Why I Fired My Broker Redux: Lessons From the Great Recession

Nearly two decades ago, in the midst of the horrors of the Great Recession, Jeffrey Goldberg, now editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, wrote what is probably the best personal finance article I’ve ever read: Why I Fired My Broker (The Atlantic, May, 2009).

Andy Kane

The stock market has produced extraordinary returns since this article was written, and many investors have never experienced a prolonged bear market. Here’s a look at Mr. Goldberg’s article plus my own experience with the Great Recession, with some ideas on how to keep yourself prepared for financial surprises.

The Grim Reality of 2008

The Great Recession was the most severe economic and financial meltdown since the Great Depression. It began in the United States with the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007, and eventually spread throughout the world. Here’s the common joke during the housing peak:

“I've always wanted to live in a million-dollar house. I just didn't think it would be this house.”

During the Great Recession, gross domestic product (GDP) declined significantly and unemployment doubled. Millions of people lost their homes, jobs and savings. The S&P 500 index fell by 57%, down to levels in 1997. Many people nearing retirement suddenly found themselves working much longer than they had planned.

For years, almost daily I could find an article on the latest personal finance disaster.

• A once successful father now living in his in-laws’ basement with his wife and children, wondering what happened.
• Millions of homes in foreclosure, with some courts—known as rocket dockets—processing cases in minutes.
• A man who lost his house, his job and his wife, spending a winter in a van in North Dakota with his son and his son’s girlfriend.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street 

Mr. Goldberg had invested carefully, following much of the standard advice still given today. Then he woke up to discover that he had taken "a random walk down Wall Street and got hit by a bus."
As his 401(k) shrank, advisors responded with familiar explanations about time, diversification and risk. To which Goldberg quotes Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead."

He learned that even highly paid financial professionals rarely know where markets are headed. Many are far better at selling financial products than predicting the future.

The Illusion of "Chuck"

At the time, Charles Schwab was running its famous "Talk to Chuck" advertising campaign. Goldberg hoped Chuck could help him understand what had happened to his financial plan.

Instead, he discovered that brokers, wealth managers and television experts were no more capable of forecasting the crisis than anyone else. As Warren Buffett put it:

"Wall Street is a place where whatever can be sold will be sold."

Mr. Goldberg's conclusion was simple: brokerage firms are businesses first. Their interests do not always align with yours.

My View From the North Woods

I have followed markets forever. I remember the disaster my parents experienced in the 1973-74 market crash, one they never truly recovered from. I also remember the 1982 market bottom that launched one of the greatest bull markets in history, running nearly uninterrupted until the dot-com crash in 2000. The Dow Jones rose from a low of 777 to a high of nearly 12,000.

I remember reading a wild forecast in 1982 that the Dow could one day hit 3000. The Dow had barely moved since the 1960s. It’s now approaching 50,000.

And then I remember 2008. We personally lost 56% of our equities, high to low. I had recently taken a new job working for a small firm in a small town in Northern Minnesota. We had recently completed a major remodeling of our hundred-year-old home. We had just sent our oldest twin sons off to an expensive private college. I was stunned.

Mr. Goldberg wisely fired his broker. Actually, his broker fired him. He just stopped calling, and Mr. Goldberg got the message. They weren't much help because they didn't know what to do any more than Mr. Goldberg did. 

The Great Recession did end. By the time Mr. Goldberg was writing his article, the markets were already on a tear, although it was hard to see that through the carnage. While many sold all they had, never to trust markets or capitalism again, the U.S. stock market climbed from 2009 to 2020 when COVID hit, one of the longest running bull markets ever. The S&P 500 rose over four times.

Today the S&P 500 is roughly ten times its 2009 low.

The Survival Playbook

Fortunately, I had rarely trusted any financial advice, even from Charles Schwab (who is still about as good as it gets).

Here’s how my own recovery from the Great Recession went. I never lost my job. Although we lost a lot, year over year we lost a third of our net worth. Not great but not the disaster that it originally felt like.

• I never made any net sales from my depressed equities. I continued to make regular contributions to my 401(k), investing in now under-priced equities.
• We had paid off our house before the Great Recession. That wasn’t an accident. I grew up in a new home that never carried a mortgage, and before 1900, my great-grandfather purchased the house my grandfather and dad grew up in—also mortgage free. This has always been good advice for surviving a market crash. 
• The kids were safe at college. We saved that money over nearly twenty years and moved most of it into short-term fixed income investments before the crash. I had known that you shouldn’t invest any money you need in the next five years.

Without doing much, in less than five years we recovered all our losses.

The lesson I took from the Great Recession wasn't how to predict crashes. It was that crashes cannot be predicted reliably. The next crisis will look different from the last, but it will arrive. The goal isn't to avoid the downturn—it's to build a financial life that can survive it.

Michigamme Highlands: The Place I Never Really Left

My first introduction to the Michigamme Highlands was walking with my dad and sister through the remains of an old mine to a deep tunnel bored into the earth. I was very young and a little afraid of falling into a hole—or a bear coming out of the cave. But this is the Michigamme Highlands: rugged, remote and undeveloped.

The Michigamme Highlands is a vast wilderness near the center of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (U.P.), a land half the size of Rhode Island that time mostly forgot.

I grew up near here, a third-generation Nordic American, part of a wave of immigrants who came for mining jobs. The house my dad built is still in our family. We also had a cabin in Michigamme, a small mining town with a ghostly feel—a place that refuses to die.

Since I was very young, I have roamed vast portions of the Michigamme Highlands, primarily fishing and camping. I spent countless days riding its mostly seasonal gravel and two-rut roads in a beat-up pickup with my uncle, searching for elusive brook trout in small, remote streams.

I remember walking along railroad tracks down to an abandoned bridge, perfect for fishing. I’ve followed roads along the remains of an old railroad blasted through its roughest terrain—the Huron Mountains—built in the 19th century but never moved a pound of freight before it was scrapped.

After I got married, I introduced these backwoods to my wife. As we slowly worked her new Jeep Cherokee along a two-rut road, I realized we were driving along a leaky beaver dam, water rushing across the road ahead of us.

The Land Itself

The Michigamme Highlands is home to hundreds of lakes, rivers and streams, and many animals, including wolves, moose and an occasional mountain lion.

It has large tracts of old-growth and mature northern hardwood/hemlock and pine-oak forests, one of the Upper Midwest’s most undisturbed forest remnants. It includes the highest elevations in Michigan, including Mount Arvon and Mount Curwood. 

The weather matches the terrain, with higher elevations receiving up to 200 inches of snow a year, snow that covers some parts of this area continuously for nearly seven months a year.

Lake Michigamme, where the town of Michigamme sits, remains a grand lake, one of the largest in the U.P. It is the natural center of the Michigamme Highlands.

The town still has an occasional train come through, although the roundhouse I remember is long gone. Indian Trails still provides a daily connection to the rest of the U.S. “Mt. Shasta,” the local eatery used in the filming of Anatomy of a Murder, is still open, and looks much like I remember it from when I was young.

The name Michigamme Highlands is a new term from the past couple of decades. It is used by the government and larger organizations to recognize the ecological value of this area. It’s not a single entity but rather a patchwork of national, state and private land that is largely available for anyone to use for outdoor activities.

Places to Explore

The most notable set-aside in the Michigamme Highlands is McCormick Wilderness, a huge square tract, with over a dozen lakes and the headwaters of four river systems. It was once a private lodge for the McCormick Family of Chicago.

An aunt and uncle of mine lived there for several years, working to maintain this elaborate lodge. It is now a wilderness area owned by the U.S. National Forest.

Another protected area is Craig Lake State Park, smaller but just as remote. The Nature Conservancy has purchased thousands of acres of land abutting this park, setting it aside forever as wilderness.

There is also a more hospitable state park on Lake Michigamme, plus some Michigan State Forest campgrounds, all great places to set up camp. One of the more dramatic landscapes here is the Sturgeon River Gorge Wilderness, a harrowing mountain canyon where the river cuts through cliffs, waterfalls, and boulder fields in a deep forest.

The North Country National Scenic Trail stretches 4,800 miles from New York State to North Dakota. It follows the full length of the U.P., including through the heart of the Michigamme Highlands. It’s easily accessible at multiple places, including McCormick Wilderness and Craig Lake State Park.

A notable section to check out is Trap Hills, just a bit west. It is another trail through steep ridges, with challenging climbs and sweeping views. It’s widely considered one of the toughest yet most rewarding hikes in the Midwest—and one of the best sections of the North Country Trail in the U.P.

More Good News

There's also some encouraging recent news. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources has purchased a permanent wildlife easement of 73,000 acres within the Michigamme Highlands. This keeps a large forest privately owned but permanently protected from development. It guarantees public access and sustainable logging while preventing subdivision or fragmentation of the land.

If you're in moderately good shape and enjoy outdoor soft adventure—whether day hikes, birding, fishing, hunting, backpacking, car camping or an Airbnb—you may want to consider an off-grid trip into the Michigamme Highlands.

Here’s some additional information to help with a visit:

• Best seasons to visit: July - September, although May, June and October can all be very nice.
• Contact Ottawa National Forest for information on McCormick Wilderness and Sturgeon River Gorge Wilderness at www.fs.usda.gov/r09/ottawa.
• Contact the State of Michigan for information on Michigan State Parks and State Campgrounds: www.michigan.gov/dnr/
  
  
• Nearby towns with services: Ishpeming and Marquette. 
• Maps/trailheads: Michigamme Highlands Map, Trap Hills/North Country Trail

I’ve spent decades returning to the Michigamme Highlands, and each time I’m reminded of a few things. First, not all investments are for physical security. Some are for the soul—and nature may be the best investment of all.

Second, in a world where most assets are constantly traded, upgraded or optimized, places like this are a reminder that preservation can be its own form of return.

And in the Michigamme Highlands, that return still looks a lot like it did when I first walked into that old mine.

My Eight-Year Experience With Micro-Caps

On December 8, 2017, Jason Zweig wrote a fascinating column in The Wall Street Journal titled "Index Funds Rule the World, But Should They Rule You?" The article questioned the dominance of index funds and suggested there might be opportunities in the market’s smallest companies.

My son, who shares little of my investing interest, told me about this article. I was intrigued. Here’s my story.

Mr. Zweig pointed out that there are "orphan stocks"—mostly very small micro-cap stocks under $100 million in market capitalization that generally aren't owned by index funds. Therefore, these mostly abandoned stocks can sell below their fundamental value.

But if for any number of reasons they grow, index funds may be forced to buy them. In theory, this structural pressure should raise the price of these stocks, possibly more than their fundamentals might justify.

I decided to give it a try. I limited myself to two stocks and not a lot of money (about 1% of our life savings). I promised myself that no matter the pain, I would not sell them, arguing that regardless of the results, I would learn something.

I still own one of those stocks. It is up three and a half times from what I paid for it, and last year it was added to the Russell 2000 index.

The second stock I bought dropped dramatically, and then rebounded when a foreign company purchased the entire company. I was now two for two. Feeling a bit more confident, I slowly started buying other orphaned micro-cap stocks, fifteen in total, nine of which I still own.

There’s some additional background that may help with my exercise. Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), one of the foundational theories of modern investing, was developed decades ago. The details are extremely complicated, but essentially it says two things:

First, over time, higher risk investments can provide a higher return. That is, investors are generally paid for the risks they take. For example, U.S. Treasury bonds pay little because they are so safe. Other sectors such as micro-cap stocks and emerging markets tend to provide higher returns to compensate for their risk.

Second—and this is critical—if you own multiple low-correlation assets, your overall risk is reduced, but your expected returns are not. That is, you get at least some of the value that comes from owning higher risk assets but without all of their downside. This is the argument for asset allocation, the strategy of dividing your investments among different asset classes to balance risk and return.

This is what I've commonly done with my investments. No matter how bad things can get, I normally have another investment, such as I-Bonds or REITs, shoring up at least some of my portfolio.

Micro-cap stocks are inherently high-risk investments. But MPT suggests that over time, having some micro-cap stocks in a broad portfolio can reward their investors with a higher return. Diversification with other mostly uncorrelated investments reduces (but does not eliminate) their risk. That is, an investment like this can raise your total portfolio return without adding comparable risk.

I quickly learned some issues with orphaned stocks. They may not regularly trade. It may be difficult to get timely financials. And they can lose a lot of money very quickly.

I soon limited myself to stocks with steady or growing revenue, somewhat stable prices and that trade on either the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq. Let’s say I’m trying to buy very small companies that seem to be doing well but are not overpriced. They have real people working for them providing real goods and services to paying customers.

As usual, I avoid assets that I don't understand, such as utilities or alternative health products, and I avoid hot markets such as AI and gold. I'm drawn to sectors that have some obvious purpose, such as healthcare, industrials and energy.

But probably most importantly, I score all my stocks based on some standard valuation and financial metrics, and I trust this simple scoring more than my instincts.

I've learned a lot with this exercise, but most importantly, I found that MPT does seem to work. When mixed with other, more traditional investments, they can increase your returns without much increase in volatility.

This is another lesson from stocks. While they can’t go lower than zero, they can rise any amount short of infinity. Yes, that may be simple thinking, but in my sample case, about a quarter of my stocks have lost some money. But six of them have at least tripled, far exceeding my losses.

Please note that, statistically, the median micro-cap stock often underperforms the market and that it is not unusual for them to never grow, and to quietly disappear.

There are endless claims that index funds will almost always outperform individual stock portfolios, on the argument that most gains come from very few stocks. In this theory, winning is a matter of luck.

But this has not been my experience. For years, I’ve repeatedly checked this claim on all my stocks, and the story is the same: Over larger time periods, although a majority of the gains are from a minority of the stocks, this minority isn’t small but instead is rather significant. Gains aren’t contained to a couple of lucky buys, but across a broader segment.

I also have frustrations with the fundamental mechanism of indexes, where they own more of overpriced stocks and less of undervalued stocks. I understand that this is due to their structure, but I don’t have to like it.

For example, today the S&P 500 index has about 30% of its value in less than a dozen huge companies, which many valuation models currently consider to be expensive. Indexes love ‘buying high,’ but not me.

I have slowly purchased these orphan stocks over many years, have occasionally made sales and some repurchases, and have sold several outright. I have limited them to a small percentage of our life savings, always prepared to eat a heavy loss.

But according to Quicken, the average annual return of my orphan micro-caps over these eight years, including unrealized gains, has been 39%, beating the average annual return of the U.S. broad market (Russell 3000) over the same period by 26 percentage points. Although there were some better years, my orphan stocks only trailed the U.S. market in one year (2022) and I’ve only realized nominal losses on a couple of stocks.

There are many easy challenges to this record—luck, small sample size, odd concentrations, small company premium, unacceptable volatility, a micro-cap boom. It is entirely possible that this has been a favorable eight-year window for micro-caps, and that another time would produce vastly different results.

I accept all of these as reasonable or even probable. But I obsessively track all my individual stocks and have casually noticed a pattern that individual orphans are highly volatile on a daily basis but collectively are not as scary as advertised.

All but one of my orphan stocks has been U.S.-based, and all were in just five sectors. Most of my investments were in industrials, healthcare and IT (electronics), and almost all the gains were in these areas.

A look under the hood, however, can be scary. It's not uncommon for a stock to drop in value by 50%. Rising or falling by double digits is also common, sometimes in a very short time. This is stomach-churning turmoil that has to be ignored.

But over time and across multiple investments, my returns suggest that they are tolerable in small amounts as part of a diversified portfolio—which is what MPT claims. Yes, arcane language and formulas would dispute much of this—remember that everything today is about indexes—but this is what I’ve thought forever: Indexes aren’t the only game and they have flaws.

My experience in no way suggests that picking stocks is easy or successful. And you can look no further than professionals to show how poorly stock picking normally goes. I recommend it to no one, if only for the angst.

I have learned some investing lessons. First, never own anything you don't understand, whether Apple or bonds or bitcoin. Second, challenge the basics of any company. Are the goods or services sound? Would I work for such a company? Most of the orphan stocks I have purchased have had very little or no long-term debt, solid revenue, and real customers—that is, in a way, my purchases are somewhat conservative, albeit small.

Decide on three or four metrics that you trust as fundamentals that represent a typical company, and then monitor your stocks by them. If a stock seems to be priced far too high or its finances are questionable, consider selling at least some of it regardless of its recent record. 

If a stock drops a lot, before considering a sale, first consider whether you would otherwise buy it. If you would, then don't sell it, but do consider another purchase.

Journal your buys and sells. Write out why you are making your transaction, and then look back for patterns. If nothing else, it might slow you down from a bad move.

Finally, there's another life lesson I've lived by, and that is to not overcomplicate things. In investing, don't agonize over daily price swings. Never time the market—it's a losing game. Activity is not your friend—when in doubt, do nothing.

If I know nothing else about an individual investor, my investing advice is to buy and hold low-cost index funds across a couple of areas, such as U.S. stocks, international equities and bonds. Then rebalance them every year or two. Over time, you won't just do well—you'll outperform most of your friends and nearly all of the overpriced managed equity funds.

But, as Mr. Zweig notes in his article, even ardent proponents of index funds will purchase some individual stocks just “because it’s fun.” To anyone who wants to do this, it isn’t rocket science—it does not require some special genius. And with some work, you too can learn something—and maybe make some money.

My Back Pages

I have a long history with Bob Dylan. When I got my first guitar—mail-ordered from Sears Roebuck for $18—his songs were some of my favorites to play, most notably “Masters of War.”

    Like Judas of old, you lie and deceive…
    You sit back and watch as the death count gets higher…
    You ain't worth the blood that runs in your veins…

And there were so many more: Blowin' in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin', Mr. Tambourine Man.

I never forgot Bob Dylan. Then recently, one of my Pandora radio stations played “My Back Pages” from his 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration—probably the best recording of this song. 

I was nearly in tears listening to it, written in the early 60s, played by a grand mix of musicians from this era who came together to celebrate Bob Dylan's first 30 years as a recording artist.

A friend of mine once told me that you have to have lived the 60s to understand it. It's the period I grew up in. I remember the Vietnam War, including the hundreds of Americans who died every week, sometimes for months at a time.

I remember when Detroit was on fire in 1967. The murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

I remember Nixon and his lying. In the end, he was a crook.

He resigned the same week I boarded a Greyhound bus with my guitar and bag, heading off to New York City to save the world. My elderly friend I made while away asked me to always stay a romantic. I returned on the same bus a year later, older than I was then but still a romantic.

I remember my fateful day in seminary, on my way to a life as a pastor, still trying to save the world. I walked back to my apartment, and within days I quit, returned to college to finish up a degree in mathematics and got myself a job in IT. 

What I had always planned had become more than I could do. 

I never looked back but I also never forgot this side of me. I married the girl of my dreams, had three boys and moved, ironically, to the small northern city Bob Dylan was born in. We bought a house with everything but a white-picket fence. And I got a cabin and a four-wheel drive truck, too.

Oh, I’ve liked my life—the hopes and dreams, for myself and the world. But each step I grew younger. The obvious became less so.

Now retired, I'm still playing my guitar. I spend a lot of time volunteering in the same human services I started as a teenager, still believing I can change something for the better. That maybe showing up, one person at a time, I can pass along something I’ve learned to anyone who cares.

I look at my kids and their generation, and recognize the same urgency I once felt, even if it shows up differently. They see problems we missed and push where we dropped off. And sometimes they simplify things the way we once did—because that’s often how change begins.

Maybe every generation needs its own version of certainty before it can learn humility.

I parted ways with Bob Dylan somewhere in my twenties. His most popular songs became a tiring reminder of bygone days. But a few years ago, I bought Blood on the Tracks and tried Dylan again for the first time, and I saw another side of him.

My Back Pages is a great example of the Bob Dylan I’ve come to know. He wrote it just a few years after he gained his reputation as a leader of the 60s protest movement. But apparently he came to see the black-and-white, good-vs-evil confidence this movement lived by as a rather simplistic view of big problems.

In this controversial song, he was saying that there may be other takes on complex issues like war and equality. That he was so much older then, and younger than that now.

My back pages don’t make me cynical; they make me patient. The work still matters. It just takes longer than a song, longer than a decade—sometimes more than a lifetime.

Christmas 2025

Merry Christmas! We missed you—and a lot more—last Christmas (2024), which I spent in what may be the most expensive building project ever done in Duluth: a towering, 18-story, all-glass medical facility perched on the hillside overlooking Lake Superior.

After fifty years of fighting my bad genes, I had open-heart surgery to repair a failing heart valve. My first hospital stay since birth was quite the experience. Apparently, I’d had the problem for a couple of years—all while Ann and I were walking and hiking at least five miles a day. 

It's hardly an overstatement to say that it took two medical doctors and four cardiologists over a month to figure out what was wrong. Along the way, I was put under anesthesia four different times. 

Although it wasn’t an emergency, I elected to spend Christmas in the hospital just to get it done. It turned into a family affair. Ann, the boys, and I spent the two days prior hanging out at the house where we raised them. I told Ben—who lives in Seattle, already had one kid and whose wife was eight months pregnant—that he didn't have to come.

"I'm not missing this one," he said.

They all got up at 4:30 a.m. to see us off, and they were in the room when I came out of surgery. My first recollections were the boys laughing at something I said. All went well. It's amazing what you can get for $200,000.

Since then, Jason and Ben have each had second children, Henrik and Elle (Jason has the boys; Ben, the girls). Ann restarted her mobile daycare business, with extended stays in both Seattle and St. Paul. We already knew the older grandchildren were above average and—no surprise—the new ones are, too. And good-looking as well.

We’ve continued gatherings in St. Paul, Seattle, Duluth and at our place in Lutsen, Minnesota. Ben and his family were here again for two weeks this summer. One weekend, his brothers and company all joined us at the house—a reminder that this is a one-and-a-half-bath house. It does not handle eleven people well!

We regularly get to all of their homes, and Ann and I have picked up our own travel schedule. Last year we took a two-week road trip through the Deep South. Ann has taken a strong interest in our nation’s history of slavery and racial justice, and it was a stunning trip—starting in Memphis (a surprisingly interesting place), traveling into central Mississippi through very rural areas, then east through Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.

We stayed focused on the Civil Rights Trail, visiting both large and small museums, monuments and heritage markers along the way—including an entire Greyhound bus station in Jackson preserved as part of the story. 

Twice, we spent long stretches talking with men working at small museums, who described their memories as children watching physical confrontations unfold between their communities and the government.

One of my highlights of the year was a long weekend David and I spent in the Upper Peninsula at an Airbnb on a lake not far from the cabin my parents once owned in Michigamme. Michigamme was barely surviving when I was young, and it hasn’t changed much since.

We spent our days riding around the very rural area, stopping by the lake property I once owned, and following parts of the old railroad line engineers once blasted through the Huron Mountains that never saw a train. 

We ate at local spots and checked out the town’s new museum. It brought me back to so many wonderful memories of the area, the people and the places I’ve camped and fished since I was a kid. I can hardly wait to do it again.

Ann first visited the Lutsen Lodge on Lake Superior when she was very young. I was introduced to it through more than forty annual ski trips I started after moving to the Twin Cities. In March, five of us who have been friends since then—plus a few stragglers—will meet up again this winter.

Ann and I both owned lake property before we were married. After selling our last cabin just north of Duluth, we eventually bought a condo managed by the Lutsen Resort. One of my ski friends had already done the same.

Vacationing in Lutsen has become a regular part of our lives, often including the kids and grandkids, who usually spend several days there with us over the Fourth of July. Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior is just one of the grandest places. We never tire of it.

The Nelson family founded Lutsen Lodge in the 19th century and sold it decades ago. The second owner since then is currently sitting in a jumpsuit in a county jail in Michigan, arrested for burning the iconic building down. He'll soon be back in Minnesota facing multiple felony charges. Actions, as it turns out, still have consequences.

Ann has recently reconnected with a couple of college friends who live in Milwaukee and Illinois. This summer, we’re planning to again meet up with them and their spouses for several days at our place in Lutsen to celebrate Ann’s birthday. I met them all at our wedding, and now we’re all friends.

In an odd “what comes around” coincidence, I and a Minneapolis friend I met through Big Brothers over forty years ago and who’s in our ski club now volunteer with SCORE, a national professional mentoring organization. 

It's been one of the most interesting things I've done since leaving work—helping younger people get into and succeed at their own jobs and businesses.

David started playing piano in first grade and still plays. Over a year ago, he contracted with a local restoration shop specializing in rebuilding Steinway grand pianos—fabricating soundboards, installing new actions, restringing and refinishing. Months later, they delivered it into his home. It’s just beautiful—and he’s still the best piano player I’ve ever known personally.

We’re doing well. Winter came fast. It’s been very cold and the ground is covered in beautiful white snow. Let’s call it a U.P. winter!

This week, we’ve been distributing Christmas gifts to kids whose parents are in prison—a program Ann started working with several years ago. It’s good to get gifts to kids who might otherwise have very little at Christmas.

Ann has the house decorated with a real Christmas tree. She’s making cardamom bread as I write, with plans for cookies and other fun foods. We’ll be in St. Paul for Christmas.

Wishing you all a wonderful and blessed holiday season, and a great 2026!

Ann and Jon

And as Linus reminds us every year:

“Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people… Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”