Category: holidays
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Into the Wild Frontier
“I’ll call the Poor Clares [monastery] and ask them to pray for your trip,” my mom said on Tuesday, the day before my flight to Orlando. “Can’t you just pray?” I whined. “We don’t have to ask the Poor Clares pray for every little thing,” I said. These are the words that will go down…
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Celebrating 50 Years, in style
Today my parents are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, and I wanted to dedicate a blog to them because this is such a tremendous milestone that it somehow makes me feel special by default.* *my enneagram Four couldn’t be happier Fifty years. Good God, that’s a long time. When they got married, disco was just…
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Little City Love Story
Yesterday during a girls’ brunch that I’m refusing to call “Galentine’s brunch,” we were asked: “What is the funniest, weirdest, or most interesting Valentine’s Day you’ve ever had?” The first one that came to mind is the one I alluded to in a recent Motif article, about the Scotsman in a Red Fez. And since…
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The Top 20 of 2020
If it hasn’t already been said, Charles Dickens wrote the best summary of the year 2020, which is remarkable given that he composed it in 1859: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of…
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The Story of the Pork Roll (otherwise known as Sir Hamselot)
My dad is a difficult person to shop for. (Just ask the set of golf clubs he never used that mysteriously disappeared.) Sometime around the 14th flannel shirt we gave him, he finally acquiesced to my mom’s and my plea to give us a Christmas list. This year the list included ski socks and a…
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The Art of Solo Thanksgiving
Sometime around July or early August of this year, I had the thought: “At least this year I won’t be alone for Thanksgiving.” As I’ve mentioned in previous Thanksgiving Day blogs, Thanksgiving isn’t an elaborate holiday for my family. For the last decade or so, my parents have gone to Colorado Springs, where they eat…
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…April Fools?
The last time I wrote a blog was on Leap Day, the 29th day of February, which my friend Katie and I celebrated as if it were a holiday because “real life is for March.” Well…welcome to real life. As is tradition at the end of every year, I wanted to create my Top 10…
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Leap Day with a Dash of Hocus Pocus
I heard that someone was getting married today, and my first reaction was, “That’s so special!” but then I thought of how unusual it is, in a practical sense. When do you celebrate your anniversary? Is your spouse going to make lame jokes after eight years that it’s only your “second anniversary, har har”? What…
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The Year of the New Decade
I started to compose this blog on January 4th, as part of my annual tradition, and in the three weeks since I drafted the opening paragraph, I: I ended up in the ER. had to close my bank account because someone was creating fraudulent checks. found out a very special person passed away at the…
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For the Judge
I don’t expect many of you to be reading my blog on Christmas Day. But this blog is actually a gift for my dad, so it must be posted today. And you get to behold it along with him! Looking back at this year’s posts, I realize I only cryptically discussed my Harper Lee Year…
Travel & Food Writer 