'TWAS THE WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS

I'm writing this post on Wednesday, December 18th. One week from today will be Christmas Day. How many of us, besides me, have felt as if Time started speeding up? (Better question--where in the world did all that Time go? Whole days, even weeks, just up and went.)

I didn't expect to get to this day, one week before Christmas Day, feeling as if the season isn't here yet. Really! Don't we have at least a couple more weeks to go?

So! Anticipating that your life is full up, and knowing mine will be fuller than usual, I'm sending you my Christmas greeting early. You've seen it before, and you may even have it memorized. Yet, the beauty and the message are ages old and always new.

So today, let's listen to Linus Van Pelt: "This is what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."

Luke 2:8-14 King James Version (KJV)

⁸ And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

⁹ And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

¹⁰ And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

¹¹ For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

¹² And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

¹³ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

¹⁴ Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

A Blessed Christmas to you!

From Thursday's Child

  WORDS - WORDS - WORDS

What is it about quotations and words of wisdom and sayings that intrigues us?

Here are some to entertain you - possibly give you a nudge - even make you smile in agreement.

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Courage is being scared to death - but saddling up anyway.

            -- John Wayne

We are all here for a spell; get all the good laughs you can.

            -- Will Rogers

Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.

            -- Tallulah Bankhead

Never miss a chance to keep your mouth shut.

            -- Robert Newton Peck

Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

            -- Mark Twain

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It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides.

            -- George Sand

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

            -- William James

You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.

            -- Evan Esar

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This thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down.

            -- Mary Pickford

I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.

            -- Mother Teresa

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

            -- Helen Keller

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Have a blessed week! Keep on keepin' on.

Thursday's Child

Not yet, but coming soon!

  HAPPINESS IS . . .

One of my favorite gifts each Christmas is the Peanuts calendar from my son and daughter-in-law. Each month shows a picture defining Happiness--Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Woodstock, Sally--sometimes in a group, sometimes alone.

Here are some highlights:

--JANUARY: HAPPINESS IS a new adventure. Perfect for the first month of a new year.

--MARCH: HAPPINESS IS a good book. That one could be on every month of my personal calendar.

--MAY: HAPPINESS IS being with friends. Where would we be without our friends?

--AUGUST: HAPPINESS IS an afternoon nap. Yesss!

--SEPTEMBER: HAPPINESS IS expressing yourself. The picture shows Snoopy painting a portrait of Woodstock. I don't do portraits, but I love to paint. (We won't talk about quality here.)

--AND THE LAST ONE, LEADING INTO THE NEXT YEAR: HAPPINESS IS staying cozy. Snoopy is nearly invisible under a huge padded jacket.

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As I mulled over the topic for today's post, I found myself remembering what it was like being a kid, what made me happy, what I looked forward to, what seemed to me to be the epitome of being happy.

At age 6--going to school. So much great stuff to do--books to read, workbooks to fill out, drawings to color, other kids to see and hear (a one-room school was a microcosm of life for me).

At age 9--discovering writing! Putting characters we'd heard about in the book read to us by Miss Kincaid into our own story! It was like walking through a secret portal into another universe, where my own words made the story.

At age 12--living in a big city. (Wichita, KS was about 300K population at that time; big city by my standards.) Finding out there were other kinds of people in the world--meeting my first African Americans as students in my school. Having male teachers. And discovering art--making puppets, fashioning clay images, painting with watercolors.

At age 15--getting a chance to write for the high school newspaper; acting in one-act plays; going to high school basketball games.

After high school, everything seemed to be going faster. Life was lived on an adult plane--college students were treated like serious contenders for honors and graduation diplomas.

Happiness came with studies--though I have to admit advanced math classes made me break out in a rash; my brain wasn't ready to deal with number logic--word logic, now, that was just my style.

Adult happiness--so much depends on the person--what they grew up with, what their expectations were about life, what resources they had, or didn't have, to make dreams become reality. Like many people, I learned to adjust my dreams and expectations to fit with the resources I had or could assemble.

In my late 20s, I could find joy in my young family; going to church; eventually returning to college to finish my education. 

Beyond that time, life didn't offer many different kinds of experiences. I did eventually work at a full-time job, which brought its own kind of happiness. I returned to writing fiction and found a writer's group of like-minded women. A short-term accompaniment job at a church became nearly full-time employment as the organist (never expected that!).

After retirement, and a rather long adjustment period in which I had to decide what I could do, what I could afford to do, and what I'd much rather do, I settled into mostly activities that called me to be creative--quilting, knitting; playing church music; watercolor painting, and writing.

Happiness is still a good book or an afternoon nap--or both! But there's always a new adventure around somewhere, waiting to be discovered. 

May you be blessed with happiness in your life!

Thursday's Child

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P.S.--If you find snatches of the "Happiness Is" song from You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown running through your mind today, do a quick google search--"two kinds of ice cream" will bring up several sites, and on YouTube you can hear it sung. Enjoy! Sing along!!

 HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

May your day be filled with the love and warmth of family and friends together.

May your bodies be blessed with food that nourishes and comforts.

May your lives live out the gratitude on this special day of thanks.

Blessings,

Thursday's Child

[My computer and the blogging program are in a snit, I think. They're not allowing me to show you the pretty pictures that abound on the Internet. So I hope you'll imagine one of your favorite scenes--indoor, outdoor--or favorite Thanksgiving-themed images--as the opening of this blog post. This post  first appeared here a year ago.]

 GIVING . . .

There's another way to look at Thanks-giving--emphasis on giving. Here's a poem by Alberto Rios, poet laureate of Arizona, that addresses that topic. I hope you like it.

When Giving Is All We Have

Alberto Ríos

                                              One river gives
                                              Its journey to the next.

We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.
 

[Copyright © 2014 by Alberto Ríos. Used with permission of the author.]

Born in 1952, Alberto Ríos is the inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona and the author of many poetry collections, including A Small Story about the Sky (Copper Canyon Press, 2015). In 1981, he received the Walt Whitman Award for his collection Whispering to Fool the Wind (Sheep Meadow Press, 1982). He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2014 to 2020.

 

  LIFE

[Today I want to revisit an old favorite--at least, it's an old favorite of mine. Hope it makes you smile, or laugh, or just nod your head from time to time.]

Life being what it is, as I've said so often before, I (like others) lose track of time, things I need, tasks that should have been done last week, and people.

So today I'm looking at LIFE.

Let's start with song lyrics popular in the 1950s, recorded by The Hi-Lo's:

Life is just a bowl of cherries

Don't take it serious; it's too mysterious
You work, you save, you worry so
But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go

So keep repeating it's the berries
The strongest oak must fall
The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned
So how can you lose what you've never owned?
Life is just a bowl of cherries
So live and laugh at it all

--Lew Brown and Ray Henderson

[If you've never heard this one, look for it on YouTube.]

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Erma Bombeck snagged the popular phrase, "Life is just a bowl of cherries," which had been an old saying when Hector was a pup, and turned it into the title for one of her many humorous books: If Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries, Why Am I in the Pits?

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Here are some more thoughts on Life:

Peace is the beauty of life. It is sunshine. It is the smile of a child, the love of a mother, the joy of a father, the togetherness of a family. It is the advancement of man, the victory of a just cause, the triumph of truth.

     Menachem Begin [6^th Prime Minister of Israel]

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

     Maya Angelou [American poet]

Today I choose life. Every morning when I wake up I can choose joy, happiness, negativity, pain... To feel the freedom that comes from being able to continue to make mistakes and choices - today I choose to feel life, not to deny my humanity but embrace it. 

     Kevyn Aucoin [American makeup artist]

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I leave you with two important thoughts on how to live our lives:

Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure.

     Paulo Coelho [Brazilian lyricist & novelist]

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

     Steve Jobs [co-founder of Apple]

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May you not lose track of those things that are important to you!

And--may your Life be blessed!

Thursday's Child

   CHANGE

[I'm repeating this post because it's timely. So here's what I wrote some time ago. Hope it says something positive to you.]

We've just finished one third of the season of Autumn, and already I sense the big shift in temperatures, hours of daylight, amount of rain or sun. This time of year always finds me unsettled--not because of the weather, exactly, but because I know Autumn is progressing and will come to an end, and we'll be engulfed in Winter. I don't mean to hurry the seasons along--they seem to do quite well by themselves. If I could, I'd slow them down, so I could savor the sunny days and the few warm breezes that come my way. Yet, change is inevitable--time passes, life goes on, and everything changes. Everything.

You can always tell when the season is shifting, because I blog about transitions and change. Here’s the latest batch—they’re all visuals because I don’t have anything new to say about change.

 C. S. Lewis, known to many as the creator of The Chronicles of Narnia, became a Christian late in life and wrote many books about faith.

Maya Angelou is known for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, as well as for many volumes of poetry.

Rumi was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic.

My  story--my life--is in my hands. Staggering thought, isn't it?

One early morning gratitude--mumbled while your eyes are trying to open, before the morning jolt of caffeine, before your feet hit the floor--just one expression of thankfulness can make a difference in how your day starts, continues, and ends.

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Change is taking place in my neighborhood. In the past few years, houses have sold. Of the current occupants, only three were here when I moved in 36 years ago. We don't change quickly, but when we do--wow! Look out, world!

I expect to be here several more years--probably not 36, given the age I've attained. And I've made changes to my house; no doubt there'll be more.

Since change is inevitable, you--and I--might as well try to embrace it.

Have a wonderful week!

Blessings,

Thursday's Child