I’m not going to pretend, friends, that America in the year 2018 and The Spirit of Christmas are subjects easily corralled into the same article, except for the intervention of a truly weird coincidence. For in describing to you the enigma of the recently deceased Bud Sife we’ll be catapulted into a zone where a civilization in near collapse and A Merry Christmas can and do absolutely exist, side by side.

There are the tales — probably apocryphal but possibly not — that still pass around about Woodstock Times reporters from the paper’s earliest decades, as well as scribblers from earlier townie publications, who’d been captured and detained because of their Santa Arrival Knowledge.

The tree, now standing on the village green, was headed for the wood chipper.