Monday, January 4, 2010

A Post-Holiday Post

Happy New Year, everyone! No, I am not going to suggest that you make a New Year's resolution to be greener. That's what Earth Day is for. (Watch out: it's only a few months away!) Instead, I just want to share a couple of highlights from our whirlwind holiday season that I think are relevant to this blog.

A beautiful sight. Driving up and down I-55, as we often do to visit family and friends, we pass a somewhat new wind farm. In the flat land of central Illinois, these fields of slender, white, three-armed wind turbines are—in my opinion—an elegant, magnificent sight, especially in an otherwise brown and barren winter landscape. At night, they are a wide matrix of red dots in the dark, blinking in unison (gotta warn those low-flying aircraft). I love it.

Homemade holidays. There were a whole lot of heartwarming, handmade gifts exchanged this year on both sides of our family. Most of it was good food: We gave out our apple, crab apple, and pear butters, of course, as well as some of Len's Bacon Cheese Beer Bread. We received homemade berry jams, grape jelly, hot salsa, bow tie pasta, tomato sauce, candied nuts, and fudge. And, in the DIY category, various gifts of family memories went around: a book of memories and old photos on CD, a DVD of old family videos, framed photos from a wedding this summer, and memory frames of VFW and American Legion hats paired with a photo of Len's grandpa when he was young and in uniform. Great stuff.

No comments:

Post a Comment