Christmas 2025

 

The Bergquist Christmas Eve Story

There are a few things that are more-or-less given at the holiday season. One is that you will get socks and underwear from your grandparents (if you are lucky enough to still have them around to give you gifts), another is that someone is bound to wax nostalgic for the movie A Christmas Story, and the third is that every theater guild and television station will insist on trotting out Dickens in one or more of its incarnations.

To that inevitable list, I wish to add the perennial return of The Bergquist Christmas Eve Story.

This story has been with me for a long time. It first took shape back in 1985, when I was a traffic clerk processing commercial copy at WFTS by day and a stand-up comic by night, performing for drinks at the local bar across from the station. Back then, I used to tell the crowd I was making "six-thousand a year and all the food stamps I could lick." While the income may have been slightly higher and the food stamps were purely metaphorical, the desperation of a young comic was very real.

Over the last forty years, the story has evolved. I have refined the dialogue, updated the legal understanding of my six-year-old self, and polished the rougher edges of the pacing. But at its heart, this is the tale you would have heard on that Christmas Eve in Tampa, 1985—a bare, unvarnished recounting of exactly what happened on Christmas Eve in the Village Green section of Miami in 1969. Plain, simple, and utterly true.

Sort of...

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A Quick Dash Up the Saddle

 Sometimes, the best plan is simply having no plan at all. Finding myself with a rare free Sunday afternoon, the lure of the foothills became impossible to ignore. We traded the suburban sprawl of Lakewood for the winding curves of Lookout Mountain Road, eventually pulling into the lot at Windy Saddle Park.