something called a “fiscal cliff” — writing New Year’s resolutions may seem about as important as straightening paintings in a burning house.

And yet, people will be dancing in Times Square and at countless other parties Monday night, professing optimism for the new year.

This is not a sign of incurable stupidity. We don’t approach the future like subjects in some morbid experiment who insist on doing the same things over and over, hoping for a different result.

We are, speaking of humanity as a whole, creatures of incurable optimism. Good thing, that.

Every rearview mirror comes with a switch that allows you to view the same receding landscape without so much glare. The media, present company included, tends to ignore that switch. Only when confronted with faith, optimism and forgiveness in the face of tragedy, or joy at the start of a new year, do they confront a strange world where not everyone judges life in terms of headlines.

A trip to the past illustrates this perfectly. One hundred years ago today, the nation was emerging from a bitter presidential race. You think 2012 was contentious? In 1912, a charismatic former president, Theodore Roosevelt, rocked the Republican Party by defecting to run as a third party candidate. That paved the way for the election of a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who remains a divisive figure a century later.

Progressives and conservatives were waged a bitter contest. Two constitutional amendments would take effect in 1913, dramatically altering the nation’s future. One legalized the federal income tax, allowing Congress to tax the rich. The other made senators elected by popular vote, rather than by their state legislatures.

On New Year’s Day in 1913, the Wall Street Journal published a report from Darwin P. Kingsley, president of the New York Life Insurance Co. Speaking of the recent election, he said the growth of socialism was the greatest threat to the nation.

Bitter labor strikes threatened to rend the nation. The end of 1912 saw the final sentences handed down in a case in which labor leaders had set explosives at various places around the country.

In the worst of these, bombs were detonated beneath the Los Angeles Times building, killing 21 and injuring 100 more. The Times had published editorials against labor organizers.

Any of these events easily match whatever happened in 2012.

And, by one view of the mirror, things quickly got worse. Before the decade was out, the world had been engulfed in war and an influenza pandemic had wiped out tens of millions of people worldwide.

And yet one of the most interesting stories of a century ago is a little blurb in the New York Times. It concerns a horrible accident at a holiday party in the Illinois home of a former U.S. vice president. A 12-year-old boy, perhaps mimicking the drill a young military academy student had just performed to impress the girls, discharged what he thought was an empty gun, killing a 15-year-old girl who was a party guest.

The young shooter’s name was Adlai Stevenson. He was, by reports at the time, inconsolable. Yet years later he was governor of Illinois and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Twice he ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic candidate against Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Stevenson was known for his strong advocacy of peace and his frequent self-deprecation. Historians have speculated that the accident molded his character.

Regardless, he clearly chose to remove the glare and move ahead with optimism.

So did the nation as a whole.

Not many people today would enjoy having to live as if it were a century ago, no matter what we may think of the year just ending. We move forward with resolve, knowing we can indeed make things better.

And yet the holidays — more precisely the one that will be celebrated Tuesday — are precisely what ought to be remembered at a time like this.

Senseless violence, even the wholesale slaughter of innocent children, is not a new invention. It even has its place in the Christmas story. The Bible records that King Herod, ever jealously guarding his power and angered by prophecies that a king had been born in Bethlehem, ordered the murders of all male children there under the age of 2.

The mourning was certainly no less in Bethlehem than it is in Newtown, nor was it any less than in countless tragedies in the world’s history, regardless of their cause. Eight years ago this Wednesday, a tsunami crashed onto shores in Asia and East Africa, killing about a quarter of a million people, many of them children. We naturally put the adjective “senseless” next to any tragedy that includes little children or that takes a life before what we consider to be its time. And yet such things happen virtually every day somewhere on the planet.

The real meaning of Tuesday morning has little to do with material possessions, Black Friday or the ham that may be the centerpiece of a banquet. It has everything to do with God’s gift of a child who came to wipe away the tears and bring meaning to it all.

It is a meaning that can be seen only through faith, the only lens through which tragedies such as Newtown’s can be endured with any sense of hope.

A recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that one-fifth of people in the U.S., and one-third of those under 30, are religiously unaffiliated. Nearly 6 percent of the nation now identifies itself as atheist or agnostic, a small band that has grown vocal in recent years.

Some atheists have become evangelistic, erecting billboards in search of converts. One in New York’s Times Square this year features pictures of Santa and Jesus with the phrase, "Keep the Merry! Dump the Myth!"

And yet the most their philosophy can offer the people of Newtown is to say, “We are sorry for you, but your children are gone forever.” There is no justice. There is no meaning. The “merry” they speak of can be had only if one willfully ignores the tragedies and abuses that daily happen worldwide. Otherwise, despair swallows any claim to happiness.

Tuesday morning is all about a man of whom the Prophet Isaiah said, “The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes, we are healed.”

News accounts tell of an ever-growing makeshift memorial in front of Sandy Hook Elementary. A local firehouse donated 26 Christmas trees, one for each victim. Teddy bears, flowers, candles and notes are stuffed into the space. Visitors come from several states away, seeking comfort, and also seeking to bring comfort.

At an interfaith memorial service, the New York Daily News reported on a conversation between a child and a mother. “All those little children, are they with the angels now?” the little girl wanted to know. 

Her mother didn’t hesitate to assure the little girl that those who died were indeed in a wonderful place.

Christmas morning offers the hope that this really is true; that life does matter; and that little children who died in kindergarten won’t all be forgotten in time or in a cloud of cosmic radiation that ends the world some day.

That is a great reason to pause amid sorrow and remember the holiday.

because the airline decided to “throw the bums out,” you might be forcing open the doors and taking your chances with the emergency inflatable chute.

And yet it’s hard to imagine someone new running for Congress who doesn’t proclaim that he or she is a Washington outsider who is not a professional politician.

On one level, this can easily be understood. According to the web site Realclearpolitcs.com the public’s approval rating of Congress currently sits at a dismal 20.7 percent, which is actually considerably better than only a few months ago (a lot of Americans may mistakenly believe the new Congress they elected already has been seated).

When nearly 80 percent of the people who hire you think your profession is doing everything wrong, you’re naturally going to distance yourself from your colleagues.

But on a more practical level, we have Alan Grayson, newly elected congressman from Florida who held his seat once before until he was briefly thrown out as a “bum” in 2010. He has three academic degrees from Harvard and a working knowledge of the federal bureaucracy — liabilities in some voting booths.

“Wouldn’t you want somebody in Congress who actually knows how to do that stuff?” the New York Times recently quoted him as saying.

Wouldn’t we? It’s a tougher question to answer than many assume.

The Times interviewed Grayson as part of a story analyzing the incoming Congress. The most recent election, it seems, was a type of boomerang to the 2010 electoral purge. In some parts of the country, it was an “anti-antigovernment wave.”

People with government experience are replacing people who truly don’t understand politics, but not completely. The new Congress will mix the two groups, although they will be hard to tell apart. That’s because even those with insider experience claim they aren’t really a part of Washington.

“The makeup of Congress has not been this volatile in 20 years,” the Times story said. That’s hardly comforting for a nation that seems to confront one cliff after another.

No matter what the current lame-duck Congress does to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” it isn’t going to solve the long-term issues of reforming the tax code and entitlement programs, funding defense and confronting the ever-rising debt ceiling. Those will be up to the new bunch to confront.

This generation invented neither politics nor the dislike of politicians. Ideology and compromise have always been in conflict, as anyone who has watched the 1939 classic, “Mr. Smith goes to Washington” can attest.

When too many uncompromising ideologues dominate, ideology becomes the overriding issue. Majority rule is gold.

Details, we are told, are where the devil resides, but ideology pushes them aside. The Affordable Care Act is a perfect example. Winning was everything at the time, but the details have now led 16 Democratic senators who voted for the act to ask that one provision, a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices, be at least postponed from taking effect Jan. 1.

On the other hand, a Congress dominated by experienced politicians and policy wonks could easily forget the concerns of the voters who put them there. Instead, they build bulwarks against accountability.

Ultimately, it’s impossible for politicians to be divorced from politics, no matter what they would claim. Outsiders have much to offer with fresh ideas and ideals. Experienced politicians know how to get things done.

The two don’t have to cancel each other out.

As the recent past has shown, politicians can solve problems or draw ideological swords and engage in endless battle. They cannot do both.

headmaster of the Santa School in Calgary, Alberta, which supplies Santas to stores and malls in the U.S. and around the world, told MarketWatch. “And there’s not a lot of room for untrained Santas.”

Yes, you read right. Santa School. I’m envisioning more laptops than at a nerd convention.

Yet, even in the best of times being a Santa wasn’t always the easy money some people might have expected it to be.

Years ago, as a cub reporter in Las Vegas, one of my first stories was to cover a Santa who was marching in front of a local mall with a sign claiming mall owners were unfair. The mall insisted the Santa made a little girl cry. The Santa said the mall had it out for him, and that crying kids are just a part of the job. He said he never said or did anything out of character or that would have needlessly provoked the kid.

He said; they said; and ultimately I was told to stop covering the story because it was hurting holiday ad sales.

The message I got is that being Santa is no cushy gig, no matter how many cushions one may use as stuffing. But then, anyone who has watched Miracle on 34th Street knows that.

And the message I’m getting today is that, when profits are at stake, Santa may be the first one to go.

That’s bad news for all the little Virginias out there — and there always are new little Virginias, thank heavens.

But then, the whole point of that editorial 115 years ago was to tell a little girl from the upper West Side of Manhattan that Santa is real even though you can’t see him.

“You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see,” it said.

I always thought that message must be confusing for little children who then go out and see multiple Santas dotting the retail landscape. This year, apparently, not so much.

and the highest mean level of days gambled in the past year (26.1 days).”

Young people, 30 and under, tend to play more than older people. Seventy percent of them play the lottery, compared with 45 percent of those 70 and older.

A 2008 study in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making looked at the reasons people willingly give up their hard-earned cash in exchange for odds that are just this side of hopeless. Low-income people aren’t stupid. They likely play out of a sense that they have the same chance of winning as everyone else, rich or poor. Life doesn’t often hand them a deal like that.

Then again, it’s probably more accurate to say they have the same chance of losing as everyone else.

A 2010 study in the Journal of Community Psychology found that neighborhoods with high concentrations of minorities tend to have the most lottery outlets, and those people tend to be most likely to develop gambling addictions.

You can read the research yourself. When you do, it would be well to ask yourself why state and local governments think it is healthy to rely on money obtained this way. You might also ask why a nation that believes it’s best to tax rich people more would accept a tax that not only takes the most money from the poor, it also can cause other problems in their lives.

I know the answer has something to do with that one tiny chance that a lottery ticket can pay off. But really, isn’t that the cruelest joke of all?

the majority should always try to imagine itself living under those reforms as the minority party. Few things are more certain than that political fortunes will change in Washington. It may not happen in two years or even in 10, but it will happen.

Senate President Harry Reid has said he will put filibuster reform on the agenda when the new Senate convenes in January. There is no denying that filibusters have been invoked more in recent years than ever before — a symptom of the ideological divisions in the country.

Note that Reid wants to reform this tactic, not eliminate it. The reforms include possibly requiring senators to actually talk their way through a filibuster, the way they once did.

If you have to stay up all night reading from the phone book in front of C-SPAN cameras, it might weaken the resolve of a minority trying to stop an appointment or some lesser piece of legislation.

Another reform would eliminate the filibuster on the motion to proceed. This means a bill could be opened to debate before a filibuster could happen, but Republicans say they do this because Reid has refused to let them propose amendments to bills.

I find this all very interesting. Not too long ago, in 2005, Republicans controlled the Senate and were annoyed at Democrats who constantly filibustered. They wanted to reform it so that judicial appointments could not be blocked. Cooler heads prevailed, and Republicans today are glad.

Let’s understand one thing: At its most basic level, democracy is about majority rule. But the United States has traditionally tempered this with strong protections for the minority against the tyranny of the majority. The American system is meant to be more inclusive than efficient.

In the Senate, this minority protection hasn’t always been used for noble aims. Democrats from the South used it to delay civil rights legislation for decades.

The Congress that takes control in January will have built-in safeguards against tyranny. The House and Senate will be controlled by different parties. But the Senate confirms appointments and ratifies treaties on its own. It is the most powerful of the two bodies.

At one point, the House had a filibuster rule, as well. That disappeared long ago. But clearly, it would not be unprecedented to monkey with the rule. In 1917, the Senate decided to require a two-thirds vote to end a filibuster. After the civil rights fiasco, the Senate lowered that threshold to three-fifths.

Reid and the Democrats can require actual spoken filibusters and enact other reforms if they wish. That may make them happy for awhile. But as any good Roman general knew, it would be unwise to set any trap they themselves would not enjoy falling into.