The week between Christmas and New Year’s is unlike any other.
No school. No work (or less work) for many. Hopefully all the shopping, wrapping and cooking paid off on Christmas and everyone had fun, but now is the time of no chores, no commitments, no challenges.
I told my husband it’s “anything goes” week. If he wants three Godiva chocolates for breakfast, that’s fine. If I want to wear my Comfy and slippers into a store, I will. (My slippers have hard bottoms, like real shoes 😉.)
My high school did the musical “Anything Goes” when I was in junior high in the late 70s, so I never got to be in it. But my friend’s older brother had one of the lead roles. We idolized those older kids and couldn’t wait to get to high school so we could be in the musical too. I still remember all the songs, especially the title song.
Here’s Sutton Foster in the Act 1 Finale of Anything Goes on Broadway. She got a Tony Award for her part in this production.
OK, I’m back in a good mood now. I had a lovely Christmas Eve.
I felt profound gratitude for four things last night:
1) I have a good son. Mothers of good sons, you know what I mean! Last night my son drove me to church for choir practice and came back an hour later to sit with me during the service, which was especially meaningful as my husband couldn’t make it to church this year due to his knee surgery. My son offers his arm when we walk through icy parking lots together. ❤️
2) SINGING: I just love it. Especially on Christmas Eve at our beautiful candlelight service.
My church on Christmas Eve
3) My husband felt well enough to go out to dinner with us after church. It was his first time in a restaurant since his surgery a month ago.
4) A negative mammogram. Ladies, you know how good that feels. Even if you’ve never had breast cancer, we all have friends or family members who have had it. (I got my results on Christmas Eve at 10pm.)
And now we await the arrival of our “celebrity guest” (as my son is calling her)—my precious one-year old granddaughter and her parents.
My husband preparing his famous Lasagna Bolognese with an ice pack strapped to his new knee
Yesterday I participated in a sacred circle dance where we honored Yule and the winter solstice.
AI depiction of our sacred circle yesterday, which included a 90+ year old woman and her 5 adult daughters all dressed in white for her birthday
The sun set at 4:16pm yesterday so we lit a fire in our fireplace in the evening. I had a memory of how much we really wanted a fireplace when we were house hunting. (Our first house did not have one.) We only use our fireplace occasionally, but it IS special to have an an indoor fire on these longest, darkest nights of the year.
As the embers burned down, I made myself two s’mores for dessert.
And now, on Winter Solstice morning (December 21) it is still pitch black at 6:30am and I’m awaiting the replay of the livestream of the ancient chamber at Newgrange in Ireland, which we visited in June. (I wasn’t up at at 3:40am to watch it live.) We saw a demonstration of how the sun lights up the inner chamber on the solstice when we were there, but I want to see the real version.
Finally, if you missed this year’s Lucia Morning broadcast from Visby, Sweden on St. Lucia Day (December 13), it’s a great thing to experience during these dark long nights. I watch it every year. The second children’s choir (the younger kids in the adorable wool coats and sweaters) are particularly enchanting.
Wishing all of my fellow Northern Hemisphere dwellers a light in the darkness this December solstice day. It only gets brighter from here.
I’m afraid the 2025 holiday season will be forever remembered as the “Year of the Knee.” Arthroplasty is rough, people. My husband is doing OK, but the pain is quite brutal. Thank goodness for opioids. I honestly don’t know how anyone gets through this without a partner. (I know they can and do, but it would be really hard.) Outpatient PT has started and now I get why folks call the PTs “Physical Terrorists.”
But on to happier things…
I have been enjoying looking at the lovely, happy holiday posts and photos from Scillagrace and others.
Last year was such a special Christmas because we had my brand new baby granddaughter—so perfect in every way. After the sting of the horrible election in November 2024, she gave me so much hope. She was—and is—a miracle. All babies are. I thank my wonderful daughter for the greatest gift of all last Christmas. Infants are pure love, pure light, pure joy.
My granddaughter and me last December Our tree last year The new mom managed to decorate—and even bake—last year. Hand-dipped and decorated Oreo cookie ballsWhite roses for Christmas last yearI got Christmas “crackers” from the British imports store and did special napkin folding last year.
I hope everyone can find some way to enjoy the season this year, despite whatever pain or hardships burden you. I recommend watching Sweden’s National Santa Lucia Day broadcast this Saturday, December 13. It’s always such a beautiful celebration of light in the darkness, with gorgeous choral music—including young children singing in tune. It’s typically available on YouTube the same day.
December Rx:
Music, lights, babies (if you can’t get your hands on a baby, watching young children sing is a good substitute)
Yesterday I went to a concert by the world-renowned Boston Symphony Orchestra in Boston’s historic Symphony Hall.
Boston’s Symphony Hall yesterday afternoon
My friend Eileen and I had wanted to attend this particular concert because the planned guest conductor—a young man we knew from our days working together at the Conservatory—was making his Boston debut.
AFTER we bought our tickets, we were notified that he wouldn’t be conducting due to “ the recurring effects of a shoulder injury.” Instead, 29-year old BSO Assistant Conductor Anna Handler would be making her Symphony Hall debut. OK, well at least we were seeing someone’s debut!
The first piece was “The Imagined Forest” by 31-year old British composer Grace-Evangeline Mason. It was atmospheric and beautiful.
Something about seeing these two young women—the conductor and the composer—take their bows together felt like Progress. I’ve seen plenty of women take their bows as soloists, but not as conductors and composers—the artistic leaders—at the very highest level of classical music.
There was no mention of it being a historic first or anything like that, but you could feel that the audience was 100 percent supportive. Partial standing ovation (unusual for the first piece in a concert). Many cheers.
Brava, ladies. Well done. Respect.
29-year old Anna Handler commanded the podium in a focused, confident way as she stepped in for an ailing guest conductor of one of the world’s finest symphony orchestras
If you’re GenX like me, about half your life was captured on film only (if at all). Digital cameras were not a thing when we were kids. If you were the third or fourth kid in the family, there may be very few photos of you as a child. This is not the case with me. I am the oldest and my parents were diligent. There are a lot of pics of me as a kid. Later on, I liked taking photos and even took a photography class or two.
Therefore, I’ve got a huge closet full of photo albums, boxes of loose photos, and a folder of black and white negatives in my basement, most of which have not been digitized. These include photos from throughout my life from 1965 through the birth of my second child in 2000. (After that, we went digital.) The photo albums are pretty easy to leaf through as they mostly have the correct year on the spine. And the boxes aren’t too bad because they’re pretty small. Until this weekend, I had ignored the big folder of negatives.
Welp, I finally decided to have a look and it turns out that the negatives are almost entirely from the year 1989–the year I took a photography class at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. There are apps now for scanning negatives with your phone. I used one called FilmBox. It worked OK. There were a few surprises in those negatives. Things I had completely forgotten or only vaguely remembered were jolted back into my mind through the tiny black and white images.
My three best friends from college and me in Boston’s North End. This was about 18 months after we graduated. I had forgotten that we briefly all lived in the same city.
This was an art exhibition opening at the museum where I got my first job: The Institute of Contemporary Art. I had forgotten about those openings and the cheap white wine we always served at them. I typically invited my friends who lived in Boston.
The woman on the right, Teil, was my second boss at the museum. She taught me so much and was such a wonderful person. I think this is the only picture I have of Teil. It’s appropriate that she has a plastic cup of that cheap white wine in her hand.
I had forgotten that my 80s friend Debbie came to visit me in my first studio apartment in the Fenway. Seeing her in front of my turntable, CDs and record albums (in milk crates) reminded me of how people used to look through each others music collections as a way of sort of figuring out what they were like. At that point, I think our musical tastes were diverging, but we both liked Prince.
In that same studio apartment, I had forgotten that my very bad cat Kimba was SO bad that I had to keep the bathroom trashcan above the mirror or he’d spread it all around the apartment. He was very cute, but a real pain in the neck.
I definitely remember going to the massive March on DC for abortion rights in April 1989, but had forgotten I went with two friends from work—Ann and Bridget. Later that year, Bridget and I became roommates in the North End.
My father turned 91 yesterday. My granddaughter will turn 1 next month. And this beloved poem from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, which I first read in college, still resonates so deeply with me.
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”
Welp, yesterday we learned that Ozzy Osbourne passed away at the exact same age as Jimmy Buffett—76. So, I decided to ask my “Generation Jones” husband (age 63) the same questions about Ozzy that I had asked him about Jimmy Buffett two years ago.
Question: You heard the news that Ozzy Osbourne has died at age 76. How did it make you feel?
Answer: Surprised. I didn’t know he had Parkinson’s and I had heard about the farewell concert two weeks ago (which was billed as the last time Black Sabbath would ever play together).
Question: What were your overall feelings about Ozzy?
Answer: I really liked Black Sabbath, but only with Ozzy. Together they were great. (Didn’t really like Ozzy on his own or Black Sabbath without Ozzy.) Iconic sounds. Ozzy’s voice and Tony Iommi’s guitar…there was nothing else like it at the time (early 70s). First started listening to Black Sabbath in junior high school.
(Tells me the whole story about how Tony Iommi’s fingers were severed in an industrial accident, which forced him to play the guitar an octave lower and make that incredible sound.)
We then listened to a couple of his favorite early 70s Black Sabbath songs: “Sweet Leaf” “Into the Void” “NIB”
He says that their 1978 album “Never Say Die” was the last album of theirs that he liked.
Question: What made him a cultural icon?
Answer: The Black Sabbath/Ozzy sound. They were the first ones. The low guitar, the slow riffs, Ozzie’s Voice. Influenced everything that came after.
As an illustration of how truly different and awesome their sound was at the time, we looked at the Billboard Top 100 Hits of 1971. And I really got the point. I mean…I love Carole King, The Osmonds, The BeeGees, John Denver, etc…but you can see how Black Sabbath felt like the start of something entirely new and exciting to a lot of people—boys especially.
And then came the true revelation: my husband still listens to Black Sabbath all the time—even more than Led Zeppelin—especially in the gym.
It’s his jam.
Deadlifting 485 pounds
I guess Black Sabbath makes a better soundtrack for powerlifting than say… Taylor Swift. I get it!
Question: Would you say that they were a uniquely British band?
Answer: No. They were just completely different than anything else out there.
Question: You’ve now read his obits, was anything a big surprise?
Answer: No. (Already knew the whole story of Sharon dragging Ozzy out of the gutter and resurrecting his career—way before “The Osbournes” TV show.)
Question: Did you ever know any other big fans?
Answer: We all listened to them in high school. (He has an older Boomer sister who introduced him to cooler music in the 70s. Meanwhile, I was listening to The Osmonds and the Bay City Rollers.)
Question: What do you think his legacy will be?
Answer: First answer: young people don’t listen to Ozzy anymore.
Upon research, we learned that certain subgenres of metal continue to cover Black Sabbath songs and even sound a lot like them.
A cat outside my window has awoken me early here in the westernmost part of Europe—the Dingle peninsula.
I’ve officially turned sixty and it’s OK!
I had two shots of Bailey’s before ascending the iconic Cliffs of Moher. Highly recommend.
Cliffs of Moher
The sun came out yesterday and it was spectacular.
“The Three Sisters” in the background View from Slea Head Drive, Dingle Peninsula I took a selfie with an owl (that takes skill people)
I’ve been to at least four pubs and had my first Guinness, which I liked. (I got a half pint, which you can do.) I’ve learned I do not like straight whisky.
Music abounds.
This GenX pub singer was great
They have free healthcare and college here! And I have not seen a single American chain—no Starbucks, no Dunkin, no McDonald’s. Weed is illegal here. So…🍻!
Billy Keane (son of writer John B Keane) behind the bar at his pub in Listowel
As of today, May 31, 2025, Greater Boston is experiencing its 12th consecutive rainy weekend. Since early March, every weekend has included some measurable rainfall, with more than half of those weekends seeing rain on both Saturday and Sunday.
GenX, there are a couple of rain songs from our childhood that will never leave my brain.
The first is “Rainy Days and Mondays” by The Carpenters. It came out in 1971.
The other one is “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” by BJ Thomas. (I didn’t know the artist. I looked it up just now.) It came out in 1969, so perhaps only older GenXers like me remember this one. Apparently it was featured in the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” but I don’t remember that. I just remember singing the song along with the radio, with the most memorable line being “Just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed.” I always pictured that guy. His feet must have been enormous.
What are your rain songs? You know—those songs that just emerge in your brain on rainy days.
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