December 2025

Here comes Santa Claus at the end of the year to snatch all of your money away. It’s become an American tradition now to lose it all voluntarily and then build it back up again the next year, starting in January.

I remember I was still a fresh Howard University grad living in the Maryland area when I first heard the concept of the Christmas and New Year’s season being the most vicious time of year. It’s stressful, it really is. It’s something about coming to an ending and starting over again that terrifies people. It’s old so cold in most of the United States during the wintertime, where family warmth and love is needed more. So, we end up with more natural deaths during Christmas and New Year’s than any other season. The yearly transition from old to new in cold weather can evidently take a lot out of us. But since we can’t stop time from moving forward, we all have to deal with the season anyway. So, we leave the drama behind from last year and carry it back over into the new one. Or some of it. I guess the Christmas gifts can help us to do that, like planting a new tree and watching it grow in the summertime.

 However, that easy growing new tree doesn’t happen so naturally in the wintertime. Winter is more of a time for rest than for revival. We’re also forced to spend more money in the winter with the expense of heat, thicker clothing, boots and quilts, gas, food, cold medicines, heating pads and everything else we buy in the winter as opposed to the summer. Unless you have annual vacation money for an entire family—which most people don’t—you’re going to spend more money in the wintertime, where coats, hats, gloves and boots typically cost more than beach towels, sandals, sunshades and swimsuits. And if you’re not into swimming like that anyway, you end up enjoying the heat all summer long with free picnics and celebrations that happen right around your area. Then we all prepare for the wintertime again, starting in September.

I even came up with a book idea called The Season years ago, a dark comedy of a novel where craziness happens at the end of the year. I never got around to writing it though. I’m always working on other new projects around this time. It’s part of the process of starting over again. I always like to be prepared with something new in January. I’ve been that way for as long as can remember to. Even in my early 20s, I worked overtime during the Christmas and New Year’s season for the extra pay. I never got pulled into the end-of-year-vacation philosophy, where folks shut down for a couple of weeks and do nothing. I was always more concerned with preparing for the next calendar year. You know, some people are like that. We like to be prepared. And the New Year represents a new hope for us, like freshly trained Jedi Knight in the Star Wars movie franchise. We have faith in the annual process. So, we’re glad to leave the old year behind to start the new one.

I love the family spirit of the season though, if you have a close nit family to enjoy it with. Even without spending a bunch of money, you can enjoy the excitement of the season with the gifts and joy that other people receive from it. And despite the millions of employed Americans who lost their jobs this year in government takedowns, a friend of mine reminded me that we always find a way to adapt and keep going. Humans are wired that way. We adjust to whatever is needed the way we need to. Otherwise, we would have disappeared from the face of the earth a long time ago.

Situations are always changing in life, so, we have to change with them. If we are able to. Because children hold on to the things that they grow to like. And if we bring our kids up on Santa Claus, New Year’s and gifts—like I was brought up—then they’ll grow to expect it every year, because it feels good. And you don’t want to deny your child what makes him or her feel good. That’s why the gifts are so specific and particular at this time of the year. Each loved one wants you to see them differently, because they are different. So, we become stuck in the psychology of the season of trying to please everyone we love and make them feel happy and included. It’s an American family ritual now of spending money each year for love.

It didn’t take long for Uncle Sam to figure it all out for good old-fashioned capitalism either. So, American retail businesses came up with this idea this called “Black Friday,” where stores began to give their goods away at more than half the price sometimes in order to entice a hungry, money-spending crowd of family-pleasing citizens out to their stores right after Thanksgiving. And these hungry Black Friday shoppers have also learned to please themselves. Why wouldn’t they at 70% off the goods?

You mean to tell me this computer store has been selling this laptop for $399 all year long, but now we can buy it for $120 plus taxes? Are you kidding me? Who’s not going to jump on that deal if they have the money and need a laptop? Hell, with deals like that, you could save your money for the first 10 months of the year and then rack up on good on Black Friday in late November. And you could learn to do that annual.

However, be warned that the local car traffic, the malls, the shopping centers, and most of the megastores around the nation will be extra crowded with vehicles parked in every space in the lots, including the overflow areas. In fact, if you happen to be late to the shopping party, with some of these stores opening up at midnight while Thanksgiving Day turkey is still stuck in your stomach, you may end up with an hour or more wait just to get into the store. Some of those lines will start in your car with a wait to even exit from the highways and turn into the shopping areas.

You know, most of these American malls, shopping centers and megastores are located right off the highways, boulevards and major avenues where they had more room to build and more room to park. And when those areas get overcrowded, there’s no way around your dilemma. You’ll be waiting in car lines with everyone else… just to climb out and spend up your money.

During this time of year, stressed-out shoppers have even been known to get frustrated to the point of fighting other customers for the limited goods on sale. So, you can forget about trying to jump in the line after spotting a friend or a family member up ahead of you. That action will cause a fight as well. We’ve heard about incidents like these on the news from coast to coast in America, from New York City to LA.

That’s the obvious stress that Christmastime creates for all of us. America ends up with more reported incidents of theft, larceny, burglaries, fraud, and outright robberies that go on all over the country. I was planning to add the psychology of stress and crime in my book, The Season, with a Santa Claus who actually plots, plans and succeeds at robbing people. Imagine that for a dark comedy novel. If you dare to laugh at that kind of thing. I even had a publisher who agreed to give me a deal on the book. But… I never wrote it. I guess I kept thinking that I could only sell a book like that from the months of October through March. And I wanted to write yearly books rather than seasonal ones.

At any rate, I’m back at it again with a list of a dozen projects I’m now working on to pitch for January 2026, while others wake up from their winter slumber and get back to work. And you will read about it and see these new projects when I begin to pitch and produce them. You can count on it. In the meantime, be safe, enjoy your family, stay warm and healthy, don’t stress yourself out, and if you’re forced to spend money on your loved ones for GP (general purposes), then make sure you devise a game plan to get them something they really need that is inexpensive, rather than something they may want that leaves you broke until mid or late January.

But… if you can’t avoid it, and it makes more sense to spend that money in order to keep your loved ones happy—instead of you worrying about them getting off to a horrible start to the New Year because they feel unloved and unappreciated—then by all means, do what you need to do and get that spending over with. Then when mid-January comes around, you can finally breathe again and return to normal—whatever that normal is after making your New Year’s resolutions that usually crash and burn over the first few months.

Right now, as I write this, the date is Thursday, December 11^th, exactly two weeks out from Christmas on Thursday, December 25^th, when Santa Clauss will cheer, “Hoe, hoe, hoe! Merry Christmas!” like he always does. So, enjoy it!

And I’ll see you all again in January… with my computer loaded up with brand-new creations, just like I always do. And what are you planning to do for your New Year…?

Omar Tyree is a New York Times bestselling author who has published more than 30 books and counting and won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Work of Fiction after graduating from Howard University, cum laude, with a degree in Print Journalism from the School of Communications in 1991. 

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