Gripped by Vortex
It is the season when I feel the undertow of email offers, direct mail catalogues, and the bombast of television commercials. They won’t get me.
Feeling like you are in the holiday vortex? Here is Merriam-Webster’s definition of vortex: Something that resembles a whirlpool.
It is the season when I feel the undertow of email offers, direct mail catalogues, and the bombast of television commercials. They won’t get me. I have lashed myself to the knowledge of our storage unit containing all the stuff we have no room for at home—clothes, furniture, paintings, books, bicycles, cookware, and appliances. Our grandson wants an electric keyboard to begin piano lessons. I would like to give him the one we purchased for my youngest son twenty-five years ago. It never led to any concert recitals. But, by golly, it survives in storage! Who knows, this could be its break-out moment. (Except we would have to get it to France.)
Less imaginary than the holiday vortex, right now, is the polar vortex. We are definitely in the grip of that. We shouldn’t be surprised it’s cold outside. We live in New Hampshire, right? But beginning in January last year, bitterly cold weather—single digits, down to zero—has been more commonplace. At home, we had to supplement our firewood supply last February with BioBricks (think, wood pellets) because it had taken more than expected to keep two stoves running to that point. I heard others say the same thing when we emerged from our dwellings in spring.
If you don’t know, the polar vortex is a mass of frigid air that hovers over the poles, kept there by the trade winds. Occasionally, warm air from below manages to disrupt the trades enough to cause the vortex to “wobble,” which is the technical term science uses in this case. The vortex goes from being a stable cold air mass over the pole to a punch-drunk fighter meandering around the ring. If the vortex wobbles enough, it can divide in two, sending one half of itself to Siberia, and the other half to us (so that it feels like Siberia).
They are saying 2024 was the warmest year on record, globally, beating out 2023. Ironic, that the incidence of warmer weather is triggering the extreme cold winters for us in northern parts of the hemisphere. Unfortunately, for fans of 2024, the year may not hold the record much longer. The polar vortex has wobbled especially early in the 2025/2026 winter season, implying that when the results are in, 2025 will have been an even warmer year.
Locally, we should be concerned that one vortex does not fuel another. This holiday season—every holiday season—it is important we don’t wobble on the importance of shopping local. As a former retail owner, we dreaded the arrival of frozen temperatures on business. Cold and bitter wind were always impediments to store traffic, more so than snow (unless it was a blizzard). A little snow this time of year is festive, the perfect thing to accompany the sound of store bells ringing as you go through the door. But when the windchill is -10, Amazon can seem like a cozy alternative to bundling-up, warming the car, and trudging between neighboring boutiques.
Don’t let them get you. There is nothing as cold as an empty storefront, and it is going to be cold enough around here for a while without any more of those. So bundle up. We live in New Hampshire, right?
Published in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, December 16, 2025