 These are so much more than just a few random puzzle pieces... If you’re like me, you’ve been making a list — and checking it twice — of all the people who really ticked you off this year. High on my tally is the knucklehead — for whom I’m sure there’s a special place reserved in hell — who designed the 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle Rich and I began in November. The Spanish call them rompecabezas — head-busters — and they aren’t kidding. This particular one was formed of pieces so clumsily cut it was impossible to be sure if they were meant to fit together. I know that sounds like an excuse, but hey, we’re veteran puzzlers; we know shoddy work when we stub our toes on it. Rich and I soldiered on for a month until what had started as a lighthearted pastime had become a grim slog. I realized we were endlessly redoing the same sections to try different ill-fitting options of near-identical pieces in indistinguishable earth tones and lavender sky. That’s when I had my brilliant idea. “What say we throw the damn thing away?”  If we had a fireplace, this might have been an even more satisfying option. Joyfully, we tore the puzzle apart, tossed the pieces back in the box, carried the box down to the recycling bin, and pitched it in. A glorious sense of freedom washed over me. We were done with that puzzle forever. But the puzzle wasn’t done with us. Three pieces had somehow escaped the roundup and were hiding out in dark corners of the floor, like cockroaches. I started to toss them out, then I thought, "No, wait! I could use these." One of our small annual rituals is coming up with an ornament symbolizing the year. A matador’s jacket celebrating our move to Seville. A locomotive commemorating a long railway journey. A paint brush marking the year Rich (who loathes painting) helped me re-do the accent wall in my office.  I thought — hoping it wasn’t blasphemy to paraphrase the Bible — “Greater love hath no man than this, that he picks up a paint brush for his wife.” We attached the surviving puzzle pieces to Reepicheep, a woolen mouse named after the Narnia character. He must have joined us during the early years in our Home 2.0, because his string attaches to the tree with a paper clip, our solution in the days before Seville celebrated the holidays with trees involving ornaments and wire hooks. Reepicheep now holds our memories of that fiendish puzzle in his paws and will remind us, year after year, of the importance of letting things go. Small rituals like this are a way of connecting to the turning points of the year and to significant little moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed in the headlong rush of our days. They provide “a buffer against the strain and uncertainty of modern life,” according to The Science of Hedonistic Consumption (a publication that sounds totally trustworthy to me). It’s easy to get stuck maintaining rituals that have outlived their usefulness; the trick is learning when to let them go.  Could it be time to give Frosty and Santa a rest? Every December I give thanks that I am no longer responsible for the vast amount of gift-shopping and card-sending I’d cheerfully undertaken decades ago in Ohio. Back then I designed my own cards and had them printed on actual tree-sourced paper, sending out hundreds of them, each with a handwritten note and newsletter. Every card I mailed felt, as a Guardian article put it, like “a long-distance hug.” Today printed holiday cards are heading towards extinction. Twenty-five years ago Americans sent three billion a year; it’s now one billion and dropping fast. Most of us find it easier and more eco-friendly to convey greetings online, and with nearly 75% of the nation on social media, we all know far too much about each other already, so who needs annual newsletters?  Christmas cards sent to us in Spain in 2018. Number received this year? One. While I enjoy receiving “long-distance hugs,” not sending paper cards feels tremendously liberating. It got me thinking about how much of life is a balancing act between personal preferences and community norms — which wound up being the theme for December’s Ideas Club. “Can anyone be truly free?” our invitation asked. “Living in a society and enjoying its benefits requires conforming to its norms and responsibilities — which curtails your freedom. If you ignore societal norms and responsibilities in favor of personal preferences or independence, does that make you selfish, unreliable, or worse? Do you have an obligation to work for the common good — or is it enough simply to do no harm?” To keep the conversation lively, we presented various moral dilemmas such as Mama’s Kidney, which explored how far you would go to obtain a life-saving organ for a family member. Would you sell your house? Impoverish your family? Commit a robbery? Buy an organ on the international black market and ask your doctor to install it?  Luckily I’ve never been faced with those kinds of choices. But in December of 2021, Rich and I did find out how far we would go to save a holiday lunch. At that point Seville had lifted most of its Covid restrictions but strongly urged everyone to test before attending parties. Easier said than done. There was a temporary shortage of test kits, and we were far from certain that all 17 of the guests coming to lunch on December 25 would be able to get one. Rich and I scoured the city and finally found a pharmacy that had received a small shipment. To ensure fairness, they would only sell five to each customer. We bought our five and went home to contemplate our options. “I’ve got it!” I said. “Go back to that pharmacy.” “But they’ll recognize me.” “Not if you’re in disguise.”  Rich McCann, master of disguise Feeling like Q outfitting James Bond for a mission, I helped him don an old jacket, his spare glasses, my red scarf, and a baseball cap in place of his trademark fedora. The Covid mask helped, too. Rich walked out of that pharmacy with five more tests and the warm glow that comes with carrying out a successful caper. As it turned out, all our guests acquired their own Covid tests, and nobody (so far as we know) communicated or contracted any diseases at our fiesta. Bullet successfully dodged! Last year we weren’t quite so lucky. Rich and I both got Covid and had to cancel the annual feast. But we couldn’t cancel the pre-ordered turkey, a robust seven kilos (15.43 pounds). We had a quietly jolly meal under the tree telling stories of past holidays and thinking up creative uses for leftovers. The turkey-apple stir-fry has become a family favorite.  Not the grand feast we usually hold, but December 25, 2024 was merry and bright nonetheless. Starting 2025 with a case of Covid was a reminder of just how little we can actually control in our lives. Often the best we can do is manage how we respond to events. So I am choosing to feel hopeful about 2026. Not everyone is equally optimistic. When I looked online for professional predictions, the first ones I saw were from Baba Vanga, a blind Bulgarian seer who passed to the Great Beyond in 1996 but still has a worldwide following. She left behind predictions that in 2026 we’d see massive natural disasters, another global pandemic, and a visit from extraterrestrials. So it’s shaping up to be another lively year. But if I can get through it without another head-busting puzzle from hell, I’ll count myself very lucky indeed.  Happy holidays, everyone, and best of luck in 2026!
I'm taking a few weeks off from this blog. See you in January.  How T-Rex might look today if that asteroid had deviated a teeny, tiny bit from its trajectory. Image: Etsy Are you finding the Universe particularly random these days? I certainly am. And so is a woman from Alicante, Spain, who made headlines this week for getting fired because (and I am not making this up) she came into work early. The young woman repeatedly showed up for her delivery job at 6:45 or 7:00 am instead of the stipulated 7:30. I know, right? We can’t have that kind of maverick behavior! Managers warned her she was undermining the employee-employer relationship. (Translation: You’re making the rest of us look bad.) She refused to change her ways, got fired, and sued the company. The court sided with her bosses, saying she was guilty of “disloyalty, breach of trust, and disobedience.” Wow, I didn’t see that coming. But then, we rarely know when disaster is about to overtake us. “Some 66 million years ago,” wrote university professor Mark Robert Rank in his book The Random Factor, “an asteroid hit the Earth at precisely the right angle and location to annihilate the dinosaurs, paving the path for our ascendency. Had there been as little as a 10-mile difference in its path of entry, we would not be here today and the dinosaurs would still be roaming the land.”  OK, so that one worked out in our favor — although obviously a bit less optimally for the dinosaur community. Looking back over history, we see how often the fate of humanity is determined by sheer chance. For instance, what if the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria had been lost at sea? Crossing 6000 miles of storm-tossed Atlantic in sailing ships just 50 to 60 feet in length, anything could have happened. Hurricanes. Shipwreck. Sea monsters. Dragons. Had those ships disappeared, everyone back in Europe would have said, “Yep. Told you nothing would come of it. A fool’s errand!” The Caribbean’s indigenous populations would likely have been left in peace for at least a few decades. Portugal would have totally dominated the high seas. Eventually they would have sailed to the New World, where, with luck, they’d have focused on trade, as they’d done in India and China, rather than colonization. And we might all be speaking Portuguese right now. It's easy to get lost in these kinds of speculations — what philosophers like to call “counterfactuals” to make them sound more respectable than the wild fantasies they really are. This week I was indulging in all sorts of counterfactuals as I stood looking at the first known map of the New World.  Juan de la Cosa's famous mappa mundi, drawn in 1500. Perfectly accurate? No. But you can pick out Africa, Spain, Italy, the Caribbean islands where they landed, and beyond them the Gulf of Whatever-It’s-Called-Now. I happened across this map in the Spanish town where it was created: El Puerto de Santa Maria, known to its friends as El Puerto (the Port). There, in 1492, Columbus met the cartographer Juan de la Cosa, owner and master of the Santa Maria, who agreed to commit his ship, his navigational skills, and his reputation to the Italian’s mad enterprise. De la Cosa would make seven voyages to the New World before he was killed by a poisoned arrow in a battle with indigenous peoples in what’s now Colombia. But early on, in the off-season of 1500, he sat down at his desk in El Puerto to lay out the limits of the Atlantic Ocean. Fast forward to this week, when Rich and I made an impulsive day-trip to El Puerto and came upon the map in a dark corner of the Castle of San Marcos.  El Puerto's Castillo de San Marco, parts of which date back 2000 years. Photo: Guia de Cádiz The map was a reproduction, but it was a stunning sight nonetheless. This was the start of it all, the inspiration for the 100 million people who, over the next 525 years, would choose America as their Home 2.0. My own ancestors made this same Atlantic crossing on wooden sailing ships launched from Ireland, England, Germany, and who knows where else. Like that asteroid 66 million years ago, that massive migration spelled disaster for some and a safer future for others.  Irish immigrants arriving in New York in the mid-1800s. Like my people, they got there ahead of the Statue of Liberty and before Ellis Island was established. The past seems very present in El Puerto. There, 3000 years ago, the Phoenicians took advantage of the ocean breezes and chalky soil to grow grapes for wine. When the Moors occupied the region in 711, they introduced the art of distillation, which led to fortified wines and the region’s famous sherries, viewed by Medieval Europe as the world’s finest vintages. Many bottles found their way onto the Santa Maria for her voyage into history. Rich and I promised ourselves some El Puerto sherry later, but we began the outing with coffee in an old café near the downtown farmer’s market. The place was jammed with families and clusters of neighbors showing off their grandkids and leaning into chats with people they’d clearly known for the better part of a century.  A café in downtown El Puerto de Santa Maria on a Friday morning Rich leaned over and whispered, “It’s like a Fellini film.” I knew what he meant. These were not bodies honed in a gymnasium, skin smoothed to perfection with lotions and Botox, hair shiny with this year’s trendiest tints. There was something of the baroque earthiness of Fellini’s characters and the faces of townspeople in medieval paintings. Fortified by the cheery atmosphere and strong espresso, we spent hours exploring the market, city streets, the church of the Slaves of Sacred Heart, and the castle. When we’d worked up sufficient appetite, we settled into a restaurant on Calle Misericordia (Mercy Street) for lunch. One of the highlights was a dish of migas, day-old bread crumbs sauteed in olive oil with slivers of chorizo, a holdover from post-Civil War scarcity, when stale bread was way too precious to consider throwing away. Migas are less popular in these somewhat more prosperous times, but they are true comfort food. And they always remind me to count my blessings. Because as so many in the world are discovering these days, you never know when lean times will come again.  Migas were created by shepherds and are still often prepared over an open fire or hot coals. As you’ve no doubt noticed, 2025 has been as random and chaotic as a stormy sea, and even the most savvy navigators are worried about whether or not they’ll land safely on the far shore. “The lack of control that comes with random acts can be frightening, knowing that the ‘bell may toll for us’ next,” wrote author Bob McKinnon. “But it can also expand our gratitude for what we have and the good fortune that comes with just being alive and healthy. “The recognition of randomness ensures that we do not take the good things in life for granted, and it allows us to understand the precarious nature of good fortune. Even for those currently less fortunate, it can be cause for appreciating the small things in life and hoping that the winds of chance may yet blow your way.” How have the winds of chance treated you lately? Care to share any examples of luck in your life?  Here's one example of my good luck: at the end of our day in El Puerto, I got to sample a local favorite, Osborne Bailén Oloroso Sherry. ¡Delicioso! HOME 2.0 This is the latest in my series of blog posts exploring what it takes to create a better life for yourself abroad — or at home, for that matter. See all posts in this series. DON'T MISS A SINGLE UPCOMING STORY! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POST ANNOUNCEMENTS? Check your spam folder. If you still can't find it, please let me know. FOR FURTHER READING My bestselling travel memoirs & guides My newest book: My San Francisco If you haven't read My San Francisco yet, you can order it HERE. Already read this book? Please leave a review HERE. You can purchase a signed paperback edition, in person or online, at Rebound Bookstore in San Rafael, CA GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it. |
This blog is a promotion-free zone.
As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog (or anywhere else). I only write about things I find interesting and/or useful. 
I'm an American travel writer dividing my time between California and Seville, Spain. I travel the world seeking intriguing people, quirky places, and outrageously delicious food so I can have the fun of writing about them here.
Don't miss out! SIGN UP HERE to be notified when I publish new posts. Planning a trip? Use the search box below to find out about other places I've written about. 
And check out my other bestselling travel books
Winner of the Firebird Book Award for Travel
BLOG ARCHIVES
January 2026
CATEGORIES
All
|