches and the rest — was not aimed at generating the order’s principles of humility and poverty. Rather, it put before us God’s choice for the “poor one,” Jesus. The motive for the Christian ideal of poverty was not about embodying a general divine principle in favor of the small. The embrace of poverty comes simply from following this particular God-Man Jesus of Nazareth, the “elect.” Our goddity, then, is also about following just this Jesus. “Baby Jesus” is Jesus as a baby, not the Baby, who happens to be presented as Jesus.
The difference is profound. Goddity evokes oddness rather than following logic. To be odd is literally “not to fit” — to stand apart from a pattern or reasonable presumptions about cause and effect. The way of the Cross, the call to the lowest seat, the command to forgive enemies and to turn the other cheek do not make sense. They cannot be deduced from one man Jesus, showing how he “fits” into the flow of the universe. They could not be derived from the grand schema of Nature, nor scanned in the panoply of the heavens. Natural theology may well seek to discern some coherence between Golgotha and the empty tomb. After all, the odd choice of God to become a human infant is not arbitrary in any divine fashion: It is who God is. And thus the world that God has made must somehow reflect the same “who.” But the order here is paramount: The world follows the oddity of Jesus, not the other way around. To embrace Smallness as a principle is not to follow, but to leave Jesus behind, to trade the person for a concept. By contrast, if there is a pattern to the world, it is itself always “odd,” the fact of “just this person.”
That is why it is impossible to apply Jesus’s smallness to the world — to the world of politics and economics and architecture and nanotechnology. Rather, the world is applied, as it were, to the Jewish infant of Bethlehem, to his and his parents’ specific prayers and devotions in the Temple of Israel, to his hidden life in Nazareth in a home of workers and family with their savory or banal meals passing down the throat on Shabbat or otherwise, to a journey into the desert for baptism and temptation, to his particular reading of the Scriptures of Israel, to his wandering and teaching in Galilee, to the calling of a few named disciples, each with their own history, and to his explicit end “under Pontius Pilate” and to the counting of three days to his rising — God’s odd choice for his own life is just where the world is going. It is a wrenching conformance. We do not apply Jesus to the world, but the world to him.
Strays:
- Angela Duckworth, the psychologist that made “grit” a ubiquitous concept in the mid-2010s, tells the New York Times that willpower doesn’t work and suggests “situational agency” instead.
- Over at Vice, a study suggests 50% of people dating online are “financially catfishing” their partners. It’s a clickbait way of describing how Gen Z displays (and often fakes!) financial stability as a status symbol.
- A Day in My Highly Optimized, Convenient Life. “Next, I hop on my Peloton, draft my work e-mails for the day in ChatGPT, add items to my Instacart grocery order (no-contact delivery, of course), and cue up a true-crime documentary.”
- Whatever Ails You, the Answer Is Dance. “When children become frightened, they stiffen. When they’re happy, they can hardly keep their shape. That’s the looseness that dancing collects into rhythm.”
