It is true, I am capable of reading a calendar and I am aware that Christmas and New Year's Day were over a week ago. I could bluff and argue that since my grandmother was Ukrainian I am celebrating the orthodox Christmas instead, but the real answer is far more boring. 
 
For reasons that I still haven't been able to ascertain, the company that hosts my blog on this site and one of my other websites suddenly closed down their blogging program on Christmas Eve. Because of the holidays I haven't been able to get any solid information, so I do not know if this was a planned outage, a cyber-attack, or just a glitch. Their website isn't acknowledging it at all (perhaps because the staff are on winter holidays) but the software is throwing a number of exceptions and errors. 

And so my annual ruminations have had to be posted a little late this year. Just ignore the date on them, and enjoy them anyway. Merry (Late) Christmas!