I introduced the concept of seasonal themes for The New Leaf Journal in my October 10, 2025 post titled Inflatable Fall Crow in Cobble Hill. As I noted in that post, I borrowed the idea from Richard MacManus’ post on his Cybercultural online magazine titled Seasons: A Fine Way To Structure a Website or Blog in 2025. The seasonal concept appeals to me because The New Leaf Journal has had a certain seasonal sensibility since its earliest days (see e.g., Welcome to The Emu Café, The Trees Leaf in May, and New Bark Town and The New Leaf Journal Slogan. I admittedly did not do too much with my cobbled-together theme for fall 2025, but with winter having begun on the morning of December 21 and our having a couple of days remaining in 2025, I deem it as good a time as any to introduce a theme for the winter season in The New Leaf Journal.
It snowed heavily in my native Brooklyn on December 26-27. Fortunately, I discovered on the 27th that most of the areas I walk have been well-shoveled and/or salted. Lest anyone things this is to be expected, I can confirm that some areas of Brooklyn are often less well-off in this regard (looking at Bay Ridge and Kensington from past excursions). But shoveling seemed like as good a place to start as any.
I have been busy in recent weeks. Being busy made it hard to publish some works on The New Leaf Journal that had I hoped to have done in 2025. In fact, I have some outstanding projects which trace their origins to 2024 (my recent follow-up post on Dragonair’s catch-rate in Pokémon Yellow was a long-pending project which did make it into our 2025 archive). The backlog will affect 2026: I still need to put together our most-read article lists for our 2025 year-end review (see 2024), and I have a long way to go before I am sufficiently caught up on the year- that- was in anime in 2025 to publish that year-end review (see 2024, which I admittedly published at the end of January).
A backlog of unfinished and pending projects has a tendency to bury potential new projects. While it is far too early to announce a theme for spring, our theme for winter will be shoveling unfinished projects from the to-do list so that we will have a relatively clean slate when the trees begin to leaf again (save for the trees which exhibit perennial veridity, of course). Speaking of to-do lists, I have an interesting idea in that area tied to my recent string of articles on website .txt files (see carbon.txt, ads.txt, and trust.txt): Add that one to the to-do list too.
I will submit that the to-do list extends beyond The New Leaf Journal. I have a few clerical real-life tasks to attend to, so I will work on those while cleaning up The New Leaf Journal’s backlog (I suppose we can count watching anime from the 2025 summer and fall seasons as a real-life task which happens to benefit The New Leaf Journal).
Our winter season theme is not intended to be all-encompassing. I will publish articles that are not long-standing projects or to-do list housekeeping (or snow-shoveling to stay on theme). But readers can expect to see me prioritize articles consistent with the theme. While I will not reference the theme in every on-theme post, I will append a “Winter 2026” tag to articles which I consider to be part of the project introduced above.
