In my family, we have a tradition of making written predictions every Christmas. It started when my father used to write down in a little notebook his guess for when the spring peepers (frogs) would start making sounds from the ponds behind our house. Then it grew, and we'd sit around making predictions about family and about politics. One year we predicted my sister would have a boyfriend, and she did.
We lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, so even though our house was in a semi-rural part of what is now an absurdly overdeveloped concrete jungle, we subscribed to the Washington Post, and politics was huge. At Christmas 1973, when I was nine, we made predictions about what would happen to Nixon (nobody was right). The 1976 presidential elections were a big deal, and we made predictions for both the primaries and the general. In 1979, my dad correctly predicted Reagan's win, and we tried to make predictions for the decade of the 1980s. My grandfather even predicted his own death during that decade, but was wrong (he got it right the next time).
This year, my brother made a prediction that both of us want to see proved wrong.
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