Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Frank and I are enjoying a peaceful post-Christmas, our daughters having departed together to party, our house still full of warm smells of cookies and pie. The racing around to buy, to ship, to gather, to cook, to wrap or en-stocking, is over for one more year. All is calm. I won’t clean up till tomorrow.

How lucky I feel that we’ve made it past one more Christmas–surfed the crazy, commercialized wave of meeting insanely high expectations defined as “normal.” Now that it’s past, I’m having a chance to remember the older image of Christmas (and Hanukkah), celebrating the power of both courage and hope.

I’m sending out special thanks tonight to Kalilily, Amygdala, and Niek, whose courage in coping with this particular Christmas may well come back to inspire their blogfriends someday. In the long run, we all need more courage than pie, as well as renewable hope for a better New Year.