christmas

Holidays Are For Reading

Humbug!

Humbug!

I was always a voracious reader. As a kid, most of my free time was spent reading. Picture books, chapter books, horse magazines, fairy tales; pretty much anything I could get my grubby little hands on. But as I got older, school and friends and extracurricular activities started taking up more of my free time, and my reading time was more and more often confined to bedtime and weekends (heavens forbid). And that’s when I discovered the magical time known as the winter holidays.

Just think–two glorious weeks empty of schoolwork and extracurriculars! Friends off to visit relatives or tied up with family obligations. Shorter days. The winter break was, for me, a series of long, beautiful hours just asking to be filled up with reading. Plus, for Christmas I was guaranteed a pile of new and exciting books just waiting to be cracked open and devoured.

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Gratitude

No eel...

No eel…

I know I’m a few days late for a Thanksgiving-themed post, but the long weekend gave me some time to think about what exactly gratitude means to me. Thanksgiving is an awfully fun holiday, usually packed chock-full of food and family and friends. There is pie and wine and binge-eating and carb-loading. There is music and laughter and impromptu games of touch football and chilly walks in the woods. These are all things I love. But sometimes I wonder if all the food and fun doesn’t distract us from what Thanksgiving is about.

I’m not talking about Pilgrims and Native Americans (although I recently learned that the First Thanksgiving probably featured eel as a main course, among other things). I’m talking about being grateful for the things we busy, self-absorbed, attention-challenged humans rarely take the time to thing about, let along express our gratitude for. In 1621, a feast was held to celebrate a good harvest and the sharing of knowledge between two disparate people. These days, what does the feast stand for? Does gorging ourselves on stuffing and pie really express our gratitude for all the things we own and the people we love and the lives we experience?

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