Merry Christmas 2025
Dear friends,
As 2025 draws to a close in a world that sometimes seems to teeter under the weight of its own contradictions, I want to send you my most heartfelt wishes during this Christmas season.
This year, more than ever, I have felt that tension between the decay of our institutions and the permanence of what truly grounds us. Between the artifices of a system running out of breath and the solidity of the bonds that unite us. Between the deafening noise of the media and the precious silence of shared moments.
2025 reminded us, often brutally, that grand speeches are worth nothing without action. The farmers’ blockades of these past few weeks are a glaring illustration: those who feed us, heirs to a thousand-year-old lineage (for our ancestors were all, at one time, farmers), are rising up against bureaucratic absurdity and the betrayal of their elites. Behind every statistic lie real lives, families struggling, craftsmen toiling, caregivers holding the line. These ordinary people who, in the shadows and without fanfare, keep this country standing, the very country some are working to destroy through ideology or incompetence.
I think of all of you who take the time to read my reflections, sometimes harsh, often critical, but always sincere. Of those who, like me, refuse groupthink and dare to question the certainties imposed on us. Of those who prefer an uncomfortable truth to a comfortable lie.
In this Christmas season, my thoughts turn naturally to those who suffer from absence. Those who have lost loved ones. The holidays have that cruel quality of making empty chairs more visible, silences heavier. But let us remember that death cannot erase what was lived, loved, and shared. Those we have lost live on still, in our memories, in our gestures, in the values we pass on.
Christmas, beyond the consumer spectacle we have made of it, remains that singular moment when what truly matters reclaims its rights. It is not the plastic nativity scene that counts, but what it symbolizes: the humility of a birth in a stable that changed the world. A reminder that great transformations do not always come from above, but sometimes from the most unexpected places.
In a world that prizes appearance, noise, and the ephemeral, Christmas brings us back to substance: family, friendship, faith, whether religious or simply faith in humanity. These foundations that neither a failing welfare state nor passing ideologies will ever be able to replace.
So yes, 2025 has been hard. Yes, 2026 may prove harder still. But it is precisely in such moments that we must draw on our roots, stand shoulder to shoulder, and refuse to give in to discouragement. Every act of kindness, every truth spoken, every battle fought with integrity is a victory over the prevailing nihilism.
I wish you a Christmas full of human warmth and genuine moments. May your tables be full, but above all may your hearts be too. May 2026 bring you health, serenity, and the courage to stay true to your convictions, even when the wind blows against you.
Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones. 🙏🏻
May this celebration remind you that hope is not naivety, but a form of resistance.
Paul ARGOUD.
