I'll end this year's article with the same title I began it with. Thirty articles later, here we are, finally pausing to look back at what actually unfolded. It's that time of the season, when we take stock of the year that was. We all look back not only at what was achieved, but at what we lived through. Monumental events barely had time to settle before being eclipsed by the next headline.  Trends appeared for five minutes, and were immediately overtaken by something louder, stranger, or more meme-able. It's the perfect embodiment of the Maltese phrase "imut Papa u jiġi ieħor". Only this year, it literally happened.

In the year 2025, we sidestepped viral dance trends, apparently summoned by K-Pop demons, welcomed Pope Leo while watching a couple get spectacularly coldplayed on the internet. Meanwhile, we tried to make up our minds if Labubu dolls were irresistibly cute or unsettling enough to haunt our dreams. All of this, of course, unfolded while we ate toast, served kant and rode a chicken jockey into an inexplicable global obsession with the numbers 6 and 7.

Much like Zager and Evans' 1969 song "In the Year 2525," the year 2025 felt like a moment when technology sprinted ahead at full speed, propelled by rapid developments in artificial intelligence. The 2025 became the year we asked the same question more than ever before:

"Is this AI... or is it real?""Is my toaster hearing me and algorithm my life?" From photos to essays to suspiciously perfect cat videos, AI seeped into every corner of daily life.  Next year welcomes Generation Beta, children born into a world where AI isn't a novelty but the default setting. For them, it will simply be reality, the only one they know. The pandemic, for them, will be a strange historical anecdote we recount with dramatic hand gestures, and they'll be utterly puzzled that we once spent weeks, even months, indoors making bread, ordering w/b-olt, and calling it resilience.

Throughout this year, I often turned to trivia in my articles, using it as a way to make sense of it with social understanding and frequently pairing it with a song. The attempt was to sound tracking social life as we know it. This is a metaphorical gesture of how music becomes part of how we experience, interpret, and remember social moments. It helps us make meaning out of fleeting experiences. Memory through music itself is fascinating. We remember through layers of emotion, often tinged with nostalgia.

Songs, in particular, anchor us to specific moments in time, to where we were, who we were with, and how life felt when a track first played. In that way, music doesn't just accompany our social lives; it shapes them, becoming an archive of shared experiences and personal histories. Christmas songs tend to do the trick. Year after year, we hear them, the same melodies, the same choruses, the same familiar lyrics. Yet somehow, they never lose their power. Some songs gently unlock memories of our younger selves, carrying us back to moments of our childhood.

Last week, I found myself smiling with an unexpected sense of nostalgia while listening to sweet young children, at my daughter's school concert, singing Id-Dinja Tagħna. In that moment, I was transported straight back to my own childhood, to simpler familiar classrooms, and the magic of believing that the world was, indeed, ours. Similar feelings to Lennon's song "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", written over fifty years ago. We sang it earnestly, year after year, believing in its promise. Yet today, its message feels painfully unresolved. These feelings resonate with the Band Aid's song Do they know it's Christmas? Though we are still hoping to feed the world after forty years.

Yet, at this time of year, it is impossible not to acknowledge and commend, the invaluable work carried out by those who do feed others. This includes the impeccable work by Diakonia and the soup kitchen, with over 88 thousand meals last year prepared by soup kitchen OFM alone. Their tireless efforts to prepare and distribute meals, for those experiencing loneliness and hardship, becomes especially visible during the festive season. Beyond nourishment, these meals offer comfort, dignity, and a sense that no one has been forgotten.

As the year draws to a close, December invites us to pause, to take stock, and to notice the small but meaningful acts that often go unseen. Here's to ending the year with a little more kindness, a little more awareness, and perhaps a little more time for each other. Wishing you a peaceful festive season and a gentler, more humane year ahead.