Christmas is less than a week away, a fact that prompts me to think about gift-giving. What a very fraught subject! I’d be more than willing to just forget about the whole process myself, being content with good food, decorations, socializing with friends and family, and special outings. But I can’t be a complete Scrooge, can I? So here are some ways that I enter into the spirit of the season without putting myself through the wringer or giving items that may not be used or appreciated:
Happy Memories
The Best Way to Make Yourself Happy
I’ll have a post later this week about doing the food for the Chorale post-concert reception on Friday, but for today I have a couple of quotations for you and some observations about doing good deeds for other people and how helpful that is for the person performing said deeds.
First, from the comic Patton Oswalt, whose wife died suddenly in April 2016:
“Something that really pulls you out of grief is helping other people. . . . Anything to get you out of your head.”
“So we beat on, boats against the current. . .
. . . borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
This closing line from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald came into my head Saturday night as I walked out of the building after the final performance of the Cherry Creek Chorale’s wonderful fall concert. Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I very much dislike the novel itself. I can’t stand Daisy and don’t have the slightest idea why Jay Gatsby would carry a torch for her and even take the fall for her.
The Happiness of a Big Event
I have a separate blog called Intentional Hospitality, but my purpose in writing this post isn’t so much to give you recipes and timetables as to talk about a major source of happiness–and nervous breakdowns—in my life: throwing parties.
I have always liked to cook, going way back to my grade-school days. In fact, one of my fondest memories from about fourth grade is the time that my mom put me in charge of cooking dinner and I made everything from the
Does the Present Moment Really Exist?
I’m always hearing snatches on the radio that intrigue me; sometimes I even follow up on them. One of my favorite sources for these snatches is “The TED Radio Hour” on NPR. As you may know, and as I’ve written before, TED Talks are a great source of short talks on a wide range of subjects. “TED” stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” but you can shoehorn almost any topic into those three areas.
Vacation Wrapup
I almost always worry that we won’t have enough to do on our trips, a worry that Jim reminds me of when we arrive home after having crammed each day to the fullest. This trip was no different.
Somewhere I read a study on memory that asked, “Would you go on vacation if after it was all over your memories of the trip were erased from your mind?” Would all the money and effort be worth it if you had no memory of what you did? I honestly don’t know. It seems to me that there would be a happy “residue” left in your mind even if specific items were gone.
Vacation Eating
I find to my great surprise that I’ve never done a post about French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Giuliano. (The link is to her website. She’s wearing a very odd outfit in the current main picture on the home page, but, as she would say, c’est la vie!) While we were on vacation I found myself thinking about that book’s ideas quite a bit as I tried very hard, and for the most part succeeded, in following them.
Here’s her main principle: Eat food you love and eat deliberately and mindfully. Eat real meals. Don’t eat standing up, or in the car, or in front of the TV. Remember that you get the most enjoyment out of the first few bites. You don’t have to eat a lot of something delicious in order to enjoy it; in fact, overeating destroys the enjoyment. Better to have a small portion and enjoy every morsel than to scarf down a huge serving without tasting it much and then paying the price of feeling bloated and stuffed.
How I Spent My 25th Wedding Anniversary
Jim and I have now been married for 25 years! Is that even possible? We had sort of planned to do something fun last evening—maybe go downtown to the Denver Art Museum and then go out to eat at our favorite restaurant on the 16th Street Mall (we’ve been there once), the Paramount Cafe. But Jim had a meeting that went long, and he’d been working all day on the kitchen . . . so we’ll do it this weekend. But we ended up doing something we really enjoyed, even though it may sound pretty boring: we figured out what we want to do with the dining nook in our new kitchen.
In Which I Take Ownership of My Chorale Cooking
The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church by Margaret Visser, originally published in 2001, now available in hardback, paperback, and Kindle versions. Link is to Amazon page.
In this book, the historian and anthropologist Margaret Visser takes the reader through a Roman church, Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura), exhaustively describing the architecture, history and current activities centered on this ancient structure. Sound boring? Oh believe me, it’s not. It is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read, and I’m so sorry that we didn’t visit this church when we went to Europe back in 1993. We’ll do so someday! I had read the book many years ago (it came out in 2001) and then again in 2013 when we went on our big driving trip to LA.
A Small Act of Compassion
I wrote last week about my disagreement with the concept of empathy. (Apparently Jonah Goldberg got a ton of hate mail on his column on the subject, including messages from people who didn’t read the article very carefully—or at all—and thought the book he was quoting was from a nasty conservative. Sigh.)