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November 22, 2025 
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Good morning. Thanksgiving’s this coming week. How can we keep a busy holiday season from overwhelming us?
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| María Jesús Contreras |
Pushing off
We’re on the precipice of The Holidays now, again: where has the time gone, where has the year gone, where is my life going, etc. If you’re traveling for Thanksgiving, perhaps you’re already gone, reading this in the security line at an airport less crowded than you expected. Do you dare admit some optimism, that this trip could go off without incident? But this is just the beginning of your travels, of course. Who knows if the good luck and the good weather will hold — here’s hoping.
The holiday season has its own engine, one that’s been gaining momentum since Halloween and will shift into ever higher gears as we hit the straightaway that leads to the year’s end. There’s an urgency that can feel both exciting and overwhelming. There’s a tension in all the stock holiday scenes: cheery and/or awkward gatherings, delicious and/or overcooked proteins, snowy and/or soggy backdrops. Not many days left, and so even in moments of abundance, there’s a scarcity underneath.
How much of this is real, and how much of it is just our acceptance of the fiction that the end of the calendar year is a deadline by which certain things must be accomplished? Remember when marketers tried to scare you by announcing there were only so many “shopping days until Christmas” left? In the era of “buy it now” and same-day shipping, a shopping day seems quaint. Yes, vacation days and insurance deductibles must be exploited or lost, but otherwise, there’s a comfort in knowing the end of the year isn’t really a finish line in any meaningful way.
An old friend wrote me a month or two ago suggesting coffee, asking for dates that worked this fall. I forgot to respond, and this week she followed up: “Frankly you could suggest Jan. dates — I get how time is compressing right now!” My immediate response was one of shame. I’d dropped the ball! And then that feeling of scarcity: Yes, time is compressing, and there’s not enough of it, and let me count exactly how many days are left in the year so I can really feel the squeeze. (After today, 40!) And then gratitude for the reminder: Some things can wait until January.
Most things, really, can wait until January, and maybe they should. If your holiday season already feels too packed, here, on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, then see what might be shifted. If you’re dreading that post-holiday lull when Christmas trees lie felled on the curb and you have no reason to wear your “fun” sweaters, then now’s the time to joyously, eagerly move what you can to next year. Your holiday to-dos and celebrations need to stay put (although, if your family is flexible, no one’s stopping you from moving them, too), but the optional stuff — the coffee dates and catch-ups, the movies and books you keep meaning to get to — won’t expire.
Every first weekend of January, I go away with the same group of friends. It’s a tradition that feels defiant: In the severe landscape of the Northeastern winter, when December’s merrymaking is receding to memory, there’s a reprieve, a reminder that we don’t have to get all our fun in before the clock strikes midnight.
Trump-Mamdani Meeting
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| Eric Lee for The New York Times |
- President Trump heaped praise on Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor-elect, during his visit to the White House. “I feel very confident that he can do a very good job,” Trump said.
- The meeting seemed to change Trump’s view of Mamdani, a democratic socialist whom he had previously described as a “lunatic.”
- After a reporter asked Mamdani about his calling Trump a “despot” on election night, Trump said, “I’ve been called much worse than a despot, so it’s not that insulting.”
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More Politics
International
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| President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Wednesday. Ozan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
Other Big Stories
- Eli Lilly, the maker of hugely popular weight loss drugs, has reached $1 trillion in value. It’s the first health care company to hit that milestone.
- A series of storms moving across the country could complicate Thanksgiving travel. Here’s a look at weather around the U.S.
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Movies
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| Ariana Grande, left, and Cynthia Erivo in “Wicked: For Good.” Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures |
- “Wicked: For Good” features two new songs that help Glinda and Elphaba grapple with the choices that change their destinies. Director Jon M. Chu insists the songs were added for plot development and not for a shot at an Oscar nomination.
- A new documentary featuring senior members of the government claims that the U.S. is hiding what it knows about U.F.O.s. The filmmaker screened it for House members this week.
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Music
- The British government is taking on ticket scalpers. New legislation backed by Coldplay, Dua Lipa and Radiohead would make it illegal to resell entertainment or sports tickets for more than face value.
- More than 30 years after finding two unsigned compositions for organ in a Belgian library, a Harvard researcher has announced that he knows who composed them: Johann Sebastian Bach.
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Theater
- This new version of “Oedipus” on Broadway casts Sophocles’s tragic king as a politician in an age where elected officials can get away with almost anything.
- A theater director in Switzerland recruited amateur actors that had anorexia. One of the performers called it empowering. But was it unethical?
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Opera
- The hero of San Francisco Opera’s latest world premiere isn’t a handsome prince, but an ancient monkey king who was hatched from a magic rock. Our reviewer had effusive praise for the production, which will be available on streaming services.
- Daniele Rustioni, the Metropolitan Opera’s new principal guest conductor, is only 42. But he has been called a “maestro of the old school,” following in the footsteps of Italian luminaries like Arturo Toscanini.
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More Culture
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| One of the virtual reality rooms at the Netflix House. Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times |
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