Happy holidays and best wishes for 2025

Thirty Four Kilometres from where I live is Newgrange, and this morning the winter solstice took place. The site is believed to be over 5000 years old, and today is the shortest day and the longest night in Ireland.

Its a time of stories being told around fires, of staying close to the light and ignoring the darkness around. And the world today is in a very, very dark place. So we console ourselves with stories, tales and conversations. Interaction and sociablity, a sense of place and time.

I think personally, writers, poets and artists of every shape and form have to step up and use what we do to shine a light.

Illuminate the way with our craft for the coming year, which the pessimist in me sees as getting worse rather than better. 

We are the bearers of light, information, education and the distracting of people's woes.

I'd like to wish you all (those who celebrate), a very happy Christmas, a prosperous 2025 and like the chink of sunlight that seeped through the stones, I wish you all a creative and enlightening new year.

Feile Nollaig Shona Duit.

Robert Craven