This past Christmas afternoon, I visited the Freeport store to buy the finishing gifts for a late holiday celebration three days later and found many discounted items, including a collection of 40 Northeastern saltwater flies in an unbreakable fly box. This proved a perfect gift for my oldest daughter, Heather, who fishes in the Atlantic off Long Island in New York.

The month of January is named after the Roman god Janus, who faces both forward and backward at the same time. Janus is also known as the god of gates, doors, bridges, beginnings and endings, transitions, movement and even time itself. That is especially fitting now that we have survived the often forecasted end of the world and are ready to create new beginnings and transitions and an age of greater cooperation on Earth.

As skiers and snowboarders in Maine, we have it pretty darn good. We have resorts lauded by the national press, with Sugarloaf, Sunday River and Saddleback noted as three of the Northeast’s best. Skiing is easy to get to, with community slopes less than an hour from each of Maine’s urban centers. This fall, as it does every year, the Ski Maine Association sent a press release detailing the dozens of improvements to snowmaking, terrain and facilities.