The post-Christmas quiet has set in, and I have my work cut out for me. That’s it pictured above: the collection of books I received as gifts. Continue reading
Reading through the calm
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Category Archives: Miscellany
Christmas Day: Photos and Musings
Aside
And Christmas Day came, because it always does, whether you want it to or not, and it always goes, whether you want it to or not, because life is as it is.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Snowmama, from “Christmas Days”
Bloody Rudolph: A gratitude journal
Every year for the past several years, my family and another have come together a few days before Christmas to make and decorate cookies together.
Sometimes a lot gets accomplished. Sometimes not so much. That’s not really the point. The point is that we have created a holiday tradition of fun and fellowship, one that brings us together to laugh and play (and work; making and icing cookies is hard work!), and one that feels closer to the meaning of Christmas than a frenzy of buying and wrapping and unwrapping. Continue reading
Holiday foods: There’s sharing, and then there’s sharing
If you know me well, you probably know that holidays are food rituals for me. Thanksgiving is turkey and stuffing and pie; Easter is bunny bread (bunny refers to the shape, not the ingredients); St. Patrick’s Day is corned beef; New Year’s Day is lentil soup. Then there’s the mother of all food rituals: Christmas. Continue reading
Persimmons
Photo by Boris Oblak (Own work) [GFDL or CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Not all of one, just a bit. I shared it with my husband. Continue reading
New Year’s resolutions? What’s the point?
Do you make New Year’s resolutions? I’ve never really gone in for them, though it’s possible I might have tried once or twice. To me there’s something almost superficial about pegging the promise of a life change on the occasion of a recurring holiday. It seems trivializing or insubstantial, maybe flighty. I don’t trust myself to commit to keep a promise that I’m making because it’s the time of year to make a promise.
But that’s me, and I wonder if other people have success with their resolutions. I do like the idea of “new year, new start.”
I’ve been reading Jeanette Winterson’s “Christmas Days,” a book of stories and essays and recipes that isn’t only about Christmas, and it has this to say about New Year’s resolutions: Continue reading