From the Editors: December 2025

lagano

This is the third year now that I've had the task to research, compile, and write our annual Year in Review feature. And while it can be an overwhelmingly large chunk of print (this year's clocking in at nearly 4,800 words) it is a creative challenge that I truly look forward to taking on. It gives me the opportunity to look back at all that has come and gone within our year. But it can also make time feel really weird.

This year, in particular, has seemed painfully long. Each new day, a full frontal firehose attack of awfulness that can make the days that fill up with keeping informed about it all, enduring it all, responding to it all, organizing to combat it all… feel endless. But there are many, many other ways to measure a year.

In the alt-monthly publishing sphere, we tend to measure time in terms of issues. The year passes with what has to be accomplished within the month in order to meet deadlines, flesh out themes, and produce a paper on time. June is not just June, it is the month in which we select and photograph and write about 40 young people for the July issue. February is spent eating food all across the county to share our favorites in the March Food issue. And December will be spent compiling the results of our Best of Erie contest (voting is open through Dec. 15 FYI). In this way, every year is comfortingly familiar while also holding the creative excitement of figuring out ways to make these issues new and fresh, time and again.

We can feel time move through art – through the music and books and movies that define the periods of our lives. Music has a special kind of time-traveling power – listen to a song that was a young-adult obsession and you are magically whisked back to that time. Our regular album review contributors (Julia, Nathaniel, Aaron, Melissa, Nick, and Larry) share their top five lists from this year within, and share those albums which may become the stuff of time-traveled nostalgia in a decade or two. Our Erie Reader Book Club's first anniversary was eclipsed in April. Ally Kutz has summed up the literary experience that was our year with that core group of thoughtful, lovely people. Our film reviewer Forest looks back at his cinematic experiences of the year and reminds us that watching movies alone at home is not the only option – getting out and experiencing movie magic in any kind of venue makes the experience deeper – ultimately making the time we spend watching things on screens more meaningful.

That which we use to measure time: our work, our hobbies, the music, films, and books we enjoy, and the people we go through it all with, give us chronological touchpoints of joy, lightness, love, creativity, and togetherness, even through undeniably dark times. So often, when everything feels urgent, and stressful, and demanding – it's all too easy to miss the beauty that will ultimately truly define these days in your memory. Time, no matter how you measure it, has the audacity to move forward whether we notice it or not. And no matter how old you are, these are the days that will be the stuff of nostalgia all too soon.