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We’re off for a spell to chill and Spend More Time With Our Families, while consuming mass quantities of cheap carbs and a wide variety of alcoholic beverages.

It’s our annual unpaid holiday leave, offering us a brief respite from our normal, push-push-push, deadline every minute (more or less) multitasking posting routine. Also unpaid.

Upon our return, the National Affairs Desk in all its might and majesty will be heading up to River City to witness Jerry Brown be sworn in as governor for the third time — a feat that only Republican Earl Warren has previously accomplished.

From all we’re hearing, Brown’s “transition” to date has appeared to be a bit… haphazard. We can’t help but wonder if Gandalf  hasn’t quite grasped that the state he’s about to command is one helluva’ lot bigger and more complex  than when he was crashing on the floor and cruising around in the Plymouth  several lifetimes ago.

One thing we’ll be keeping an eye on is the key question of how he intends to integrate his lovely and talented wife, Anne Gust Brown, into the day-to-day operations of his new administration, on the theory that it would be a big mistake to install her as the gatekeeper or switch point in the governor’s office. Not, by any stretch, because she’s not more than fully capable of serving as de facto chief of staff, but because as First Spouse, she would be immune to firing, which would raise all manner of political, policy and human resource complications.

For starters: Any person of substance who might work for Brown will want to know to whom her or she reports and where, exactly, the lines of authority run. Or totally criss cross. Will everyone have to go through Anne to get to the governor? More than a mere bad idea, that would be a total humbug.

Remembrance from our first-ever Christmas posting:

On behalf of our Department of Spiked Eggnog and Cooked Geese, here’s a bit of holiday cheer from our favorite yuletide poem, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” by the late Calbuzzer Emeritus Dylan Thomas.

Years and years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: “It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.”

“But that was not the same snow,” I say. “Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like dumb, number thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards.”

All best wishes for the holiday from Calbuzz.