In a year that has held good tidings and ill—the usual ingredients with some new and sometimes startling arrangements . . .

We want to take a moment from our Christmas celebrations to wish you and your family and friends a good and cheerful holiday season. We wish you safe and smooth travels wherever you go, and good food and drink and fellowship as you gather with loved ones.

As ever, we pray especially for our fellow Louisianans and Gulf Coast neighbors displaced by the hurricanes and this year’s oil flood, and especially those lost to Hurricane Katrina. We wish them well, we honor the memory of those who are no longer with us, and we hope that others on higher and drier land will continue to remember them too—particularly those with the wealth and political power to lend a hand. (Heartfelt gratitude to generous volunteers everywhere.)

We think also of the men and women in uniform in the endless wars overseas, and those who are posted at over a hundred military bases around the world, and sailing the seven seas, keeping watch for the empire. We wish them safety, some warm fellowship around the mess hall and campfire, and hope they’ll be able to come home soon, safely, to their families.

To all of you we wish a good and healthful new year, a measure of prosperity and good luck with work (finding it or keeping it), endurance through the struggles to come, and some hope and good cheer because the hard times don’t appear likely to end in 2011. But we’ll be there with you in spirit and in action for the work to be done to make this a better, safer world, for humans and other living things.

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Previous years’ Christmas and New Year’s wishes can be found here, here, and here. These wishes we still pray for, and continue to work for.

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Dee-licious crawfish wreath designed by our friends at Dirty Coast. Visit their store at 5631 Magazine Street, New Orleans.