Holiday Noticings

--My favorite memory of the past week?  Oddly, it may be the night we sat on the front porch, all the candles in the Advent wreath.  A raccoon and a baby raccoon rambled by in our front yard, paying us no mind.  I felt as if we background characters in an illustrated children's book about woodland creatures who celebrate Christmas together, as if the raccoons were returning from Roberta Rabbit's Christmas Eve gift exchange.

--My favorite Christmas week typo (note the last word), from an e-mail I was writing (and happily, I discovered the error before I hit send):  "Program leaders, please stay in touch with your adjunct faculty to make sure they’re understanding our new procedures so that everyone is paid in a timely manger."

--We own a long shelf of Christmas CDs, but we've been enjoying the Classical Christmas station on Amazon music.  About a month ago, my spouse realized that the Alexa feature of our new Smart TV could be used to pull up music, and we've been having fun with that.  I like having a variety of musical approaches to Christmas music in the background without having to change CDs.  And yet we've also discovered how much dreadful music is out there--thus, the constant playing of the Classical Christmas station.

--Sunday as I was cooking a turkey--yes, a whole 22 pound turkey--I wondered why I wanted to do this.  Yes, I like having left overs, and I like the cheap price of a whole turkey (68 cents a pound--protein doesn't get much cheaper these days, even when one buys legumes).  Yes, I like the way the house smells while the turkey is cooking.  But my spouse pointed out that I'm cooking for 10-12 people, and we've almost never had that many people come over.  It's a lot of clean up.  And we're running out of space to store leftovers.

--Monday morning I decided it was time to start walking a bit further--yes, this decision was prompted by my stepping on the scale and realizing that the magical thinking that I could overindulge indefinitely was not true.  As I walked around the lake, from a short distance, a man said, "Did you see that?  What was that?"  I had some suggestions:  a fish, one of the dolphins we sometimes see, the manatee that one morning walker told me she had seen once.  The man was from Salt Lake City and had been up for hours writing about leaving his job.  He had that antsiness of someone making a big decision, but having no one to talk to.  We chatted for a bit, and although we didn't talk about God, I felt that the world was saying, "There's more than one way to be a spiritual director."

--I loved this article that I discovered yesterday.  It's about how the historian Heather Cox Richardson became so widely read and influential.  I needed this reminder that there are many ways to make an impact with one's writing and that it's not too late, as long as we're writing.