Once again, Georgians across the country are preparing for the holiday season, making travel plans, crushing walnuts for gozinaki, and buying gifts for their friends and families. Gifts are an important part of celebrating the New Year and Christmas, signifying the importance of friendship and allowing us to treat our loved ones to something to start a brand new year in style.

Georgian media is full of stories about nepotism and the funny justifications of those involved: When Irakli Garibashvili, still being Minister of the Interior, was confronted with nepotism allegations, he replied: “Don’t you know that a relative of your wife is not your relative?”

During the last 12 months, the Georgian authorities have been conducting interesting experiments designed, so it seems, to test the resilience of domestic beer producers. In September 2014, the industry was hit by Article 171 of the Civil Code, prohibiting alcohol consumption in public places. The beer market, 97% of which is supplied by local producers, has immediately shrunk by 22% (in physical volume, see chart), in annual terms.

According to Steve Johnson (a popular American science writer and media theorist, the author of Where Good Ideas Come From), coffee and coffeehouses were a significant contributor to Europe’s scientific and industrial revolution. The first coffeehouses opened in London in 1650 and quickly mushroomed all over Europe. The coffeehouse had two major positive effects.

According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, the word gay refers to a cheerful, lively, and high-spirited person. The LGBT Prague Pride Parade, which I was fortunate to observe on my recent visit to Prague, lived to the very definition of the word. What I saw was fabulous: unicorns and countless rainbow-colored flags, balloons, and thousands of exalted people dancing and singing in the middle of Wenceslas Square.