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Holiday bliss, Santa list, central Nebraska

Guy Speckman by Guy Speckman
December 23, 2025
in Ponder the Thought
Santa Claus
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Greetings from the throes of holiday bliss.

Just kidding, I’m just surviving all of this. I crave and thrive on the mundane drum beat of my normal life and holidays disrupt the rhythm of that drumbeat, so I just try to survive. Pray for me.

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Kansas City Mayor Lucas’s legacy appears to be headed directly for losing an MLB and NFL team and adding a bunch of street cars and a women’s soccer team during his tenure. Not sure that will be viewed favorably in the history books, but I’m no expert on history books.


I don’t want you guys to be jealous of me, but my daughter moved from Kansas City to Nebraska last year and apparently that is where I will now be spending a portion of my holidays for the foreseeable future. Before you jump to conclusions, let me clarify. She didn’t move to Omaha or even Lincoln. She moved to central Nebraska. I had no idea this part of the world even existed. It’s like western Kansas, but worse. It’s basically desert land with wintry weather added for a little spice.

Pray for me.


Not that you care, but she’s marrying a young man next year that we like quite a bit, despite his unfortunate geographic predicament. He speaks fluent farm and can move a pivot irrigation system when necessary, so that seems positive. He’s not feeding the world, but he does contribute to turning corn into combustible engine fuel, which falls in line with my political leanings, so we got that going for us.


Speaking of combustible engines. Ford has written off a few billion dollars from the Biden era decisions to try to move us to electric trucks. Oddly enough, I said that electric trucks and cars were not ready for Midwestern prime time back when they started spewing all that nonsense. If someone at Ford had just paid Foley for subscription, they would have saved a billion or so dollars.


We’ve officially crossed over the halfway point of darkness. Last Sunday at 9:03 a.m. marked the least amount of sunlight in our days. Now we trudge forward back to days that don’t start and end in darkness. I don’t mean to impress you with my Google skills, but apparently all this darkness is the result of the tilt of the earth. Apparently, it reaches 23.5-degree tilt, basically the equivalent of the tilt that grandma gets after three or four holiday cocktails
.


I’m writing this before the Chiefs potential news on Monday of this week. Any fool that has driven around Arrowhead and then driven around the Legends can see what an easy decision it is for the Chiefs to move to Kansas City, Kan. and quite honestly I don’t care much where they are, but that will be a sad day.

For those of us that can remember staying in the Adams Mark and even the Holiday Inn across from Arrowhead, you can remember the vibrance of the area on game days. Except for the stadium grounds, the area is now more reminiscent of a vibrant homeless population and drug market. If the Chiefs continue to exist in that area, I’d be shocked and so should anyone with eyes.

(Guy Speckman can reached surviving the holidays)

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Guy Speckman

Guy Speckman

Guy Speckman is a Landmark contributing columnist with his Ponder the Thought column. Speckman is the former owner of the Savannah Reporter, where the column appeared for nearly two decades. Speckman is a former city government manager, serving as city administrator in Maysville, Plattsburg and Savannah before entering business. He is a graduate of Northwest Missouri State University (1989). He is originally from Plattsburg, Missouri. He and his wife own and operate a real estate valuation firm and a daily legal newspaper and are the parents of two grown children.

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