Dear Thanksgiving, No matter how many twinkle lights go up around town or how many holiday songs I hear on the radio, I haven’t forgotten you. November is yours. I have a turkey decoration on the center of my kitchen table, and that bird will stay in its place of prominence until the sun sets on November 28th. I promise. For years now, you’ve been getting the short end of the wishbone, thanks to a phenomenon they call “Christmas Creep.” Don’t worry. Christmas Creep is not some weirdo in a Santa Suit. It’s a strategy used by retailers to move the holiday shopping period earlier in the year. They want a longer runway leading up to Black Friday, when holiday […]

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It started about a week ago – a strange itching sensation on the palm of my hand. No redness, no bumps. Only a pesky itch with no apparent cause. I mentioned it one day to my dad, who said an itchy palm means you’re about to receive some unexpected money. What I got instead was a deluge of other symptoms, not just for me but for two of our three kids. One kid had a low-grade fever, which I chalked up to the common cold or 24-hour virus. The other had achy legs, which I attributed to the kind of growing pains that take a kid from 46 inches tall to 48 inches seemingly overnight. Then I came down with […]

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This morning I caught a glimpse of something white sticking out from under the sofa. Typically that “something” is a stray sock that one of our boys has taken off and slid under a cushion because walking it to the clothes hamper would be both inconvenient and wildly out of character. But this time it wasn’t the kids cluttering up my living room. It was the dogs. That white thing was a bone I’d given them a few days earlier – one of many dog treats they love to never eat. Overall, our 16-year-old, Lab mix, E.J., and our 2-year-old Beagle, Charlie, are good dogs. That’s exactly what I tell them when I reach into the container where I keep […]

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Like so many women (and a few men, too), I don’t like getting my picture made. It’s ironic, too, because I love photography and the way pictures tell a story or capture a mood. So I’ve been asking myself lately why I, along with so many other camera-shy people, sprint from the room anytime a lens gets pointed in my direction. I think I’ve figured it out. We all think we know how we look as we go about our daily lives. But we’re wrong. Inside my head, I have a picture of what I think I look like. But then I see my photograph and realize how far off my mental picture is from the real thing. That’s the […]

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