Published on Thursday, December 25, 2025

By James Brodell

Recently, it was a great morning. I got an early email from the Georgia lottery commission saying I had won a prize. The top prize was $1.6 billion.

I started spending the money in my head, but delayed opening the email until my wife returned from the store.

My big win was confirmed in my head when a letter arrived from the I.R.S. in the midday mail. How could they know already, I asked myself. The surveillance state, I concluded.

 

Anxious, I opened the email. The win was a whopping four dollars. That meant out of fifteen lottery tickets, I had one with two of the winning numbers. I only needed four more on the same ticket. I am not a big lottery fan.

The $50 I played was the first time in a year. But $1.6 billion is a really big attraction. Still, I guess my accountant and lawyer can stand down now.

Amid this, what travails have I been spared? No undue worry, wondering how to best invest the after-tax $1 billion or so. No big security fence or armed 24-hour security team. No army of crooks seeking a piece of the prize. No large trucks are delivering my wife’s purchase of expensive jewelry. No long-lost relatives to feed.

No one else won, either. So the next drawing set for Christmas Eve was for $1.7 billion.


So I was down $46 this year. Still, I did have enough money, $4, for two more lottery tickets for that drawing.


However, someone had a very merry Christmas Eve holiday with a Powerball prize of $1.8 billion. The Wednesday, Dec. 24, Christmas Eve Powerball inched close to $2 billion, but one lucky ticket had the perfect number combo. It was purchased from a Murphy USA gas station at the Walmart Supercenter in Cabot, Arkansas. The Christmas Eve jackpot was for $1.7 billion, but final ticket sales pushed it to the second-highest lottery prize in U.S. history, at $1.817 billion.

James Brodell, A.M. Costa Rica editor emeritus, is a retired journalism professor and a New York Metro area newspaper editor. He has studied U.S. open records and open meeting laws extensively. He can be reached at JBrodell@jamesbrodell.com or Jay@amcostarica.com.

Check out Brodell literary offerings here at 5440north.com or JamesBrodell.com  -Copyright James J. Brodell 2025-

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The views or opinions expressed in this article are the sole and exclusive responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinion of A.M. Costa Rica.

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