I originally wrote this piece for Odd Prompts right around Thanksgiving a few years ago. One of these days I'd like to polish it and turn it into a proper e-book, but I just wanted to share it again ( Read more... )

It's sad that Thanksgiving Day is getting crowded out as Christmas decorations go up earlier and earlier every year. When I was a child, Thanksgiving was the beginning of the winter holiday season, and only on the Friday or Saturday after Thanksgiving did Santa Claus come to the mall to hear little children's Christmas wishes. As a result, ( Read more... )

May you have a safe and happy Independence Day if you live somewhere that celebrates it. I'm currently listening to a lot of fireworks being launched by our neighbors.

Today is Memorial Day ( Read more... )

Today was a rather quiet Christmas. For the first time in almost a decade, we put up the tree again. It was nice to see it all lit and pretty, even if it didn't have any ornaments.

Still, it was nice to eat Christmas dinner together, then exchange presents. Maybe not as fancy as a decade or so ago, but times change and life goes on.

Here in the US, today is Thanksgiving Day. It's a harvest festival, but focused upon gratitude, and has its roots in the early days of the Plymouth Colony, one of several established in what is now Massachusetts by English Calvinists ( Read more... )

We were planning to go to church with Dad this morning, but when we got there, we discovered they’d canceled services after a pipe in the ceiling burst and they didn’t have any water in the whole building. Maybe we should’ve checked online before leaving, since they had the front restrooms closed due to frozen pipes at the Christmas Eve services ( Read more... )

This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from nother Mike: They had a pumpkin pie with mashed potato topping…It felt like the work of someone who was trying to produce a Thanksgiving dinner, but was unfamiliar with American culinary traditions and working from a photograph or painting of an idealized Thanksgiving dinner ( Read more... )

Thanksgiving Day is in many ways a harvest festival, but it is also a time to count our blessings. For some it has a religious aspect, of gratitude to the Divine Providence as understood in their faith traditions, while for others the expression of gratitude is more secular in nature, to friends, to mentors, to others who've given them a hand up in ( Read more... )

Memories of Christmas past always have a certain rosy glow, a patina of nostalgia that can make it difficult to separate what actually happened from the retellings over the years. Maybe the turkey really was as huge as we remembered, or maybe it just seemed so big because we were so very small at the time. Did the tree really stretch all the way to ( Read more... )