Ohio journal: Time with family and appreciation for home

New Year’s greetings from Ohio, where Susan and I are visiting daughter Danielle, her husband Mitch and grandchildren Leroy and Esme for the holidays. What a delight it is to see them for an extended period, and I’m grateful for our staff pitching in to get this edition out without the big guy at the helm.

There’s nothing like little kids at Christmas and their pure joy of little toys and family. You learn that a toy doesn’t have to be fancy and expensive to be fun. Little 3-year-old Leroy’s favorite gift appears to be some simple plastic zoo animals: a lion, tiger, elephant, hippo, cheetah, bear, giraffe and more. You see, he has a set of wooden blocks, and he loves to build a zoo out of the blocks but had no animals to put into said zoo, except some dinosaurs, which tended to roar around and tear the place down.

So now Leroy has animals and blocks – simple and even better than the smoke-producing animatronic dragon, which I must say has had some epic battles against a similar mechanical T-Rex.

Mitch’s two brothers and their families came over the day after Christmas – four additional adults and five children, and the house was filled with loud stories, kids screaming and racing around, guy talk like sports and fix-it projects, and gal talk, mostly kids, I think. There was hardly a place to sit with 15 people in the house, though the two dogs were taken to a doggy daycare for the day, no doubt a benefit to them.

Not having a chance to be around little ones for an extended period of time very often, it’s easy to forget the wonderful things and challenges that come with a 3-year-old and 1-year-old, the sudden mood swings, getting them to eat properly and demands for their favorite shows on TV. But they are also kind and loving to each other, and they love music and art.

As I grow older, I cherish weeks like this, a chance to chill and be with family. I envy those who are able to spend parts of every week with their grandchildren, but then I suppose the distance between us enhances each visit or FaceTime call – at least that’s what I tell myself.

What I do know for sure is that I appreciate my newspaper family, my church family and my community with many wonderful friends. This has been a challenging year, with the loss of several good friends and the stress of national turmoil. I’m hoping for a better and brighter 2026, and I truly value our readers, our advertisers, our hard-working staff members, our community supporters and leaders, all of whom keep our newspaper going week after week during challenging times for the industry.

I continue to hope and plead that, as citizens of this great state and nation, we treat each other with respect in the year ahead. In recent Christmas services or contemplations at home many of us read or heard the Christmas message from Luke in which the heavenly host exclaim to the shepherds: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

Good will toward each other is certainly in short supply as we turn to a new year. Our own president, in a Christmas message, referred to “Radical Left Scum doing everything possible to destroy our Country,” inappropriate words, in my opinion, for a president’s Christmas message, but it does reflect the divisive times in which we live.

As we shut the door on 2025, here’s hoping for a truly better 2026 and far more good will toward all. All my best to our readers. Blessings to you in the year ahead.