Around the Corner

The holiday season is notorious for bad eating habits. We’re busy and we’re tempted to eat from a drive-through window instead of taking time for a home-cooked meal. We’re invited to holiday parties where there will be cookies, pies, candies and cakes. No one wants to pass up the treats or offend the host. The weather’s colder, the days are darker, and holiday stress adds insult to injury. We’re more likely to turn to comfort food. Sure, we’ll all be promising ourselves diets and exercise by January, but you can add these superfoods to your menu now without passing up on the holiday fun: black beans, broccoli, rolled or steel-cut oats, citrus fruit, bright yellow vegetables like squash or pumpkin, salmon, soy, leafy green vegetables like kale or spinach, tomatoes, turkey, walnuts, blueberries and yogurt. Look at it this way: eating more of these now gives you a bit less to feel guilty about in six weeks.

Peace and Prosperity

I love this time of year: especially the food, the lights and the music. I have friends involved with no fewer than four separate productions of A Christmas Carol. They’ve all asked me to attend; in fact I’ve promised to help with more than one. I’ve been asked to assist with four church Christmas parties, one Christmas concert and two Christmas worship services, some of which happen at the same time. Then there are gifts to buy (or make) and wrap, cards to send, stockings to stuff, decorations to put up and a recital  to plan. I’d love to do it all, I really would. But until I come up with a Tardis, a time-turner or a DeLorean with a flux capacitor, it’s not going to happen. This is why I make lists. On paper everything is so much simpler. I can cross out what can’t be done, prioritize what can, and get to work.

Escher's Leaves

When Jack Prelutsky was growing up he had a teacher who hated poetry. She was expected to recite a poem to her class at least once a week. He said she would, "pick a boring poem from a boring book and read it in a boring voice, looking bored while doing it." As an adult Jack worked at odd jobs including cabbie, moving man, busboy, potter, woodworker, and door-to-door salesman. He liked to draw animals. His friends convinced him to send his art to a publisher. As an afterthought he scribbled a poem on each before sending them off. He was amazed when they wanted his work; not the drawings that took six months, but the poems which took two hours. This one is on display at my local grocer's, surrounded by second graders' illustrations:

If turkeys thought, they'd run away a week before Thanksgiving Day.

But turkeys can't anticipate, and so there's turkey on my plate!
Happy Thanksgiving Day!

Teal Inner Beauty

Here’s what I DIDN’T know about the first Thanksgiving: The pilgrims didn’t call their new home Plymouth, Massachusetts after Plymouth, Devon. Previous explorers dubbed it that long before the Pilgrims came. So it was just a coincidence that their journey’s beginning and end had the same name. When Squanto taught them to plant maize, the pilgrims called it “turkey wheat.” To them the word “corn” was a general term referring to any kind of grain. When we say the word “Puritanical,” we mean abstinent and austere. And the Puritans were all that. But they weren’t teetotalers. They brewed and drank a lot of beer; primarily because they believed water was dangerous for their health. We think of turkey and cranberries as being part of the first Thanksgiving, and they were there. But so were clams, eels, venison, lobster, mussels, squash, walnuts and grapes. No wonder the feasting lasted three days!  

Four Double Nine-Patches

I spent a chunk of last week studying about the first Thanksgiving to prepare a lesson for young adults. Most of what I read was like a fifth grade refresher course: the Puritans were a radical faction of the Church of England that fled to the Netherlands where practicing their faith wasn’t against the law. (Holland is still an “Anything Goes” sort of place.) They suffered economic hardship there, and were afraid their children wouldn’t grow up “English,” so they joined a London Stock company to finance their journey on the merchant ship Mayflower. The trip took twice as long as they’d expected, and their first winter was unlike anything any of them had experienced. Half of them never lived to see the spring. The Old World peas and barley they brought wouldn’t grow in the Americas. If not for the help of the Wamanoag tribe, there would have been little to be thankful for that autumn.

Blue Inner Beauty

Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it. – Malachi 3:10

“The imagery of the windows of heaven used by Malachi is most instructive. Windows allow natural light to enter into a building. In like manner, spiritual illumination and perspective are poured out through the windows of heaven and into our lives as we honor the law of tithing. For example, a subtle but significant blessing we receive is the spiritual gift of gratitude that enables our appreciation for what we have to constrain desires for what we want. A grateful person is rich in contentment. An ungrateful person suffers in the poverty of endless discontentment.” – Elder David A. Bednar