Kevin McCallister, meet Sydney Sweeney. The actress recreates Macaulay Culkin's iconic "Home Alone" aftershave scream in a playful new ad for her lingerie brand, Syrn, before bringing several other memorable scenes from the holiday classic to life. The tribute is already getting attention from fans, including one who jokes, "Who on earth would leave Sydney Sweeney home alone this Christmas?" And Kevin McCallister isn't her only holiday inspiration. See the other Christmas classics getting a Sweeney makeover:

Our Christmas Gift will also be announced first in our group before sharing it on X. Signing up for this gift alone will be worth all your investments in one year. Good thing we have a -30% Discount Promo on right now to take advantage of this.

This 'Bradford' man killed a pensioner in a brutal attack on the doorstep of his home Stephen Jedynak was 72. A dad, a brother, an uncle. Lived alone. Punched in the head on his own doorstep and left dying inside his house over Christmas. Hamza Shafique got a poxy 6 years 3 months prison sentence. That’s not justice. That’s a joke.

My friend Hanae is a linguist. She spent six years in western Kansas writing a dissertation that her professors in Tokyo still talk about. Its title: "The Grammar of the American Father." Here is the thing about Japanese. We have words that do far too much. "Sumimasen" can mean sorry, thank you, excuse me, and hello. Linguists love words like that. Hanae lived with a farm family outside a town of 1,100 people. Within a month, she realized the father of the house, Del, spoke an entire language built the same way. It was mostly one-syllable words. Each one carried about forty meanings. Nobody had ever written it down. So she did. Here are a few entries. WELL. At the start of a sentence: I am leaving in forty minutes. In the middle of a sentence: bad news is coming. Alone, with both hands slapped on both knees: this party is over. Everybody in America obeys this. Nobody has ever been told. WELP. Something has gone wrong. It cannot be undone. We are not going to talk about our feelings. We are going to get the truck. HOO BOY. Something is about to cost money. Said while looking at an engine, a receipt, or a daughter's prom dress. HUH. The highest praise a father can give a meal. One "huh" means good. Two means he is about to ask your mother to get the recipe from you. Hanae received two "huhs" for her curry. She describes it as the proudest moment of her academic career. WE'LL SEE. No. Except when it means yes. Nobody can tell until Christmas. OH, YOU DON'T WANNA DO THAT. You are about to do it wrong. He is now going to do it for you. It will take three hours. You will learn nothing. You will feel incredibly loved. THE SOUND. The noise an American man makes when he stands up after age forty. It is not pain. It is an announcement. Her chapter on "Well" alone was 61 pages. Her professors in Tokyo were confused. One of them asked her, in a very serious meeting, "Is it really possible for one syllable to carry an entire emotion?" Hanae said she wasn't sure yet. Then she came home. Six years. The whole family drove her to the airport in Wichita. Del didn't hug her. Del doesn't hug. He stood at security with his hands in his pockets. He looked at the floor. Then at the ceiling. Then at her. "Well," he said. And Hanae, after six years of research, understood every meaning at once. Last spring was her final defense, in Tokyo. Five professors. A small, very quiet room. Del had never been on a plane in his life. He was 74. He flew to Tokyo anyway. He described the flight as "a ways." He sat in the back row in his church jacket. He didn't understand a single word of the Japanese. At the end, the oldest professor asked her the same question again. "Can one syllable really carry an entire emotion?" He didn't understand the question. He understood her face. Before she could answer, Del stood up in the back row. Every head turned. He looked at the floor. Then at the ceiling. Then at her. "Well," he said. And he sat back down. Five Japanese professors with a combined 140 years of linguistics looked at each other. They passed her on the spot.

Mrs. Nakano runs a twelve-bed guesthouse in an old part of Tokyo. For 19 years, travelers from 112 countries have slept under her roof. On every guest's last night, she makes tea and asks them one question. "On all your travels, who was the kindest stranger you ever met?" She types every answer into an old laptop. The file is called "Kindness." There are about 4,000 entries. Most of her guests are European. Or Korean. Or Australian. Very few are American. But Americans keep showing up in other people's answers. More than any other country. Including Japan. She checked twice, because she didn't believe it either. She let me read some. A German engineer. His rental car died in the Nevada desert. The first car that came by was a family of five. They drove him 90 miles to the next town. The kids gave him all their road-trip snacks and apologized that it was only Doritos. A Korean college student. She lost her passport in Chicago. A police officer drove her to the consulate on his lunch break, then bought her a hot dog and told her that putting ketchup on it was technically legal but morally wrong. A Swiss grandmother. She slipped on the ice in Minnesota. Three strangers picked her up. One carried her groceries. One drove her to urgent care. One dug her rental car out of a snowbank and refused her money. "Ma'am, this is just January." An Australian backpacker. Australians do not impress easily. A rancher in Montana fed him for a week, made him work cattle, paid him in cash, and, the Australian said, "cried a little when I left. Please do not tell him I said this." An Italian chef. At a barbecue in Texas, a stranger gave him his chair and the last rib on the plate. "In Italy," the chef said, "we would never give away the last of anything. I still think about that rib. Six years." A nurse from the Philippines. She worked two years in a hospital in Ohio. A patient's wife, a farmer's widow, has sent her a Christmas card every year since. Nine years. Always with a five-dollar bill inside. "For coffee." Mrs. Nakano says the Germans are precise, the Australians are funny, and the Italians are dramatic. And the stories about Americans almost always end the same way. "They wouldn't take anything." Then I asked her why she started asking. In 1987, when she was 22, Mrs. Nakano backpacked across America alone. In West Virginia, she got very sick. A high fever, alone, on a bench at a small-town train depot, no English, no plan. A woman she had never met, a retired schoolteacher, saw her, put a hand on her forehead, and took her home. Four days of soup. Clean sheets. A doctor from church who came on a Sunday. When she was well, the woman drove her to the train with a bag of sandwiches and her address written on the back of an envelope. They wrote to each other for eleven years. Then the letters stopped. Mrs. Nakano never got to pay her back. She has never stopped wondering about one thing. Was that woman one in a million? Did a scared girl from Tokyo just get lucky? So she opened a guesthouse. And for 19 years, she has asked the whole world. Four thousand answers. She wasn't one in a million. She was one of you.

HISTORY SAYS THE NEXT 12 MONTHS COULD BE VERY BULLISH FOR S&P500 Since 1950, the S&P 500 has gone up in the 12 months after every single US midterm election. A separate dataset going back to 1942 finds the same thing in the November to June window after a midterm: 21 for 21, also positive every time. Year 3 of the presidential cycle, the year right after the midterm, has also historically been the strongest year of the entire 4-year cycle. Fidelity's 1961-2024 data puts the average at 18.7%. Here's why this keeps happening. Before an election, markets have to price every possible outcome at once: who controls Congress, which taxes get cut or raised, which regulations pass or die. Nobody can commit real money when 5 different futures are still live. That's why midterm years are historically the weakest part of the 4-year cycle, averaging just 3.8% from 1945 to 2025, compared to 10.9% in the other three years, with an 18% average drawdown along the way. Once the result is locked in, that entire range of outcomes collapses into one. Markets don't need the winner to be market friendly. They just need the unknown removed, and removing the unknown alone lowers the risk premium investors demand to hold stocks. This pattern has survived completely different crises, for completely different reasons, every single cycle: After the 2010 midterms, the US was still digging out of the financial crisis. The Fed launched $600 billion of QE2, buying long term Treasuries to push yields down and force money into riskier assets. It worked, until 2011, when the US debt ceiling standoff led to the first-ever downgrade of US credit, and Europe's sovereign debt crisis exploded at the same time. The S&P fell almost 19% at its worst point that year. It still finished the year positive. After the 2014 midterms, the US economy and labor market looked fine, but oil prices collapsed and the dollar spiked, gutting earnings across the entire energy sector. Then in 2015, China devalued its currency and its economy slowed sharply, triggering a global risk off panic, right as the Fed prepared its first rate hike since 2006. The S&P barely survived, finishing up just 3%, the weakest year in the entire 76 year record. But It still didn't break the streak. After the 2018 midterms, the Fed had hiked rates 4 times that year and was still shrinking its balance sheet. Trade war fears with China pushed the S&P to the edge of a bear market by Christmas Eve. Then Fed Chair Powell reversed course in early 2019, signaled patience, stopped hiking, and eventually cut rates 3 times. Big tech earnings stayed strong and the US and China moved toward a trade truce. The S&P went on to gain nearly 29% that calendar year. After the 2022 midterms, inflation had just peaked at 9.1%, the Fed was still raising rates, and most of Wall Street was calling for a recession. A cooler than expected inflation report landed right after Election Day, convincing investors the Fed was close to done hiking. Stocks can explode while a central bank is still raising rates, because markets price where policy is heading, not where it sits today. Through 2023, the expected recession never came, the Fed slowed down then paused, and a generative AI boom sent Nvidia and the rest of mega cap tech into one of the biggest rallies in years. Four different decades. Four completely different crises, a debt downgrade, an oil crash, a trade war, and the fastest rate-hiking cycle in 40 years. The S&P 500 closed positive after every single one.

My wife's best friend Yui married an American named Jason, from a small town in South Carolina. Before she met his mother for the first time, Yui didn't sleep for three nights. In Japan, the mother-in-law is the final boss. There are TV dramas about it. The mother-in-law who runs one finger along the top of the bookshelf, looks at the dust, and says nothing. The silence is the point. Yui practiced her English. She bought a very expensive box of Japanese sweets. She practiced her bow in the mirror. Fifteen degrees. Respectful. Not desperate. They pulled into the driveway. Before Yui could even open the car door, a woman in an apron came off the porch at full speed, flip-flops slapping, dish towel still over her shoulder. Her name was Kay. She was 66. She opened Yui's door herself. She didn't wait for the bow. "Come here, baby." And she pulled Yui out of the car and into her arms. Into the smell of fried onions and dryer sheets and something sweet in the oven. She held on like she'd been waiting her whole life for this exact person to pull into her driveway. Yui stood there, stiff as a board, holding a box of Japanese sweets, crying into a stranger's shoulder before she'd said a single word. Kay patted her back. "Oh, honey. Did you eat?" That was the first thing. It was always the first thing. In Kay's house, "Did you eat?" meant hello, and I love you, and I've been worried, and sit down, all at once. Yui stayed two weeks. She kept a list. She showed it to my wife later, and my wife showed it to me, and I have not been the same since. In Kay's house, nothing in a Cool Whip container has ever been Cool Whip. Green beans. Gravy. Chicken and dumplings. Yui opened one hoping for dessert and found black-eyed peas. Kay laughed so hard she had to sit down. Kay's recipe cards were in a tin box on the counter. Handwritten. Stained with butter and fifty years of fingerprints. Some of them were in her mother's handwriting. Some in her grandmother's. Kay said, "When I'm gone, these are yours too." Yui said, "But I'm not even…" And Kay said, "Hush." Kay checked for a fever with the back of her hand. Not a thermometer. Never a thermometer. She'd press her hand to your forehead, then your cheek, then your forehead again, and frown, and she would know. Kay cut the crusts off sandwiches for her 38-year-old son. He did not ask her to. She did not ask him. At Christmas, there was a stocking on the mantel with Yui's name on it in glitter glue. It said "YUY." Kay had spelled it the way it sounded. Yui has never let anyone fix it. And when it was time to go home, Kay stood on the porch. She waved while they backed out of the driveway. She waved while they drove down the street. She waved until the car turned the corner and she couldn't see it anymore. Jason said she has done that every single time, his whole life. Since kindergarten. She waves until you're gone. And then a little longer. Just in case you look back. Three years ago, in Tokyo, Yui lost a baby. Eleven weeks. In Japan, we are taught to carry things like that alone. Quietly. Gaman. Endure. Don't be a burden. Yui went back to work in three days. She smiled at her coworkers. She cried only in the shower, where the water was loud enough. She told Jason not to tell his mother. It was too far. Too much trouble. Kay had never even been on a plane overseas. Jason told her anyway. Two days later, there was a knock at their apartment door in Tokyo. Kay. Sixty-nine years old. Fourteen hours on a plane, alone, for the first time in her life. One small suitcase. A tote bag with a casserole dish in it that customs had looked at for a very long time. She didn't ask what Yui needed. She took off her shoes, because Jason had told her you take off your shoes in Japan. She walked into the kitchen. She looked at the pile of dishes in the sink. And she started washing them. Mothers like Kay don't ask. They just start the dishes. She stayed three weeks. She slept on a futon on the floor and never once complained about her back, though Jason could hear it cracking every morning from the next room. She couldn't read a single word in the supermarket. She bought three bottles of what she thought was milk. It was drinkable yogurt. She drank all of it anyway, out of principle. The tiny grandmother next door taught her how to hang laundry on the balcony the Japanese way. They had no language in common. They did it with hands and laughing. By the second week, they were drinking tea together every afternoon and Kay was calling her "Sugar." Kay made chicken and dumplings from whatever she could find. They tasted wrong. They tasted perfect. She left notes on the refrigerator. In marker. Big letters. "Eat something. Love, Mama." Yui had never called her Mama. Kay had decided it was time. On the fifth night, Yui finally broke. In the kitchen. Over nothing. A dropped spoon. She apologized. She tried to stop. She said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I should be stronger." Kay turned off the stove. She came over and took Yui's face in both of her hands. Warm. Smelling of onions. "Baby. You don't have to be strong in front of me. That's what I'm for." And Yui cried the way she hadn't let herself cry. Not in a shower. Not quietly. On the kitchen floor of a tiny apartment in Tokyo, in the arms of a woman from South Carolina who rocked her back and forth like she was small. Later, sitting on that kitchen floor, Kay told her something she had never told anyone. Not even Jason. Between Jason and his little sister, there had been another baby. In 1987. Kay lost him at four months. Back then, nobody talked about it. The doctor said, "You can try again." Her church said nothing. She went home and put away the little clothes by herself. "I named him," Kay said. "In my head. I never told anybody. His name was Daniel." She held Yui's hand. "You don't get over it, baby. You carry it. And I'll carry some of it for you." When Kay left, she filled the freezer. Fourteen meals in plastic bags, labeled in marker. "Chicken & Dumplings. Thaw overnight. Eat it, Yui, I mean it." There was no porch at the apartment. So Kay did the only thing she could. She waved from the back window of the taxi. All the way down the narrow street. Her whole arm. Her face pressed to the glass. Until the taxi turned the corner. Yui stood on the sidewalk and waved back until there was nothing left to wave at. And then a little longer. Just in case. Yui and Jason have a daughter now. She's two. Her name is Kay. They live in Tokyo still. Every morning, when Jason leaves for work, Yui stands on the little balcony with the baby on her hip. In Japan, we don't really do this. We bow once at the door, and we go back inside. The neighbors think it's a little strange. Yui doesn't care. She waves while he walks down the street. She waves while he crosses at the light. She waves until he turns the corner and she can't see him anymore. And little Kay waves too. With her whole arm. Her whole body. Until he's gone. And then a little longer. Just in case he looks back.

Twelve years ago, my wife sent one of her students to America for a year. Shun was 16. Quiet. He had never left Japan. He was placed with a couple on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. Walt and Carol. Married 38 years. Carol was the one who signed them up. She wrote the letters. She picked out his room. Five months before Shun arrived, she died. The exchange program called Walt to cancel. Walt said, "She signed. We'll keep it." At the airport, Walt was holding a sign. WELCOME HOME, SHUN. Carol had made it in January. He held it up with both hands, the way you hold something that isn't yours. In the first week, Walt said eleven words. Shun counted. Four of them were "Yep." Walt couldn't cook. Carol had done all of it for 38 years. So he drove two hours to the nearest Asian grocery and came home with a 25-pound bag of rice and a rice cooker. He read the manual at the kitchen table in his reading glasses, like a man defusing a bomb. The first batch could have held bricks together. He served it anyway. They ate it in silence. By Christmas, the rice was perfect. Shun found out why later. Behind the barn were four empty 25-pound bags. Walt had been practicing at night, after Shun went to bed. Every morning: a peanut butter sandwich, crusts cut off with his pocketknife. Badly. Shun asked him once why he cut the crusts. Walt thought for a long time. "Carol always did." Shun didn't like peanut butter. He never said so. He ate every one. In October, Shun got homesick. He cried in his room with the door shut, quietly, the Japanese way. Walt didn't knock. In the morning, Shun opened his door and found Walt asleep in a kitchen chair in the hallway. Boots still on. He had sat there all night. He never mentioned it. Neither did Shun. At church that fall, Walt introduced him to the pastor: "This is the Japanese." By Christmas: "This is Shun." One night in April, Shun went out to the barn and heard Walt talking. Nobody was there but Carol's old horse, Dolly. Walt was brushing her. "He got an A in math. He eats everything I make. Even the rice. He's a good kid, Carol. You'd like him." Then, quieter: "I think I'm doing it right." In June, at the airport, Walt carried Shun's bags to the counter and told the woman checking them: "This is my boy. Take care of him." Shun bowed. All the way down. The way you bow to your father. Walt looked up at the departure board for a long time. Then he said, "Yep," and walked out. From the gate, Shun could see the parking lot. Walt's truck didn't move for an hour. Somewhere over the Pacific, Shun opened his lunch bag. One last sandwich. Crusts cut off. Badly. Under it, an envelope. Inside, a copy of Carol's application. He knew the handwriting. It was the same as the sign. Question 9: Why do you want to host a student? "My husband doesn't know how to be alone. Please send someone he can take care of." Clipped to it, a sticky note. Handwriting Shun had never seen, because in ten months Walt had never written him a single word: "Thought you should know whose idea you were." Shun still didn't like peanut butter. He ate every bite. He cried all the way to Tokyo. Shun is 28 now. He calls Wyoming every Sunday. Walt is 76. He still uses about eleven words a call. Four of them are still "Yep." Last month, Shun's son was born. He sent Walt a picture. Walt wrote back. The longest message he has ever sent: "Teach him to cut the crusts. Better than I did." Shun says everything he knows about being a father, he learned from a man who said eleven words a week. The sandwiches said the rest.