From the Editors: December 2023

Nick Warren

The story of Jim Henson's well-loved holiday movie, Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas is a play on the classic story of the Gift of the Magi, where Emmet Otter and his ma, living in poverty, sacrifice their only means of income in hopes to win the grand prize of $50 in a local talent contest to buy each other special gifts for the holiday. Their talent is overlooked and their efforts are in vain however, as a band of rough-and-tumble out-of-towners who call themselves the Riverbottom Nightmare Band win first place and take home the prize money.

Rather than winning the grand (but singular prize) Emmet and his mother are overheard singing their moving melody after the talent show and are given a weekly job performing at a local restaurant. Emmet and his mother win something better than one big payout: they win the comfort of stability. Their creativity, their music, their art has provided them a better life and they achieved this by risking everything, putting themselves out there, and showing the world their gifts.

Our annual Year in Review issue gives us at the Reader an opportunity to look back on this past year and assess what risks Erie has taken, how we have put ourselves out there, and how we have shown the world our gifts. And sometimes we've stumbled — within this issue we'll look at those stumbles in our Year in Review feature (in particular the local politics section) and through an in-depth look at the local child care crisis and how we're (under)prepared to deal with it.

But as Emmet and Ma sing in the classic "Ain't No Hole in the Washtub," "if you look to the good side, falling down's a free ride."

Here in Erie, we aren't sitting around hoping to win the grand prize, we're working hard for our paychecks (and have been for over 100 years — as you'll see in the feature from Jonathan Burdick this month), with the goal of earning the comfort of stability. We've seen this work pay off through the progress our city has celebrated over the past year — the local successes of small businesses and nonprofits, the artists, musicians, curators, and creatives that make Erie more interesting, and the local activists who show us what changes need to be made and force us to have hard conversations. Some major changes combined with small acts of love and effort truly have us looking on the good side.

So as the credits roll on another year, it's our hope that we can all take stock of what we have here in Erie, do our best to make the best of it, have the courage to speak up when we can't, and keep working hard to make it better.