Christmas Carol

It’s hard to imagine a Christmas season without Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol making an appearance. This Christmas/Holiday season finds me giving copious quantities of cash to assorted home supply shops as I organize my new apartment. My daughter and her daughter are celebrating all of us being together this year by helping me bake cookies for a church fundraiser to support a local charity. I hope you’ll enjoy this rerun from 2018. May the transformed Ebenezer […]

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A Wonderful Life?

We have three men to thank for the classic Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Philip Van Doren Stern, author of the short story that inspired the movie; Frank Capra, the immigrant who produced the film;  Jimmy Steward, aka George Bailey. Prior to the release of this perennial favorite, none of them were having a wonderful life. The 1930s and 1940s, the decades in which the short story and the movie first appeared in public, were […]

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Christmas Shopping List

Christmas Non-Shopping List

Does your list of things to do include Christmas shopping for people you care about but are out of ideas for what to give them? I suspect so. Most of us really don’t need more things. What many of us long for is more time. We crave more time for activities that add meaning to our lives or help us relax and calm down. Many people crave more quality time with their friends and family. […]

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A Christmas Story - movie house

A Christmas Story

In case you’ve never seen the classic 1983 “A Christmas Story,” it’s about Ralphie Parker who needs to convince his parents, teacher, and Santa he’s old enough to handle a Red Ryder BB gun. Although the story is filmed in a neighborhood walking distance from where my grandmother lived, I never saw “A Christmas Story”until I met my son-in-law. Rudy watches the movie at least once every Christmas season. But then, I was visiting that […]

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Happy Holidays

I suppose it’d be asking too much to finish the relentless political publicity before we start in on the how-many-days-‘til-Christmas hype. It’s already started in my hometown of Houston where the Christmas lights are already coming on and the TV commercials are appearing for the annual consumer over-drive advertising campaigns. If anyone near and dear to you is about to run this gauntlet of relentless holiday over-functioning as a first time single-again adult, I urge […]

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