At the first Thanksgiving I celebrated with my future husband-to-be, my future in-laws whom I love dearly served turkey, mashed potatoes, and corn. And maybe rolls. That's it. And I said, "That's not Thanksgiving. That's just Thursday." Where were the exotic, calorie-laden dishes that only appear once a year? The puzzling mincemeat pie, the savory dressing, the sweets like cookies and chocolates and pastries? That's more like it. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Perhaps it's an unconventional choice, but one that makes sense given that I grew up playing jump-rope with the poverty line . My family didn't host or attend cook-outs on Labor Day or Memorial Day, and never bought fireworks on Fourth of July. Christmastime was often excitement tinged with disappointment and forced merriment I didn't enjoy. But Thanksgiving Days were full of delicious once-a-year foods, thanks to community pantry donations that made our food stamps go farther .  Leadi...

Did you know you can do less?  It's a secret you won't find on social media or in organized moms groups, but it's true. Did you know that when your children have to be at outdoor soccer practice for two hours, and it's cloudy and windy, you can let them go practice in the chilly evening air while you stay in the car and read a book?  You don't have to pace on the sidelines for two hours to keep warm while your sweet child runs ladders or practices defense, oblivious to your existence, under the tutelage of a volunteer soccer coach.  You can sit in a comfortable seat in the warm air of your car and immerse yourself in a good story. Nobody will even try to stop you.  How to survive soccer practice: don't And when it's time for the Easter Bunny to make its appearance, did you know you can do less there too? You don't have to buy a toddler pool and fill it with books and Legos, pool toys and two-pound chocolate bunnies. You don't have to stuff 100 bright...

 "That Santa stuff isn't real," the boy from across the street told my kids.  Uh-oh.  I was upstairs folding laundry, but I still heard the boom that would likely lead to an avalanche of eye-opening revelations (and maybe some tears).  "Who do you think comes in your house at 3 in the morning and leaves you presents?" my 9-year-old son insisted. "He's real, I've seen him! At the mall!" my daughter, who had just turned 7, chimed in. "That's just a guy in a suit," the neighbor boy replied dismissively. Proof of life From the second floor, I called out, "Okay, that's enough!" to the kids arguing in my living room. Pretending we suddenly had to eat dinner, my husband asked the neighbor boy to leave. And we braced ourselves for what might be coming.  My son is a very young 9. He still loves playing dinosaur fights with his stuffies, snuggles with me at bedtime while I sing the same lullaby I've sung since he was a tod...

I don't like Christmas.  It's kind of a lot. To begin with, the holiday is so very obtrusive.   It rushes at me from every direction, demanding that I pay attention, saying I should feel joyous and bouncy and excited every waking hour. Christmas wants me to be an inexhaustible toddler, dazzled by everything, rushing around filled with glee.  Amid the lights strung high and low, the incessant holiday songs, and the numerous celebrations on my calendar, I'm drowning in forced merriment.  Every year it overwhelms me. Instead of feeling joy, I'm distressed. Like trying to wade through a kid's ball pit, it looks fun until you can't make any headway through all the obstacles so you sink down and decide this is where you live now.  And then the to-do's come calling.

We're skipping the thankfulness, and I hate it.  Are you only doing one of these things? As the calendar page turned from October to November, Americans pivoted straight from Halloween to Christmas - and largely ignored my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. This "Christmas creep" - the drift of yuletide season into the months before December - has been in full swing for weeks, and it's getting stronger by the day.  Christmas ornaments shared shelf space with a smattering of discounted Halloween stragglers even before ghosts and goblins hit the streets. A local radio station switched to all-holiday music on November 1. As of a few days ago, a house in my neighborhood is fully decorated with hundreds of glittering Christmas lights...nearly a week before anyone is roasting their turkeys. Sitting alone on the dark street, it's a glaring beacon of premature holidaying. "What's the problem?" you say. "If somebody wants to jingle their bells before Thank...

I didn't think it would happen to us. Not to *my* friends. We were smart. We were practical. We knew the risks. We had read articles from doctors advising against it, heard about the struggles of other parents, and agreed that we would never turn into Those People.  But when December came, one by one they fell victim to the contagion. They bought Elves on the Shelf. Enemy of the people I didn't understand what was happening. These are otherwise level-headed, rational parents who for some reason looked at their lives -- working from home, schooling from home, navigating a pandemic, plus taking on the load of Christmastime -- and thought, " You know what would be great? If we added even more daily responsibilities in the name of enchantment! " I wanted to talk them off the ledge, shake them into sensibility, take their temperatures and suggest bedrest. But it was too late -- the elves had already been named. It had begun. Oh, my dear friends, what have you done? Even my...

This is for those people like me, who find Christmas neither holly nor jolly. To those for whom the season means staggering around under the weight of even more responsibilities while carrying a plateful of forced merriment...I get you. To those feeling clouded by disappointment or tearful memories of Christmas past; to those aching with loneliness for loved ones who are gone or were never really here...I'm with you. If you tire of being told to "remember the reason for the season!" when the very hate that savior preached against grows hourly in our world...I know how you feel. If visits to Santa Claus and trips on the Polar Express remind you of the lies we tell our children in hopes they won't grow up so fast; if you grieve for how long it's been since you believed...your melancholy sighs are mine too. If you can't suffer any more days of going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark; if the cold eats at your bones no matter how warm you a...

Andy Williams had it all wrong . Thanksgiving is the most wonderful time of the year. Unless you're a turkey. As a poor kid growing up in rural Southeast Texas , Christmas was hard. While my parents fought over the "right" way to string lights on an anemic artificial tree, our seven television stations broadcast non-stop messages of unaffordable presents and unattainable family happiness. Toys R Us burst with more games, more toys, oh boy. Homes dripped with decorations and lights. Everyone was happy and nothing ever went wrong (except for that time Kevin got left home alone). Even the long-distance phone commercials were sappy and soaked with the kind of togetherness my parents -- mostly estranged from their own families in the Midwest -- didn't long for. I couldn't relate to most of what surrounded me. Walking the tightrope that is the poverty line, my family wavered on and off of traditional welfare. The government provided cash benefits back then for ...

Every year around Halloween I get a longing to watch the spooky television specials I saw as a kid. It's no wonder -- the old Christmas specials like Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer have been playing since the '60s. But where are Garfield's Halloween special, the one with Donald Duck and the witch, or the cartoon version of Ichabod Crane? Several years ago I set out to find and watch these again. And I couldn't help but notice...these are terrifying for children. Why was I ever allowed to watch them? As far as the Legend of Sleepy Hollow goes, well, the gist is enough to scare the bejeezus out of a child. A legendary man without a head, riding a horse, brandishing a sword, chasing an innocent (slightly dorky) schoolmaster out of town. So let's just put aside the appropriateness of beer drinking at the old Snooker and Schnapps Shoppe, the love triangle, and the fact that Ichabod spends his school time daydreaming about his lady's bountiful wealth. "Katrina...

you will never be this small again. tomorrow you will have grown a millimeter and mastered another new skill; you will fit a little less snugly into my arms. so tonight I will hold you as long as I can to memorize your weight and the rhythm of your breaths the smell of your hair, the softness of your skin before life gives you any calluses. I will hold you here and rock in this chair long past the point where my arms grow tired because this is why I wanted you this is what I came here for -- to hold you while you sleep and dream and heal my heart with love 10-20-13 (All poetry contained herein is the sole property and copyright of the author, and may not be reproduced without permission.) 

Dear Me, It is May 1998. Right now you are merely 17 but you've survived enough hardship to make you a bona fide adult, if that's how we're counting. Keep going. It will get worse before it gets better, but I promise it will get better. Some day you will soar. In the meantime, I hope you'll suffer me to give you a few bits of advice. It's about your mother. A twisty subject, I know, especially as you are on the cusp of breaking free of this town and the crushing weight of your childhood. But please listen and take these things to heart. I'm going to save you a lot of regret. Record her voice. It doesn't matter what she says -- hello or I'm going outside for a smoke or the quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog . (Remember when she taught you how to peck that phrase on her massive manual typewriter? The keys struck so hard, punctuation scarred the backs of her pages.) Make sure, though, that she says your name. Years from now you'll unde...

I don't think everything happens for a reason. I don't believe events take place when the time is right. I don't see -- or look for -- signs from God, or the universe, or a higher power. Which is what made this particular addition to my family all the more special. It was a random Wednesday in October. Isn't that when signs appear, when you least expect them? At almost 8 1/2 months pregnant with baby #2 , I was enjoying near constant backaches, heartburn after every meal, and the kind of fatigue that leaves you exhausted after unloading the dishwasher. You know, the fun pregnancy stuff. To add insult to discomfort, somewhere during the previous months I had lost my well-honed ability to nap. All of my adult naps up to this point were mere practice for the afternoon rests which I now really, really needed...yet suddenly I could not reach my goal of drifting off to sleep for a few precious minutes of recuperation during the long days. I was tired, I was frustrated, I w...

Mother's Day for me is a holiday fraught with conflicting feelings. I never know whether I'm supposed to be (a) mourning the death of my own mother, (b) celebrating happy memories woven through the complex and difficult relationship my mom and I shared, (c) grieving the lack of the typical mother-daughter relationship we never enjoyed, or (d) rejoicing over my own sweet child who is helping me create a new mother-child bond. It's a day I spend flip-flopping between feelings of joy and sadness, fullness and loss. Throw in a healthy dose of sensitivity to women who are grappling with infertility or pregnancy loss -- because I've been in those shoes, too -- and my Mother's Day turns into a hot mess that looks nothing like a Hallmark greeting. *** Mother's Day is hard for me listen: motherless and childless, I am untethered in a world full of strings 5-13-12 *** For the majority of the time I knew her, my mother was fighting physical and mental illness...

The other day I went to the mall because I was in desperate need of a new shirt for a dinner event. And I mean desperate . Most of my wardrobe is at least three years old -- the pants I decided to wear were actually approaching first-grader status. They grow up so fast, you know? Anyway, as I was traipsing from one store to the other in an unsuccessful search for something that said both spring! and I'm still young and cool!,  I found myself standing in front of JCPenney staring at an alarmingly fake garden scene. It featured emerald green Astroturf for grass (a cruel joke -- parts of our lawn are still covered in an inch of mushy snow), a profusion of ruffly pastel flowers the size of my head, and a park bench where an otherwise sane adult would pose for pictures while wearing a freakishly larger-than-life bunny suit and clutching your children. Apparently, parents will pay money for this to happen, and commemorate the surreal experience with a photo. That's when it daw...

Most of my childhood is buried in a landfill somewhere near Houston. This is not a metaphor, but rather the sad outcome of foreclosure proceedings on my family's home when I was 12. When we left the white brick house, we moved into a rickety green wooden rental that slashed our living space in half. We took what we could carry in our vehicle -- mostly the necessities -- and left the rest behind. (When your home is being foreclosed, you generally can't afford a storage building.) But the house, and thereby everything in it, belonged to the bank, so they quietly and efficiently hauled off our belongings to a BFI landfill. Family and wedding photo albums, my mom's wedding dress, most of my and my brother's toys, our bronzed baby shoes that hung on the wall as proof of how far we'd come, a wall full of books, the majority of our family mementos and brick-a-brac. The junk that makes a house a home. I'm telling you this because of an angel named Gloria. Growing up, ...

Ah, Christmas - that special time of year when we jingle our bells, deck our halls, and throw all of our musical sensibilities out the window. Christmas albums mediocre and awful abound, featuring tired renditions of old favorites and new music that aims to be the next Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" but lands somewhere closer to Justin Beiber's rap-tastic "Drummer Boy." Some songs just rub people the wrong way. I've heard a lot of complaints about "I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas," for example. Other than the distinct possibility of being killed by a hippo, the song is kinda cute. I'd be interested in seeing how a child gives a hippo a massage in the garage, for example. Other people take issue with the violent nature of "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." I don't have any problems with this one either; in fact, I agree with the statement that Santa Claus really shouldn't have a driver...