Snow and other thoughts

Five years ago, we were here in Asheville at Christmas.  There was a lot of snow.  It started early, and continued, with snow on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Quite different than today's early morning thunderstorms, with even more rain after a rainy night, and WARM temperatures.

Mocha and me -- December 12,  2010

We've almost a week more of unusually high temperatures, apparently, before they moderate to something more normal.

Remembering holidays and Christmases past

Thinking about Christmas...

A search of previous post with the label "Christmas" brings up not only travel posts of Christmases away, but remembrances of our last snowy Christmas with Mocha (our 2nd Golden) and our first with our current fellow, Woody, as well as posts that have Christmas fern in the narrative or "Christmas Eve" as a tag.  Go figure. 

A search for "holidays" was equally revealing, although it brought up some of the same posts.

My mother (and my dad, too) believed in giving back at Christmas, even though we were a secular family (my mom, a philosophy major,  took my sister and me to Unitarian fellowship for some time), but my sister (who grew up to be a music teacher and is musical in all ways) and I loved singing carols, and we made Christmas cookies and had Christmas dinner, and gathered folks to the table (foreign students who were far from home).

My sister and I learned about the philosophers of the world (and the founders of the major religions; they were wise people, my mom said).  And I don't have any reason to consider it otherwise, although I'm more or less a humanist, and not a believer of anything much beyond the basic good of people.

Christmas lights in Lecce, Italy

"Home" at Christmas for the first time (since the last ones with Mocha and Woody), after a very many away traveling, seems both welcome and disconcerting.  

What DOES Christmas mean, after all, to two secular folks who grew up with Christmas traditions, but don't practice gift-giving (to friends and relatives), but will go to a Christmas brunch, hosted by friends in the neighborhood, and share dinner with equally secular friends?

We've continued the holiday giving around food, shelter, clothing, and animals, both here and in distant places.  

We'll mark the tradition by going to a Christmas Eve celebration, as we've done in places around the world, from Mexico, Columbia, Chile, Vietnam, Italy, France, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Dominica, and Costa Rica, and other places that I'm not remembering at the moment.  There was a memorable Christmas Eve in Arusha, Tanzania, but that one wasn't celebratory!

Wishing peace for the world at this time of the year and blessings to any of you that read this.

Winter Solstice

I'm glad that today marks the shortest day of the year. 

I'm not particularly happy when the days are shorter, even if the temperatures are mild, as they've been this year.  It's still dark when I get up, and dark before I finish cooking dinner.

Yes, I remember my days in Germany when it was even darker, and the light was for a shorter period of time, and I now imagine my friends elsewhere in Northern Europe (Ireland, the Netherlands, UK) enveloped in the dark, but...  I'm glad the days will be getting longer.

We have often been off to much brighter places by now, having traveling at winter break, as academics for decades, without family obligations around holidays.

Home this year, in the mountains, for the first time, it's interesting to mark the solstice, and the holiday season.  Neither of us are religious at all, now in midlife, but we've grown up with the secular traditions of Christmas, and my gardening companion, with the traditions of Catholic celebrations behind him -- well, we enjoy marking the transition of Christmas and New Year's wherever we've been in the world. And we'll do that here in our mountain town in Western North Carolina.

That's often included Christmas Eve masses in small parish churches in Latin American countries, or a massive one in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, or a freezing one in Rome, up on the hill, on a trip to Italy after 9/11.

Lights in Hoi An

But what I'm remembering this evening is a wonderful Full Moon celebration in Hoi An, Vietnam.

We had wonderful trips there over two travel seasons.