Happy New Year to you and anyone else wanting and/or needing such a year. Happy, that is, not so much new, that ship has sailed. One can obviously get new shoes, new socks, new cars, new houses, new friends, go to new places, see new faces, but within all that “new” lingers our same old sweaty feet. “Wherever you go, there you are.”

Research on happiness indicates that roughly 50 percent of our average day-to-day disposition (good, bad, or ugly) is genetic, 10 percent our environment or circumstances, and 40 percent our choices, habits, and decisions. As the saying goes, “Genetics loads the gun, but our environment pulls the trigger.”

I would add our circumstances, our choices, our habits, and our decisions to the itchy trigger finger as well. An itch that we can choose if and how we scratch, regardless of the 50 percent we were blessed or cursed with in the bowl of genetic soup we were handed.

Speaking of soup, when I was in Ireland, I made it my personal mission to test as many bowls of seafood chowder as possible. To date, Kitty O Se’s, in Kinsale, County Cork, has my Golden Shillelagh blessing for the grandest seafood chowder I have thus far burned my greedy gob on.

When Dawn was planning our family’s menu for the holidays, I declared that I was going to make Irish seafood chowder for our Christmas Eve meal. I wasn’t just going to make any old seafood chowder, I was going to attempt to match, and perhaps surpass, the bowl of goodness I feasted on at Kitty O Se’s. That being said, I suppose it would be a bit silly to set out to match the worst bowl of slop you’ve ever grazed upon.

Dawn added steak as a “side dish”, just in case the South Dakota seafood performed like a fish out of water. Also, our son doesn’t eat fish, or any other underwater dwelling creatures, and it was too late to uninvite him to dinner. So it goes.

We were fortunate enough to have both our children home for the holidays this year and enjoyed some quality time together. Time that seems so difficult to come by as the years go by. Standing in the late-night quiet of our house, light spilling from the Christmas tree, I felt a special kind of contentment that, over the years, I’ve found only comes from having our family under one roof.

And the seafood chowder? Mmmmmm…Golden Shillelagh worthy. I looked up “Mmmm” and found that it is something called a “onomatopoeia” and is defined as “an emotional expression of contentment.”

Contentment. It seems to be abound in my little world this holiday season, and for that, I am quite grateful. I am also grateful for the new socks to stuff my old feet in, the bottle of bourbon and fistful of cigars to wrap my old piehole around, and a Tushy Classic 3.0 Bidet to…well you know the aim of that south of the border spritzer.

The trigger has been pulled for a running start to “happy” in the New Year. I wish the same for you and yours in 2024.