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The term “holiday blues,” or the idea that this time of year can be depressing for many, has become a socially acceptable construct within a culture that, typically, is not that honest about mental health issues.

Aside from the sturm-und-drang many people face of making appearances at holiday celebrations and covering all the bases with regard to gift-giving, many are lonely this time of year. In a time full of gatherings with large and wonderful families seemingly everywhere, for many, it can be an outside-looking-in sort of proposition.

Of the many holidays celebrated this season around the world, Christmas is the most traditionally family-oriented of those, and so many folks have empty chairs in their homes. I am one of those.

This year I have much to celebrate and a multitude of blessings for which to be thankful, but unfortunately, some of the burdens that have haunted me have reduced my cheer and drive to do much of anything. Like that old song goes, it’s as if my get up and go got up and went.

Grief is ever-present and something no human is immune to. There’s no one way to “deal” with it, despite whatever pop-psychology hogwash on television or in big-selling self-help tomes tell us. We’re all wired differently.

Near the beginning of this festive month, I found myself feeling in a funk and could not deduce why. The night those blues began to set in, I figured it out. 

There are dates on the calendar that haunt us all. Some call them “heaven dates,” those anniversaries of those who’ve passed on. That day was the sixth anniversary of my grandfather’s passing.

Two-thousand and fifteen was a humdinger of a year, personally, in terms of losses. I lost several friends; a mentor figure and at the year’s end my grandfather. 

By and large, looking back, I’d been numbed to loss by that point, but still, I know a lot of what I used to be disappeared in the wake of his passing. 

The great Guy Clark, who was a musical favorite of my grandfather, and who passed away, himself, the next year after, wrote a tribute to his father titled “The Randall Knife.” The lyrics deal with the passing of time and finding just the right tears to mourn his father, years after his passing.

I’m still feeling those blues, and not really looking that forward to Christmas, but I was finally able to get some solace in remembering my lost loved one. 

You see, the day after he passed, I witnessed a most beautiful sunset, probably the most striking display of such I’ve ever witnessed, westbound on 287. I’d like to think my grandfather had something to do with that. Anyhow, in the years since, I’ve needed to write about that sunset, and did not realize how much I needed to do so.

It was a healing exercise, and I would like to share the resulting words with you, gentle readers.

Your Sunset

Early December,

when those pines’ve shed their clothes;

the brilliant show 

of red-into-orange, tempered with yellow,

doesn’t just whisper through the bare branches –

it screams.

It was like a belly laugh

you committed to one of your own corny jokes,

of which I thought there’d still be an ample supply.

We always think that,

turning away the inevitability of an ending.

The punchline never seems within the realm of reason,

but to everything there is a season.

Merry Christmas and happy rest of the holiday season to everyone. Whether you are spending these days of celebration with a large and wonderful family or by your lonesome, there is always some reason to be cheerful.

Remember those who are not with you any longer, but also, remember to celebrate those who are still here and able to talk, laugh and enjoy this time with you.

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The turkey has been decimated, we’ve stuffed ourselves with stuffing, we’re pie-eyed from pumpkin pie, and Dallas, once again, surprised nobody by losing to the Raiders, albeit it was in overtime.

Now it’s time to move on to the next phase of the holidays, which of course means parades.

There are groups of people in every town, especially in our neck of the woods, whose mission is to make things as festive and home-town proud as possible. Here in the wilds of San Jac, the Shepherd and Coldspring chambers will be doing just that over the next two weeks.

First up, Shepherd, which will present a day of fun and festivities, capped off by a parade of lights. Then, Coldspring will have the Square of vendors, events, to be capped off by a parade of lights.

Aside from the obvious, which is the celebration of Christmas and the birth of Jesus, these celebrations remind us, especially in these times when it’s all COVID all the time, that we are a community, and we are our best selves when we do things together.

•Filing for candidacy for state, district or county offices opened on Nov. 13, and will end Dec. 13, or in 11 days.

There are gobs of things that go into qualifying for a seat on a panel, but for me, the biggest question and qualification there is happens to be internal: Are you happy?

I realize that question is kind of vague, but it can be fleshed out in many different ways. When it comes to elections, it could mean with the county’s direction, or the state’s finances, or education, or roads, or insert your own concern here. 

I’ve mentioned before that there is really only one correct way to make changes in the status quo, and that is through elections. First and foremost, is throwing yourself out there. It’s one thing to complain about those ruts in the roads that the county never seems able to fix; it’s another to actually get out and fix them. Which would get the fastest results, do you think?

If holding office is not your thing, that’s fine. The other side of that coin is voting, which in and of itself is fine, but if you are passionate about change, and find a candidate that fills the bill, become a volunteer.

The more apathetic the voting public becomes, the freer the power that be are to usurp liberty. So become the solution you want to see.

•The return of the Christmas season also means the return of Christmas entertainment. 

My personal favorite for top Christmas carol ever is “O Holy Night.” There’s not a definitive version I feel is tops; it’s one that encapsulates the reason for the season best. 

I also feel deeply and passionately that those songs by Wham! and Mariah Carey must never be played. They’re so lifeless — insipid screeds of whining about me me me and forgetting what this time of year means.

On the television front, nothing can compare to “Rudolph” in its glorious stop-motion color, and the animated version of the Grinch, with the inimitable Thurl Ravencroft singing the theme song. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is another fave. The reason I believe is simple: the themes of these are timeless — brotherhood, family, love, sharing.

My ultimate go-to movie is “The Bishop’s Wife,” with David Niven and Cary Grant, followed by “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I can live without “A Christmas Story” for two reasons: that 24-hour marathon every year, and that the villain of the piece has the same last name as me. I heartily recommend watching these. You’ll catch yourselves smiling. I promise.

Tony Farkas is editor of the Trinity County News-Standard. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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By Jim Powers

Have you known anyone who suffered from major depression? Not just feeling blue, or depressed for a while because of a life event. Instead, there is a deep, persistent sense of hopelessness that you can’t find your way back from?

For the severely depressed person, the voice that never stops talking in their head keeps telling them that the world around them is falling apart. That everything has permanently changed for the worse, that things can never get better. The people close to them keep telling them that, outside their own head, everything is fine, nothing has changed. But they know better. That voice that is with them 24 hours a day says so. And, it never stops talking.

Many people get through that kind of depression with the intervention of medication, or therapy and time. And on the other side they realize something many of us never learn. That those thoughts that run through their heads were lying to them. That the anger and fear and frustration they experienced when they were so depressed was the result of those lies.

Why are so many people so angry these days? Whether politically, or socially, or economically, or over religion or race, rage seems to consume a lot of people. Increasingly they are accepting and even encouraging violence as an appropriate response to their anger.

The sad truth is that, like the voice in the head of someone suffering from major depression, the voices we are listening to are lying to us. It doesn’t matter what side of the now unbreachable political divide they come from. It doesn’t even matter what their motives are (that’s another issue entirely, and just as existential as their lies). It only matters that they are lying, and that we are accepting those lies uncritically, even when we know that they are lying for their own advantage.

For most of our history as a country, we held truth as the highest ideal (even while often falling short). We rejected friends or spouses who lied to us, we rejected politicians who got caught lying. We questioned not only the claims of others, but their motives for making those claims. Due diligence it is called. What happened to that? What changed?

Before 24-hour cable news, when we got our news from outside our community on the one hour 6 p.m. national news, our “community” was measured in square miles.  Over the last 20 years, with the advent of smart phones and social media, our “community” is now the world. We spend many hours a day interacting with these devices, constantly connected to a billion of our closest friends. The voice in our head is now directly connected to the voices in our hands. And our slowly evolved brains seem to no longer know the difference.

So, about that voice in your head. 

Anyone on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, or any of the other many social media outlets, can now be an “expert.” They can be a complete crackpot, a serial killer, a sexual predator, a terrorist, or just a politician lying in their own interest, and pretend to be someone with just your interest at heart. And they can spread those lies to millions of people almost instantly. And before you can evaluate those lies, they can spread a thousand more. 

Because social media companies, in their own interest, have implemented algorithms that silo every experience you have on their platform to agree with your own presuppositions, they have effectively taken away your freedom. They are not going to serve you information you don’t agree with. Why would you want to read or watch that? The most important thing to the company is clicks, not truth. And you are more likely to click on something you agree with than something you do not.

We are angry because making us angry, and keeping us angry, is profitable for social media companies, and an effective way for politicians to pull to them increasingly corrupt power. Forget political parties, lies are corrosive to our society wherever they originate. We are increasingly awash in a tsunami of lies from those voices in our hands and heads.

There are really only a couple of solutions to the problem. We can either question everything we are told and spend the time to look beyond our own bias for the truth; or, we can turn off the voices bombarding us with propaganda. Social media and political lies are destroying our society and may very well have already destroyed our Democratic Republic. This isn’t an accident. That device you hold in your hand is the 21st century’s greatest threat to our continued existence as a free people.

The people lying to you hate democracy and, whether they are republican, democrat, libertarian or just contrarian, they do not care if they destroy this country in pursuit of their goals.

“We live in a house of mirrors and think we are looking out windows.” Frederick Salomon Perls