Bay Weekly’s 51st issue of the year celebrates family, the warm nest where we are born and nurtured.     For this is the season of birth, which we enter each year in hopes of renewal.     If it seems to you a little odd — as it does to me — that our cultural feasts of rebirth fall in the darkest time of the year, when in our cold clime is just setting in, there’s good reason.     This week’s solstice begins a new year...

After the war was over, the Founding Fathers must have been at loose ends.     Winning your independence from the past is one thing. Creating a future from scratch is entirely another. Like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution’s laid out a map of lofty principles. But if every step of daily life had to be invented anew to conform to those principles, revolutionary life would have been very existential.     It’s easier to change our belief...

Blub … blub … blub … blub …             That’s the rhythm that tells you your Southern Maryland stuffed ham is boiling its way to perfection. So says Celeste Furey of St. Leonard, hostess of an annual pre-Thanksgiving all-day stuffing party.     Blub … … … … blub … … … … blub … … … … blub … … …...

Well that’s that. The votes are counted. Losers are mourning, winners celebrating their mandates, that word pundits love. The future is beginning.     There’s a finality to those black-and-white results that’s too simple for real life.     To see the fuller truth, read down any column of figures. Bite into any pie chart.     You see that we are of two minds, often divided by the thinnest of margins.     President...