This is the time of year we sit down to set goals and make resolutions for improvements in health, relationships, work life, state of mind and heart, and condition of the bathroom medicine cabinet. Here is one possibility. Below are links to others. Happy New Year, everyone!
New Year’s Resolution: Share
New Year’s Resolution: Library Books
New Year’s Resolution: Garden
In celebration of this shortest day, this longest night of the year, a sketch and a poem.
Reflections On a Scottish Christmas
The dark of winter wraps around us tight.
The lamps are fired, and flickering light
beats time to the fiddle as notes float softly down, like the years’ first snow.
While outside the window a blast of late December wind
whistles harmony to the drone of the pipes.
We push the old year back against the wall
so we can dance a jig for Christmas and welcome in the new.
—Johnny Cunningham
Must post my annual tribute.
Leah
A warning to all my cookie guinea pigs! This year I set aside the traditional gingerbread cookie recipe to try a new one. I set it up last night and trudged to the kitchen before dawn (which is, admittedly, pretty late by mid-December) to finish the dough, which now must chill thoroughly before it’s cut and baked. If it’s a success, I’ll post the recipe in time for next Santa Lucia Day.
As part of my continuing obsession each December to remind the world about the discovery of the TRUE author of the beloved Christmas poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” I cannot resist once more posting a link to the story. Naughty, naughty, Clement Clarke Moore. No golden walnut for YOU.
For today, the first of December and the first Sunday of Advent, a picture, and a poem by Ann Ellerton with which my daughter and I sometimes began our homeschooling day during this season.
Now the twilight of the year
Comes, and Christmas draweth near.
See, across the Advent sky
How the clouds move quietly.
Earth is waiting, wrapped in sleep,
Waiting in a silence deep.
Birds are hid in bush and reed
Flowers are sleeping in their seed.
Through the woodland to and fro
Silent-footed creatures go.
Hedgehog curled in prickly ball
Burrows beneath the leaves that fall.
Man and beast and bird and flower
Waiting for the midnight hour
Waiting for the infant’s birth
Down from Heaven, onto Earth.
—Ann Ellerton
Melissa
Chuck
This day in celebration of pranks and tomfoolery, which dates back several hundred years in Europe (and which also appears in some non-European cultures at the turning of the year from winter to spring—a kind of universal spring fever), in France is called Poisson d’Avril. Here are a few April Fool pranks from around the world.
In our family the most successful prank was played by my husband who, glancing outside one April 1 morning, exclaimed excitedly, “A lion’s escaped from the zoo!” sending us all rushing in astonishment to the window. After all, the zoo is only a block away… He still chuckles about that one.
Giampaolo
Pauline
Sigh. Lose that hour, folks.
Aunt Mary
Lisa
