Gehrke: Did you get these Christmas cards from Utah politicos? They were strangely on-point

Christmas is, of course, a time for tradition, and there isn't much that is more traditional than politicians sending out thousands and thousands of Christmas cards. But for some reason, the Christmas card haul was a little light this year.

Maybe the cards got lost in the mail. Maybe our officials were just too busy working. But chances are it was the mail thing.

So as a public service, I’ve taken the liberty to put together a few cards that I feel capture the year that was for several government figures. Enjoy and Merry Christmas.

What do you do when you've just coasted to yet another comfortable re-election victory and are all geared up to spend two more years investigating Hillary Clinton? If you're Jason Chaffetz, you walk away. The congressman announced in May that he was leaving the U.S. House. He's now a professional pundit on Fox News.

President Donald Trump spent most of his first year in office undoing President Barack Obama’s legacy, so it wasn’t really a surprise when he dropped into Utah earlier this month to sign an order drastically shrinking Bears Ears National Monument and the 21-year-old Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Grand Staircase, as it turns out, holds vast coal deposits, which could be worth billions — if there was a market for coal and it was feasible to get it out of the ground.

Sometimes there’s no winning when you are the attorney general. Sean Reyes got caught up in a squabble between the Legislature and Gov. Gary Herbert over who got to call the shots when it came time to elect a replacement for Chaffetz. Fortunately for Reyes, he's had a lot of practice in refusing to release records, so he was ready. In his years in office, he's frequently fought to withhold documents, which earned him a “Black Hole Award” from the Society of Professional Journalists in 2016.

Orrin Hatch was a key player in Congress this year, cozying up to the Trump administration and helping author a sweeping tax package that is going to make his wealthy donors very, very happy. But in defending his package, Hatch also once again showed his contempt for folks who are at the other end of the economic spectrum.

Hatch says he’ll decide soon whether he's going to run for another term in the Senate. Maybe he’ll be visited during the night by three ghosts that will help him make his decision.

The smog and fog and pollution are as much a part of Utah winters as The Greatest Snow On Earth. This year, the winter inversion came early and looks like it'll probably hang around like an unwelcome holiday visitor. And it turns out that cranking up the fan on your idling car doesn’t help blow any of the muck out of the valley. So maybe try to cut back on respiration on those red air days.

If you're a governor who just won re-election, have a booming economy and a sky-high approval rating, what’s not to like? That was Gov. Gary Herbert’s 2017, and he even managed to roll the Legislature in their dispute over the special election to replace Chaffetz. So if you see the governor smiling, maybe now you understand why.