Christmas wishes and Kwanzaa celebrations begin

Unboxing Friday

Dec. 26 — We hope you got exactly what you wanted for Christmas yesterday. The holidays roll on as it’s the first day of Kwanzaa, as well as Boxing Day (hello, Canada, UK, and Australia!).

⛅ Partly cloudy with springlike temperatures continuing with a high of 67° today. Rinse and repeat for the weekend.

🇺🇦 Seventeen Ukrainian teens who lost parents in the war spent three weeks in metro Atlanta, hosted by local families through the Global Alliance for Ukraine.

🧠 Mount Vernon School senior Christian Foster earned the highest possible ACT Composite score of 36.

🏆 Joshua Meredith, a senior at Woodward Academy, has been named a winner of the Moises Jam Sessions, a music competition.

ELSEWHERE

❄️ New York City is bracing for its biggest snowstorm in years, with up to eight inches expected starting late this afternoon.

🇳🇬 President Donald Trump said he ordered airstrikes on ISIS targets in Nigeria, citing attacks on Christians.

💰 A Powerball ticket sold outside of Little Rock, AR, won the $1.817 billion jackpot on Christmas Eve, the game’s second-largest prize ever.

🕖 Here’s what’s in today’s newsletter:

• Best Recipes of 2025

• Movie Review: ‘Marty Supreme’

• The Sports Section

AND

• Top Stories of the Week

🌟 When the sun sets, the woods come alive at WildWoods: AGLOW. This after-hours experience combines art, nature, and music at Fernbank Museum, featuring scenic trails aglow with light outdoors and nighttime access to museum exhibits inside. Open on select nights through Feb. 28, 2026.

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1. The top five recipes Rough Draft readers loved in 2025

🍰 Each week in Rough Draft’s “Family Meal” newsletter, we share one recipe from a local restaurant or Atlanta chef. In 2025, we provided readers with more than 50 recipes to try at home, but these five – including a key lime cake and banana pudding – were the most popular recipes of the year.

🍌 See the full list here.

Ready, Set, AGLOW!

SPONSORED BY FERNBANK MUSEUM

🌟 When the sun sets, the woods come alive at WildWoods: AGLOW.

This after-hours experience combines art, nature and music at Fernbank Museum, featuring scenic trails aglow with light outdoors and nighttime access to museum exhibits inside.

🌙 Select nights through Feb. 28, 2026.

2. ‘Marty Supreme’ and Timothée Chalamet are in pursuit of greatness

WEEKLY FILM REVIEW | BY SAMMIE PURCELL

🏓 In the middle of his speech last year for the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Lead Role, Timothée Chalamet said that he was in the “pursuit of greatness.”

“I know people don’t usually talk like that,” he said. “But I want to be one of the greats.” He invoked names like Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Viola Davis, but also Michael Phelps and Michael Jordan; there’s an athletic bent to this pursuit, as well as an artistic one.

“Marty Supreme,” Josh Safdie’s new film about a table tennis player who will stop at nothing in his own pursuit of greatness, sits at the same intersection of artistry and athleticism as Chalamet’s public persona, positioning his character, Marty Mauser (loosely based on real-life table tennis player Marty Reisman), as the embodiment of American ambition, with all the good and bad that entails. Marty exists in a lineage of complicated, talented, terrible men, who will do whatever it takes – lie, cheat, hurt, steal – to get to the mountaintop. The film considers that streak of ambition and its collision with American capitalism, all wrapped up in an immensely entertaining thrill ride.

🐕 Click here to read Sammie’s review. You can also see what she has to say about “Song Sung Blue” here.

🍿 Stay in the picture with Scene by Rough Draft, our weekly newsletter about Georgia’s film industry. Subscribe for free.

3. Hawks on the skids; Falcons host MNF

BY SAMANTHA GARDELLA | SPONSORED BY NYO

🏀 The Hawks try to reverse a four-game losing streak when they host the Heat tonight at 7 p.m. The Knicks are in town Saturday night for an 8 p.m. tip.

🏈 No. 22 Georgia Tech faces No. 12 BYU in tomorrow’s Pop-Tarts Bowl in Orlando.

🏈 The Falcons host the Rams on Monday Night Football, Dec. 29 at 8:15 p.m. (ESPN).

CORRECTION

🤦 Yesterday’s newsletter misspelled the name of the consulting group that the Falcons have been working with. The firm is Sportsology, not Sportology. We regret the error.

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