Thank You for Reading Contra

Sliding into the New Year.

My kids are playing with their German cousins in the next room, building odd little creatures and machines with bricks plucked from a mountain of Legos that I will end up cleaning later. But that’s okay. I like seeing what their imaginations turn out.

There’s a saying here that people use on New Year’s Eve: Guten Rutsch. It means “good slide,” and is a s…