Dear Santa,

Don’t quite know how you do it, old fella, but you managed to get through another Christmas Eve bringing happiness and flat-screens to kids of all ages. Hope you enjoyed the homemade eggnog and bottle of small-batch bourbon I left by the tree. Figured you could use a nightcap.

Truth is, we could all probably use a friendly snort given the remarkable — some would even say epic — year just ending. I won’t trouble you with the details of a year that seemed to veer from triumph one minute (Kate and Will, SEAL Team 6, Tim Tebow) to the edge of the abyss the next (the euro crisis, say it ain’t so Joe, a Congress even more unpopular than Richard Nixon after Watergate), which, frankly, is why I’m looking forward to a quiet and uneventful Christmas Day of family and food and maybe a nice winter’s snooze over an old movie on Turner Classics.

Moreover, with New Year’s mania mercifully still a few days off, I thought this morning might be an opportune moment to get my Christmas 2012 wish list off to you ahead of the pack. Unlike Congress and most big banks these days, you have a swell history of making wishes come true for everyone except possibly Herman Cain and the Kims (the late dictator and the former NBA bride.)

So here’s my highly personal and somewhat embarrassing Christmas list a little early. Hey, like a certain eponymous Congressman tweeting in his Fruit of the Looms, I figure it can’t hurt to ask.

First off, like 70 million of my fellow Americans, I’d like to lose 30 pounds and not have to go on a reality TV show to do it. Prior to the holidays I was being so good, skipping sweets and red meat, and even exercising to the point where I’d dropped a few pounds. But along came the holidays, and suddenly I was back inhaling cakes and cookies and candies like Jabba the Hut at the Golden Corral chocolate “Wonderfall.”

Yesterday I was out walking the dog, and a cute little tyke tugged at his mother’s sleeve and declared, “Look, Mommy! It’s a Macy’s parade balloon!” That’s it, Santa! I’ve had enough. All I want for Christmas next year is a waistline somewhere in the upper 30s, which probably means it’s gonna be more hot yoga than hot gingerbread for this ever-expanding man.

That means, of course, I’ll probably have to give up popcorn at the movies or at least downsize to the kiddie-size box. That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make, Nick, in the interest of improved health and fitting into my seat, but could you please do something about all these stupid 3-D movies? Wearing those silly sunglasses in a dark theater gives me a headache, and paying an extra three bucks for this dubious privilege makes me feel as abused as a Netflix subscriber and surlier than a sober Charlie Sheen.

Of course, maybe I’ll just skip going to the movies altogether and go ride the lovely bike you and a secret Santa brought madame and me over the holidays. I’ve already taken it for a long spin, dear fellow, and must say I envision lots of happy moments pedaling merrily though the countryside once I learn how to use all the fancy gears without falling off or rear-ending a tree. I just wish I didn’t have to wear one of those funny safety helmets and those tight Spandex shorts and brightly colored jerseys that make me look either like a giant Italian flag or the world’s largest mobile cannoli.

Speaking of Italy, I sure wish I could learn to speak fluent Italian. I can’t tell you why I’ve always secretly wished I could speak Italian except possibly because I was so terrible at French and am hardly better at English most days.

But enough of me, Santa. All I really need for next Christmas is to be able to see my, uh, feet again.

Peace on Earth?

Let’s move on to the world we live in. I do wish nature would give us a break this coming year, Santa. The United States experienced a record number of weather disasters in 2011, each one costing more than $1 billion.

Arizona suffered its most devastating wildfires in history, and Texas had its worst protracted drought. April was the most active month for tornadoes in U.S. history, as the poor folks of Joplin, Mo., can attest, and May brought historic flooding along the Mississippi River. And a freak early snowstorm in October left more than 3 million people with heat and lights for weeks in the Northeast.

Maybe trumping all in the natural disaster category, Japan’s 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami resulted in more than 20,000 dead or missing and produced the most unimaginable scenes of destruction since World War II. The resulting Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown put the world on edge for weeks.

So, Santa baby, if you please, could you at least try to do something about this crazy weather? This week we had balmy temps more appropriate for a South Beach pool party than North Carolina in late December. Would a white Christmas next year really be too much to ask?

If not that, at least how about an Arab spring that brings even more representative government and more economic opportunity to this crowded, troubled orb? Inspired by exploding grass-roots citizen protests from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to the canyons of Wall Street, Time magazine this week declared the ubiquitous “Protester” its Person of the Year for 2011, sparking half a dozen major uprisings and the removal of several dictators whose people had simply suffered enough.

Others are certain to follow. Friendly advice to Syria’s Bashir Assad and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Now’s a good time to check on your 401Ks and think about a sunny clime where you won’t be recognized. Best to stay away from windows, too.

Some see this spreading civil disobedience as signs of a once-stable world coming apart at the seems, while others — like me, Santa — feel a welcome paradigm shift may finally be under way in which the people of the world reach for something better — if not our brand of corporate democracy, well, at least perhaps something we can all live with. One prominent historian recently pointed out that we are actually living in an age of radically declining violence. In some measurable ways, he argues, we may be moving into the most peaceful time mankind has ever known. So maybe “peace on earth” isn’t just a nice line from a Christmas carol, huh?

Need Term Limits

On the other hand, depending on whom you talk to — a stockbroker with a new Lexus in the driveway or college students peaceably assembled and pepper-sprayed by a bonehead security man — it’s sure been a “December to remember,” with a Congress that clearly puts party above country on both sides of the aisle and a host of presidential contenders who make the cast of “Survivor” seem like Mensa intellectuals and constitutional statesmen, here one day, gone the next. A slice of pizza, anyone?

One thing I seriously wish, Santa, is we’d wind up this pointless war in Afghanistan. Starting tomorrow. Enough already. No matter what a battalion of national security experts and overpaid defense contractors claim, we achieved our stated objective and got the world’s baddest dude — Geronimo! — between the eyes, paying for it with far too much American blood, talent and treasure. It’s time to pack up and come home to a heroes’ welcome.

Anyone who honestly thinks we can turn Afghanistan into a civil functioning nation should go spend an hour reading about that country’s tribal history. And if you don't think history repeats itself, consider how this nation has twice teetered over financial default.

Sorry about the soap box, Santa.

I guess like almost everybody else in America these days, I’m pretty fed up with the people we keep electing to high public office and watching them get rich while middle America vanishes. Here’s something I never thought I’d ever say: I dearly wish we had term limits — 12 years for everybody on Capitol Hill and one six-year term for president. I’d like Congress to have to pay for the same health care plan I pay for and be legally prohibited from accepting a dime as a lobbyist after their true “service” to the nation. I know it sounds nuts, but let’s have a citizen government again.

There. I’ve had my say. I feel so much better. I really will retire the soap box now.

List of Farewells

On that note of valediction, however, I do wish I’d gotten to say a heartfelt goodbye to a few of my heroes who departed the scene this year.

Reynolds Price, my favorite American novelist by a long country mile, quietly departed the scene last January, an uncommonly graceful writer whose brilliant stories and essays about faith and struggle among rural North Carolinians simply trying to find their place in the world established him as the finest Southern writer of many generations. Some years ago I met Price briefly through a mutual friend at Duke, where he taught for decades, and found him to be just as warm and gracious as his stunningly carpentered prose.

Rather astonishingly, Santa, Price’s name got left off both Time’s and Newsweek’s tributes to significant public figures who left us for new horizons this year. But so did a number of others whose contributions to this world will long outlive them.

My personal list of long farewells — folks I only knew and admired from afar — includes former Czech president and dissident poet Vaclav Havel, poet Ruth Stone, actors Harry Morgan and James Arness, journalists Tom Wicker, David Broder and Christopher Hitchens, bluesmen Willie “Big Eyes” Smith and Pinetop Perkins, baseball sluggers Harmon Killibrew and Duke Snyder, rocker Andrew Gold, and good old Andy Rooney, TV’s greatest curmudgeon.

Apple’s Steve Jobs passed, too, a young guy who changed a world that is changing more rapidly than ever before our eyes.

His last words were reportedly, “Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.”

I kind of wish we knew what Jobs was thinking — or maybe even seeing there at the end. Or was it merely the beginning?

In either case, rest well, big fella. Your good work is over for another year.

And our good work is just beginning. Oh, how I wish us all good luck in 2012.

Jim Dodson, Sunday essayist for The Pilot and editor of PineStraw magazine, can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.