Happy holidays to all of you no matter how you celebrate.

Assuming family haven’t been banned from your house and/or vice versa, I hope you have the time and energy to experience the wisdom, knowledge, humor, and support of family and friends and to find renewal in their love and care.

My Celtic ancestry brings me strong feelings for Yule and its traditions. My upbringing brings me similar feelings for Christmas (both the commercial and religious versions.) Your background may lead you elsewhere and that’s as it should be as long as it provides growth and a strong connexion with the cosmic.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of western movies and TV shows such as “Little House on the Prairie” in which kids would save their pennies all year to by mama a new scarf and dad a new hat. Those kids were pleased if they got one gift wrapped in butcher paper from the general store.

I wish the season could more like that where family around a tree and then around a dinner table was far more valuable than $100000000000 worth of gifts. The trouble is, the commercialization is so strongly brainwashed into our psyches that if the resist, those who know us think we’re being cheap and uncaring. So, we keep playing the game even though we wish we weren’t.

My wife and I spent so many years celebrating Christmas at my folks’ house or her folks’ house, that we began opening gifts to each other on Christmas Eve. We still do this even though our folks are long gone. It’s a special time for us and we like it. The day is quiet, nearly asleep, and so there we sit in front of our tree with our cats and a few gifts and a lot of light. Hard to beat that.

–Malcolm