What a difference a year makes. Last year's Thanksgiving Day dinner was somewhat uneasy, when we were just glad to be able to get together at all, given that so many jurisdictions were putting out "do not gather" orders of various degrees of force. I literally wasn't sure that we would be going until the day before, when we actually hit the road ( Read more... )

This time last year, I was so excited about it finally being 2020, mostly because of a Saturday morning cartoon I loved when I was a little kid, which was set in the year 2020. At that time the year 2020 seemed impossibly far away, so actually attaining it was as much a milestone (if not more so) than the year 2000 had been ( Read more... )

Last night I was thinking about why Christmas didn't seem nearly as exciting as it used to. No doubt part of it is just how low-key our Christmas celebrations have become over the past few years. Dad hasn't put up a tree or other decorations since Mom's health really started deteriorating, so the house doesn't have that festive feel I remember from ( Read more... )

I knew my family's Christmas celebration would be low-key. We haven't put up a Christmas tree or done extensive decoration in years, since my mother's health really began to decline ( Read more... )

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Here in the US, today is Thanksgiving Day. Broadly speaking, it's a harvest festival, but with a special emphasis on gratitude -- which may be why it's getting lost in the ever-increasing commercialization of Christmas, where the Christmas decorations start going up as soon as the Halloween ones go down, and sometimes even before. (When I was a ( Read more... )

When I was young, the Fourth of July was a time for picnics and for going up to the fireworks show in the evening. I particularly remember the Bicentennial celebrations in 1976, when we went up to a neighboring town to see a parade and speeches by some local politicians (which I found boring ( Read more... )

I found an article at Ask a Manager about an employee who was born on February 29, and was told by her boss that she did not get a day off for her birthday in non-leap-years, because she "didn't have a birthday." And when AAM pointed out that this employee still gets a year older every year, even if the date of her birthday doesn't happen that year ( Read more... )

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We're entering the winter holiday season, in which we have a number of holidays associated with gift-giving. Christmas is the most prominent, but there are also Christian traditions of giving gifts on St. Nicholas Day and on Epiphany. Several other faith traditions have holidays involving gift-gifting during this period, and people with cultural ( Read more... )