Well, it's been a year. That's the thing about years—they keep happening, one after another, like relatives arriving for Christmas dinner, whether you've finished setting the table or not. And this one, 2025, has been a year of considerable change for you, which I'll get to in a moment, and also for the financial markets, which I'll get to after that, and also for the country, which we'll discuss in January because some things take more than one letter to explain properly and I'm already worried about the length of this one.
This is my first real letter to you. We exchanged pleasantries earlier—that introduction where I explained how I got into this business, the bridge games with Warren, the hanging of the shingle, all of that. But this is the first proper investor letter, the kind where I actually have to say something about how your money is doing, which is a more vulnerable position to be in, like standing up at church to sing a solo. You know the hymn by heart, but you worry about being flat.
The good news is: it's going well. And by "well" I mean the Midwestern "well," where a Norwegian bachelor farmer looks at his harvest and says "that'll do"—which is the highest praise in his vocabulary. We beat the market. Beat it by a comfortable margin, during a year when the market itself had a very good run. If we were from New York we'd be popping champagne. But we're not, so I'll just say: not too bad. Which, if you know the code, means something considerably better.
But before we get to the numbers, let me acknowledge what you've been through this year, because money is not just numbers on a screen. It's life. And your life has had some chapters.
Your Year
You sold the house in Austin.
I want to pause on that for a moment, because selling a house is not like selling a stock. A stock is just a ticker symbol and some numbers. A house is where you hung pictures on the walls and knew which floorboard creaked and maybe had a garden where you grew tomatoes that never quite ripened the way you hoped but you kept trying anyway. A house is years of your life converted, through some alchemy of real estate agents and closing documents, into a number in a brokerage account. It's a strange thing, and I hope you took a moment to acknowledge it, because transitions deserve acknowledgment even when they're the right decision.
And now you're in the Pacific Northwest, where the trees are tall and the coffee is strong and the rain comes down with a persistence that Minnesotans can only admire. We have our winters, and you have your gray, and there's a kinship there—a shared understanding that the weather is not always trying to make you happy and that's fine, you'll put on a sweater and carry on.
You've also decided to retire from the water district next year. Decades of making sure San Diego has water—and can pay for it, because water doesn't flow without money flowing first. The engineers get the glory, but someone has to make the numbers work. And now you're stepping away, which shows a wisdom that many people never acquire: the wisdom of knowing when to stop.
So: a new home, a coming retirement, a chapter closing and another opening. That's a lot for one year. And through all of it, your portfolio has been sitting there doing its job, which is to grow steadily and not give you heart palpitations.
Let me tell you what you own and how it's doing.
The Cash
We'll start with the simplest thing, which is the money from the Austin house. It's sitting in a money market fund at Schwab, about eight hundred thousand dollars of it, earning around 4.5% interest. That works out to roughly three thousand dollars a month, which is not nothing. Three thousand a month is a rent payment you don't have to make, or groceries for a year, or the kind of cushion that lets you sleep at night. It's safe, it's liquid, and it's easy to understand. Your grandmother would approve.
But.
And there's always a but, isn't there? Otherwise I wouldn't have anything to talk about and this would be a very short letter, which would be a relief to both of us but wouldn't quite justify the subscription.
The but is something economists call the "real" interest rate, which is a fancy way of asking: what are you actually earning after you account for inflation? Because inflation is still out there, quietly eating away at things like a mouse in the pantry. Right now it's running about 3%, which doesn't sound so bad until you do the math. If you're earning 4.5% and inflation is taking 3%, you're really only earning 1.5%. That three thousand a month you thought was yours? Inflation took about two-thirds of it. You're left with a third of what you started with. And then Uncle Sam shows up for his third of even that. Which is the kind of math that makes you want to lie down for a while.
Now, 1.5% is better than nothing. It's better than losing money. And for money you might need soon—money for emergencies, or big purchases, or just the comfort of knowing it's there—a money market is exactly the right place. We're not in any rush to move it. But for the long term, for money that can sit and grow for years, we want to do better than 1.5% real.
Which brings us to bonds.
The Bonds
Everyone thinks of bonds as solid and safe. The rock upon which prudent portfolios are built. When you study finance in the fancy schools—the Whartons and the Harvards, places where the tuition costs more than my first house—they call government bonds "the risk-free rate." It's right there in the textbooks, printed in a font that suggests certainty.
But in strange times, that just ain't so. And we are definitely in strange times.
Now, before your blood pressure goes up and you reach for the button to turn off this program, know that there's a happy ending. For you, anyway. I think you'll want to hear it through, because your son Matt, humble as he might be—and he is not particularly humble, between you and me, though he hides it pretty well—outplayed many of the professionals. Including, as we'll see, the professionals at one of Silicon Valley's biggest banks.
But let me back up and explain what happened to bonds, because it's a story worth understanding.
The gold standard of bonds—and that's an ironic phrase if you think about it, since Nixon took us off the actual gold standard back in '71 and you can't redeem your dollars for gold anymore, but that's a different story—the gold standard of bonds are those issued by the U.S. Government. Treasury bonds. They're considered safe because everyone believes the U.S. Government won't ever go broke, so they'll always pay their bills. And that belief has been true for a long time, though I'll note that some very serious people on Wall Street are now quietly questioning whether it will always be true, and we'll have more to say about that in January. But for now, let's proceed.
Back in the early days of Covid, in 2020 and 2021, the government was selling 10-year Treasury bonds that paid maybe 1% or 2% interest. At the time, inflation was basically zero and interest rates were scraping the floor, and 2% seemed reasonable enough. A lot of banks and pension funds and sensible institutions bought these bonds, figuring they'd collect their 2% for ten years and everything would be fine.
Then inflation went to 8%.
And here's the thing about bonds that not everyone understands: when interest rates go up, the value of existing bonds goes down. It's like bringing your perfectly good blender to the church rummage sale, pricing it at ten dollars, and then Mildred Thorson shows up with a nicer blender and she's only asking five. Your blender works fine. But nobody's buying yours until you mark it down. Same with bonds: if you're holding one that pays 2% and the government starts selling new ones at 5%, nobody wants yours anymore. Not at full price, anyway.
So what happened to all those banks and pension funds holding 10-year bonds at 2%? They were underwater. Not a little underwater—significantly underwater. And if you wanted to sell those bonds before they matured, you had to take a loss. A real loss, the kind that shows up on your balance sheet and makes accountants nervous.
You might have heard about Silicon Valley Bank going bust a couple of years ago. It was all over the news for about a week, and then everyone forgot about it because something else happened, because something else always happens. But the reason SVB collapsed was exactly this. A bunch of smart people realized that SVB's reserves were invested in long-term bonds that were now worth considerably less than they paid for them. And they wanted their money back. And they told their friends. And because this was Silicon Valley, where everyone has apps for everything, the bank run didn't unfold over several days with people lining up outside the door like in the Depression-era photographs. It happened in 24 hours. Founders were just tapping their phones, moving money to safer places, and by the time the sun set, SVB was no more.
Now, you might be thinking: if Silicon Valley Bank's professionals were underwater on their bonds, what about the bonds Matt bought during the same period? When he was supposedly "diversifying" my portfolio? Wasn't he doing the same thing?
Here's where the story gets interesting.
Matt had been listening to Uncle Ray.
Uncle Ray is what I call Ray Dalio, though he's not actually my uncle, or Matt's uncle, or related to us in any way. He's the founder of the world's largest hedge fund—or was, anyway, before he retired—and he's one of those people who got very rich thinking about how not to lose money. Which is different from thinking about how to make money. Anyone can think about making money. That's the easy part. The hard part is keeping it.
Back in 2020, when the government was handing out cash like it was going out of style and interest rates were at rock bottom, Matt started paying attention to Uncle Ray. Because Uncle Ray had been warning about inflation. He'd seen it before, back in the 1970s, and he recognized the signs. All that money flooding into the system, supply chains breaking down, people suddenly flush with cash and nothing to spend it on—Uncle Ray knew what was coming. And he was telling anyone who would listen.
One of Uncle Ray's recommendations was something called TIPS. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities. Now, I know that's a mouthful, and the acronym doesn't help much, but stay with me because this is important.
Regular bonds pay you a fixed interest rate. If inflation goes up, tough luck—you still get your 2%. But TIPS are different. They're also government bonds, also backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, but they come with a special feature: they adjust for inflation. Not just the interest payments—the principal too. So when inflation went up, your TIPS went up. When the government calculated that prices had risen 8%, they increased the value of your bond by 8%. It's like having a cost-of-living adjustment built right in.
And here's what that meant in practice: while SVB's bonds were sinking, yours were floating. While other people's "safe" investments were losing real value, yours were keeping pace. The professionals got caught in a trap that your son, holed up in your back bedroom in Austin during Covid, managed to avoid. You probably wondered what he was doing back there all those months, staring at screens and muttering about things. Well, this was one of the things.
Matt bought the TIPS when inflation was low and nobody wanted them. He bought them at a discount, you might say. And then inflation came, and suddenly those TIPS looked very clever indeed.
Now they're up about 3% from where we bought them—which for bonds is a big deal—and they're still paying you a bonus every six months. See, the Federal Reserve has a target: they'd like inflation to run at about 2%, which they consider just right, like Goldilocks and her porridge. Right now inflation is still running above that, which means your TIPS keep collecting their little bonus. Every time one of those TIPS matures, you get back your principal plus all the inflation adjustments that accumulated along the way.
But wait, you might say. If TIPS are so great, why doesn't everyone buy them?
Well, they're complicated creatures. And they're popular when inflation is going up, but when people think inflation is going down, they'd rather have regular bonds that pay a fixed rate. TIPS are a little like firewood—nobody's buying it in July when the sun is warm and the lake is calling. But come January, you'll wish you had. Matt was stacking firewood while everyone else was at the lake.
There's one more thing about your bonds I should mention, which is how Matt arranged them. He didn't buy one big batch of bonds all maturing in twenty years, which would be like planting your entire garden in corn and hoping nothing goes wrong. Instead, he bought smaller batches maturing every six months or so, spread out over several years. It's called a "ladder," and it means that every six months, some of your bonds mature and you get your money back, plus the inflation bonus. You're free to do what you want with it—roll it into new bonds, spend it, buy another cashmere sweater for that chihuahua of yours who I understand eats better than most Lutherans, whatever makes sense at that moment.
That's why when you look at your Schwab account, you see more than a dozen cryptically named things like "UST INFL IDX 2% 01/26." Those are just your TIPS, lined up like jars of preserves in the cellar, each one waiting for its time to be opened.
This is all probably confusing, and I apologize. Bonds are confusing. They're designed that way, I think, to keep ordinary people from understanding them so that professionals can charge fees for explaining them. If you want to go over any of this again, you can email me at garrison@wobegonwealth.com and I'll do my best to explain it in plain English. Or you can ask Matt, but his answers tend to be technical and scattered and full of asides that go nowhere, which is fine when you're writing a rambling letter for a radio audience but less fine when you just want to know where your money is. So maybe ask me first.
The Stocks
Now let's talk about stocks, which you probably understand already, so I won't belabor it.
Back in December 2022, Matt put about a third of your portfolio—around $300,000—into something called VTI, which stands for Vanguard Total Market Index Fund. It's the whole U.S. stock market in one package: big companies, small companies, the ones you've heard of and the ones you haven't. It's boring, which is a compliment. Boring is good.
That $300,000 is now worth over $500,000. It's up about 75% in three years. If you wanted to think about it in monthly terms—which is a little silly, because stocks don't work that way, they go up and down and the monthly numbers are meaningless, but people like to think in monthly terms anyway—that's about $5,500 a month added to your wealth over the past 36 months.
Compare that to the $800,000 in cash, which is earning you about $3,000 a month, and you start to see why we don't want to leave everything in the money market forever. The stocks earned more on $300,000 than the cash earned on $800,000. It's a stark comparison, and it's why we want to think carefully about putting some of that cash to work over time—not all at once, because timing the market is a fool's errand, but gradually, thoughtfully.
There was a moment in April when the markets, as we say in Minnesota, "puked." The president announced some tariffs, and Wall Street threw a tantrum, and the S&P 500 dropped about 15% in a matter of days. The television got very exciting. People said words like "bear market" and "correction" and "unprecedented," which is a word they use a lot when they mean "I don't know what's happening but I need to fill airtime."
And then, as markets do, things recovered. By year-end, we're at record highs, and virtually everyone on Wall Street expects 2026 to be higher still. Whether that's true or not, I couldn't say. Predictions are hard, especially about the future. But you're probably wondering: should we be putting more of that Austin money into stocks? How much, and when? We've got Guy Noir on the case, though he and the cowboys have been arguing about the details. Dusty thinks we should wait for a pullback; Lefty wants to go all in tomorrow. Guy Noir is somewhere in between, nursing a coffee and muttering about risk-adjusted returns. We'll have it sorted out by January.
The Commodities
Well, now we come to the part of the portfolio that my mother would have understood, even if she wouldn't have known what to call it.
Commodities. That's the Wall Street word for stuff. Actual, physical stuff—oil sitting in tanks, wheat growing in fields, copper waiting to become pipes in somebody's basement, natural gas that will heat a house in February when the wind comes down from Canada and settles in like it owns the place. The things you can stub your toe on, if you're not careful.
There's something almost quaint about owning commodities in an age when everyone's excited about bitcoin and artificial intelligence and companies that exist mostly as apps on your phone. Commodities are old-fashioned. They're the economy your grandfather understood: you grow it, you dig it up, you ship it somewhere, somebody pays you for it. The Norwegians who settled Minnesota didn't trust anything they couldn't hold in their hands or plant in the ground. And maybe they were onto something.
This was another suggestion from Uncle Ray, and I'll be honest—it was the one that seemed strangest at the time.
It was April 2020. The world had just shut down. People were wiping down their groceries with Clorox wipes, which in retrospect seems excessive but at the time felt prudent. Oil prices had just gone negative—a sentence that sounds like it was written by a confused person but was actually true. Producers were paying people to take oil off their hands because there was nowhere left to store it. The economy had, as we say in Minnesota, gone a little funny.
And in the middle of all this, Matt was reading Uncle Ray.
Uncle Ray's reasoning went like this: the government was printing money like it was going out of style. All that money has to go somewhere. Eventually it shows up as higher prices for actual things. The stuff you can stub your toe on. The things people need, whether or not they're thinking about them.
Matt figured: when a man who runs the world's largest hedge fund tells you what he does with his own family's money, you listen. So he put $43,000 into commodities.
Then we waited. All that government money sloshed around the economy for a while, finding its level. And then inflation started—slowly at first, almost politely, like a houseguest who takes off their shoes at the door. And then all at once, like the same houseguest deciding to stay for six months and eating everything in your refrigerator.
Today that $43,000 is worth more than $130,000.
That's a gain of over 200%, which is not nothing. In Lake Wobegon, that's the kind of result that gets a quiet nod and no further comment.
But here's the really important part—the part that makes me want to pour another cup of coffee and settle in. Look at when commodities did best. It was 2022. Inflation was running hot, the Federal Reserve was raising interest rates like a man trying to stop a runaway wagon by throwing rocks at it, and the stock market was having one of those years that makes people check their 401(k)s and then wish they hadn't. The S&P 500 dropped 20%. The word "recession" was hanging in the air like the smell of something burning in a distant kitchen.
And during that exact period, while stocks were falling, commodities were rising.
Now, this sounds obvious after the fact—of course commodities go up when there's inflation, that's what inflation is—but it's not obvious at all. Most of the time, when stocks go down, everything goes down. When fear takes over, people sell everything, even the things that should hold up. It's like a church potluck where someone yells "fire" and everybody runs for the exit, dropping their casseroles on the way out. Mavis Lindqvist had that happen once at First Lutheran—false alarm, turned out to be steam from the coffee urn—but three hot dishes hit the floor before anyone thought to check. Nobody stops to think about which casseroles would survive a fire. They just run.
But in 2022, commodities held. They didn't just hold—they went up. That's diversification actually working, not in a textbook or a brochure with stock photos of retired couples walking on beaches, but in real life. With real money. Yours.
Over the past five years, commodities are up about 150%. The S&P 500 is up about 85%. Commodities—boring, old-fashioned, the-things-your-grandfather-understood commodities—beat the stock market by a wide margin. Most professional fund managers can't do that. They went to the Whartons and the Harvards, they have computers that cost more than my first house, and they still can't beat the S&P 500 over any given five-year stretch.
Your portfolio did it with a basket of wheat and oil and copper and the kind of common sense that doesn't require a graduate degree.
The Gold
We saved the best for last.
Gold used to be what conspiracy theorists and your uncle who lives in a cabin in Montana invested in. The kind of thing you bought if you believed the government was coming for your guns and you needed something to barter with after the collapse of civilization. Sensible people didn't buy gold. Financial advisors rolled their eyes at gold. Gold was for kooks.
But Uncle Ray said to buy gold.
Back in March 2020, Matt put about $61,000 into gold—about 7.5% of the portfolio at the time. And for years, it just sat there. From 2020 to late 2024, gold didn't do much of anything. It held its value, which is what gold is supposed to do, but it didn't grow. It underperformed the S&P 500. It was boring, even by our standards.
Here's the thing about gold, though: it's not supposed to make you rich. It's supposed to protect you when things get scary. A "store of wealth," the fancy people call it. Grandpas in Minnesota call it "what you want when things in the world go bad." It just sits there, keeping its value, waiting.
And then, in the fourth quarter of 2024, gold cleared its throat.
You know how Norwegian bachelor farmers are. They sit at the counter at the Chatterbox for years, nursing the same cup of coffee, saying nothing, just watching. And then one day, out of nowhere, they look up and say something so perfectly true that everyone stops talking. That's gold. Four years of sitting there, doing nothing, being boring. And then—ahem—it had something to say.
Since late 2024, gold is up over 65%. That $61,000 Matt put in? Now worth nearly $180,000. Almost tripled. In this year alone, gold gained more than four times what the S&P 500 gained. The shiny rock that just sits there turned out to be sitting on something.
Now, why did gold spike? This is where I'm going to be careful, because I'm not a political commentator and I don't intend to become one. But I'll say this: when gold moves like that, it usually means smart people are nervous about something. Central banks around the world have been buying gold like it's going out of style—and central banks don't do anything without a reason, even if they won't tell you what the reason is. Gold is the market's way of muttering under its breath. You can't always make out the words, but you know the tone.
And here's the part I want you to remember: in April, when the tariff announcement came and Wall Street had its little tantrum—stocks dropping 15% in a matter of days, the television people saying "unprecedented" every thirty seconds—gold dropped about 5%. A hiccup. A polite cough. And while stocks spent the better part of a month crawling back to where they started, gold was back in a week, brushing off its lapels and ordering another cup of coffee.
That's what we bought it to do. Not to make us rich—though it has, somewhat, and we're not complaining—but to hold steady when everything else is running for the exits. To be the Norwegian bachelor farmer who doesn't flinch when someone drops a tray in the kitchen.
That $61,000 has been adding roughly $1,700 a month to your wealth over the past 70 months, if you want to think of it that way. Not bad for a shiny rock that just sits there. Though I suppose it wasn't just sitting there after all. It was waiting.
Pulling It Together
Well. Dorothy has been by twice now with the coffee pot, giving me looks like maybe it's time to wrap this up. She's right, of course. She usually is.
Five years ago, Matt put about $400,000 of your portfolio into things that could go up but could also go down. Stocks and commodities and gold. The stuff that makes people check their phones too often and mutter about the Federal Reserve at dinner parties, which is not an attractive quality in a person, but there it is.
That $400,000 is now worth about $850,000.
I'm going to let that sit there for a moment, like a casserole cooling on the counter. More than doubled. An extra $450,000 in your name that wasn't there before, money that grew while you were busy selling a house and moving across the country and deciding to retire and doing all the things that make up a life. The money was just sitting there, doing its job, like a good Lutheran.
And here's the part I want you to notice: we didn't just make money. We made money while falling less when things got scary. In 2022, when inflation was running hot and the stock market dropped 20%—our portfolio dropped less. In April 2025, when the tariff announcements came and Wall Street threw its tantrum—our portfolio dropped less. The gains were good. The falls were gentle.
Your bonds turned out to be safer than the bonds the professionals bought. Your gold and commodities beat the stock market over five years by a wide margin. And they did it while letting you sleep at night.
That's not luck. That's philosophy. The jars of preserves in different cellars. The firewood stacked in July. The understanding that weather turns—it always turns—and when it does, you want to be the person who saw it coming, not the person standing in the yard wondering where the barn roof went.
What's Ahead
Outside the window here, the snow is piling up like it means business. Christmas lights are strung along Lake Street. The year is winding down the way years do, with everyone suddenly remembering things they meant to do in March and wondering where the time went.
In the back room at Wobegon Wealth—which is upstairs from the Chatterbox Cafe on Main Street, so it always smells faintly of coffee and pie, which is not a bad way to think about money—we're already working on the January letter. And there's a lot to work on, because something is happening in the world.
Gold doesn't clear its throat like this very often. Central banks are buying it at rates not seen in decades. They're not saying why. Central banks never say why. But when the people who run the money supply start quietly accumulating shiny rocks, it's worth paying attention.
Uncle Ray published a book this year called How Countries Go Broke. Former Treasury secretaries are calling it "bracing," which is what reviewers say when they mean "this might ruin your afternoon." Matt's been working through it, taking notes, and what we're finding is useful—not predictions, because nobody can predict, but metrics. Warning signs. The financial equivalent of knowing when the weather radio switches from "watch" to "warning." In Minnesota, we know the difference between "the sky looks a little green" and "I can see rotation." One means you finish mowing the lawn with one eye on the horizon. The other means you grab the cat and get underground.
That's what we're building here—not a crystal ball, but a weather station. A way to watch what's actually happening, not divine tea leaves or chase headlines. The world has gotten more unpredictable and more frenetic, and we'd rather have instruments than intuition. In January, we'll show you what we're watching and why.
We'll also have a concrete proposal for the Austin money—how to put that $800,000 to work in stages, in a way that fits the philosophy that got us here. And we'll talk about income: you mentioned wanting four or five thousand a month, and we want to confirm that number with you, because it shapes how we think about everything else.
Starting in 2026, you'll get a letter from me every month. Shorter than this one—Dorothy would insist on that. Think of it as stopping by the Chatterbox for a cup of coffee: a little news, a little weather, a few observations about where things stand and where they might be heading.
A Final Word
This letter has gone on long enough. But that's how I am—I start talking and I don't quite know when to stop, and before you know it we've been sitting at the Chatterbox Cafe for two hours and Dorothy is giving me the look she gives Pastor Ingqvist when his sermons run past noon. It's a meaningful look. It says: Some of us have things to do, Garrison.
The point of all this, if there is a point—and I've been accused of burying the point so deep you need a backhoe to find it—is that you're in good shape. The cellar is stocked and the firewood is dry and we've been watching the sky the way you do in tornado country: respectfully, and with a plan for the basement if needed.
Thank you for trusting us with this. It's a strange thing, being trusted with someone's money. More intimate than you'd think. Because money isn't really money, is it? It's life, crystallized. The years you spent working, converted into numbers on a screen, which we're now responsible for turning into more numbers so you can convert them back into time—time to rest, time to enjoy, time to watch the rain come down on the Pacific Northwest and not worry about what comes next.
That's a serious responsibility, and we don't take it lightly, even when we make jokes about it. Making jokes is how Midwesterners handle serious things. It's either that or silence, and silence makes people nervous.
Merry Christmas, Karyn.
I hope the holidays find you warm and fed and surrounded by the people and animals you love, even if the chihuahua is still adjusting to Pacific Northwest winter and giving you looks like this wasn't in the brochure.
The Pacific Northwest does Christmas its own way. Evergreens that don't need decorating because they already look like Christmas—whole hillsides of them, wet and fragrant and impossibly green. Rain tapping at the windows like it's asking to come in, which gives you permission to stay put, drink something warm, and watch the world go soft and gray outside. On clear days they tell me you can see the mountains with snow on their shoulders, standing there like they've been waiting to be noticed. It's not Minnesota—nobody's losing a finger to frostbite walking to the mailbox—but it has its own kind of magic. The kind that says: slow down, stay warm, you're exactly where you should be.
You've still got a few more months with those crazy people in San Diego, wrapping things up the way they deserve to be wrapped up—i's dotted, t's crossed, spreadsheets reconciled, everyone knowing where everything is when you're gone. I have no doubt you'll be missed. The kind of missed where people keep emailing you questions for months after your contract ends—not because they forgot you left, but because you were the one with the answers. The one who could explain to the engineers why the politicians needed something done a certain way, and explain to the politicians why the engineers couldn't just... well. Can you really explain anything to politicians? That might be asking too much. But if anyone could, it was probably you.
And then: the next chapter. Whatever it looks like.
For now, enjoy the holidays with Kit and all her hilarious chaos, and with John and his steady, quiet care. Enjoy whatever's on television and whoever's hogging the good blanket.
The snow is still coming down outside. Christmas is here. Another year is ending, and another one is about to begin, full of whatever it's going to be full of.
And that's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the portfolios are above average.
Good night.
— Garrison