Letter From the Editor

December is finally here. And with this last month of the year comes the Holiday season. If you celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, Pancha Ganapati, the winter solstice, New Year’s, all or none of these days, you can sense something changing around you. In either one of the hemispheres, you slowly feel the next season arriving, be it winter or summer. Here, in the Netherlands, the pitch black of the night starts in the afternoon now. The sun still brings hope, but no longer heat. Some of us even saw snow not long ago. Although this kind of December was not the one I grew up with (I was born in Brazil and it is the time of the year temperatures start to reach 30˚C), it is the December I am used to now.

But the weather is not the only thing that starts to shift. If you pay attention, you can sense the frenzy that leads us to the end of the year. The entire world seems to be in a rush. The days pass by and we barely see them. We make plans for the parties, we buy gifts, we think of the days off we will have. But before that, the “to-do” list seems to grow. At least it does so for me. So much to do, so little time to be rewarded in the end with a glass of glühwein. It’s the time of the year when you cannot even see the end of December because you need to live a day at a time. At the same time, you long for it to end: the last month of the year carries a paradox of a never-ending wait that passes by in the blink of an eye.

Today, I’m here to invite you for a new experience. While you hope for days of rest, family, friends, communion, eating good food, having fun and being together, I want to dare you to take a step back. Get out of the rushed trance of this frenzy. Look around you. Rest, be with family and friends, eat good food and have fun before the year ends and not just because the year is going to end.