A message to readers from columnist Sean Kirst, 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Seamus Kirst

A little story about the card you see, just above these words. My family was all together for Thanksgiving a few weeks ago — meaning my wife Nora and our grown children Sarah, Seamus and Liam. One night on that long weekend, before Seamus headed back to his home in Brooklyn, he and I took the dog for a long walk just after a heavy Syracuse snowfall.

It was an old-school storm, the kind of beautiful yet relentless snow I’ve identified with this city since Nora and I arrived here, more than 36 years ago. Seamus and I headed toward Onondaga Park, a well-loved hub between multiple city neighborhoods. It is a place where my kids spent a whole lot of time when they were little, and one of my absolute favorite nighttime spots on the planet during the Yuletide.

In 1990, when Sarah and Seamus were infants and Nora and I were flat broke and renting a place not far from that park, I went out alone to walk another never-forgotten-dog on Christmas Eve — a walk that began with me quietly fretting about money and the bills, though those thoughts quickly turned into something else.

I was alone with that dog on a snowy night, and I looked at the Christmas lights from nearby homes on the hill toward Robineau Road reflecting off the dark water of Hiawatha Lake, and the sheer quiet beauty of all of it swept away all my petty fears about our bank account. It occurred to me that the thing Nora and I had always wanted most… to have children when the doctors said it was improbable, if not impossible… had happened twice, in a swift and against-all-odds way.

Then and now and forever, that was Christmas.

So it has always meant something to be at that park, beneath the streetlights in the snow. A day or two after Thanksgiving, by sheer chance, Seamus and the dog and I were the first ones to walk the trails since the snow began to fall, and we were swept up that night in a simple truth:

A hardy garden rose persists the day after the first lake effect storm of the season in Central New York Tuesday, November 28, 2023. Credit: Michelle Gabel | Central Current

Go to the right place — as in that park, on winter evenings — and it is hard to imagine a city more beautiful than Syracuse, in the snow.

A Christmas tree was already glittering in the gazebo at the lake, a tree put out there each year by some inspired neighbors. As for the dog, he is 11 and represents our favorite breed: A Mattydale terrier, who came to us more than a decade ago straight from the SPCA shelter. He is a big and soulful guy, with the ears of a German shepherd and the markings of a pit, and he still lights up with that sense of joy and wonder that animates even old dogs in new snow — one of the many ways in which, well, that old dog and I are much alike.

I was focused on his reaction, letting him lead the way, when my kid quietly fell behind and took the photo you see above this piece. In the way that so often is the best with things that are unplanned, the image became a perfect choice for our Christmas card for 2025, designed as all our family’s cards have been for decades by old friends Collin Becker and Sharon Pickard at Industrial Color Labs on Lodi Street — where Sharon, by the way, is retiring after more than 40 years of memorable work, while Collin is shifting to a consolidated Industrial Color Labs location in Fayetteville once the longtime shop on Lodi closes in a few days.

Anyway, I share the card this morning because the message seems especially appropriate for all of you. We had a friend, the late Ceil St. Onge, who ran a legendary neighborhood tavern – Lee’s Miniature Falls – in Niagara Falls, and always treated Nora and I like family. For years afterward at Christmas, when she sent us a card, she would always write beneath whatever wording it provided:

“Read the card. I mean it.”

Let me echo that here, with our card. Eight months ago, I formally retired from my work of nine years as a metropolitan columnist at The Buffalo News — ‘retired’ only in the sense that for the first time in my life, I now receive a pension — to return to Syracuse as a columnist at the new Central Current, this digital, no-paywall news site.

It is the sixth stop — and I expect it will be the final one — of my journalism career. To work for the paper I grew up reading, in Buffalo — the birthplace of my parents, home to countless relatives, the civic centerpiece of the region where I was raised — was a deeply spiritual and unforgettable experience.

Yet in a way I hope all of this somehow captures, coming back to Central New York carries a kind of fitting, one-last-time emotional power. The Current has no paywall and thus becomes a once-in-a-lifetime chance — after more than 50 years in journalism — to gather together digital readers from every Upstate community where I ever wrote: Dunkirk and Fredonia and Rochester and Niagara Falls and Oswego and Buffalo and all these years, all these friends, all this life in Syracuse.

It provides an opportunity to work with a young and inspired staff and to reunite with some brilliant local photographers — with a couple examples of their winter work showcased within this piece.

As for what it means to be writing again, from a newsroom in downtown Syracuse? This is the place where we raised our kids and where we went from not-so-long-out-of-college into parents with gray hair, the place where Nora built her career as a city grade school teacher and the place where I figured out who I am and what I ought to be as a journalist…

The place where so many people trusted me to care of their stories.

I was not sure, coming back, just how it would go. It has been a decade since I left my position of roughly a quarter-century as a columnist with The Post-Standard, another job where longtime colleagues came to feel like family. Most important, I made connections in that newsroom with several generations of readers, and I had no idea if the intensity or intimacy of those bonds could or would be sustained… in a new place and a new way… a decade later.

The bison herd at the Onondaga Nation during a snowstorm, Jan. 4, 2024. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

Allow me to back into the answer. I’m officially part-time at The Current, since my full-time gig is teaching journalism and storytelling at Le Moyne College. But the flood of warmth and support and suggestions from readers leaves me with a “problem” that involves one of my greatest revelations of this Christmas.

There is so much left to write I don’t know how or when to do it all. Your ideas — the possibilities — are unbelievably beautiful, offered from Syracuse to Buffalo to Dunkirk and beyond, and I wish I could get to them all. This is my chance to say that if you’ve sent me a great idea and I haven’t written it — or was simply unable to do it in time — please know this:

I cannot fully express how thankful I am for the heart and insight of great readers. You are the ones who bring together this whole circle, the ones who understand the foundational truth that the greatest, most powerful and most communal stories are often found within the quietest homes and streets throughout Upstate, because those are the places where the best tales are forged.

In other words: Read the card. I mean it.

The only reason I have the privilege of doing what I do is because so many of you — a long time ago — embraced a shared notion of what a column can be, built on three central qualities:

Truth, love and trust.

That you still share it, that you still feel it, that you still send me ideas and visions that express it…

Oh my God. Today, of all days, thank you for that gift.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...