It’s not quite Christmas, but for our purposes it’s close enough, so I’m making our customary announcement that the holidays are here and we’ll be powering down a bit here at The Hayride.

It’s been a terrific year for us – having added some new contributors and bringing some syndicated content that many of you have told us has enhanced the site. We’ve had our best year for traffic since 2017 – which is a reflection of the quality of content on the site, but it’s also a product of social media platforms letting up on their suppression of our articles, something that has been a persistent problem.

It seems that we survived that injustice, and now perhaps we’ve outlasted it. For that we’re thankful.

But today is the 22nd of December, Christmas is Thursday and the chances of many of you seeing much of anything we post, unless it’s covering some earth-shaking event in Louisiana politics which is exceedingly unlikely to happen before New Year’s Day, are awfully slim based on our experience.

It’s an obvious time to power down and go into a little bit of journalistic hibernation.

We’ll have some stuff at the site this week and next week, so it’s not like The Hayride is going to become a wasteland of content. But I’m not going to be posting daily, a lot of our usual posters are taking the rest of the month off, and so we’re going to go from six  or eight things a day to more like two or three.

As such, let me take this time to thank you. Thanks for your readership, your feedback, your social media shares, and your loyalty to the site. It means everything. And I’d like to wish you a Merry Christmas and, if we don’t cross paths before then, a Happy New Year!

And also, a plug – if you’re looking for a last-minute gift, there’s always my latest novel Blockbusters, available at Amazon. Nothing but five-star reviews so far, you know.