I don't have much to say.

Last night, the last night of this year’s Hanukkah; tomorrow night, Christmas Eve.

Lights! Light! The winter solstice behind us, we now have one or two minutes of additional daylight every day.

Cards and letters, greetings, gifts and gatherings. 

This is the good news—and while there is all too much of the other kind, this morning I am focusing on light and love and life and wishing the same for each of you this holiday season at another year’s end. We will never have this day again.

Goodbye, November. Hello, Winter!

Holiday greenery at home

The Sunday after Thanksgiving came with more snow than I had expected. We’d had so little with the predicted big storm on Wednesday and Thursday, followed by continued clear roads on Friday and Saturday, that I had grown complacent, and even when snow began falling and blowing on Saturday evening, I didn’t expect enough accumulation to to get in the way of a visit to the dog park. 

 

I was wrong. 

That’s okay. Sunny and I walked in deep snow close to home, which she found exciting, and then came indoors where I began a project for the day: turkey soup. We live a revisable life, my dog and I, with much improvisation amid the constants.

 

Soup begins here.

It was the last day of November. Hanukkah will begin at sundown on December 14. The official beginning of winter is December 21. Christmas comes on the 25^th, Kwanzaa on the 26^th, and then, the following week, the last day of the year. Meanwhile, on the last day of November, as I neared the last page of Wieseltier’s book on Kaddish (mentioned and quoted in my previous post), I came upon the author’s remarks on closure, an idea he finds a “ludicrous notion of emotional efficiency” and a very American delusion.

 

Americans really believe that the past is past. They do not care to know that the past soaks the present like the light of a distant star. Things that are over do not end. They come inside us, and seek sanctuary in subjectivity. And there they live on, in the consciousness of individuals and communities. 

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

 

This accords with my own life experience, with what I love in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and with what I see across my country and around the world today. What do you make of these words?

 

The soul does not heal as the body heals, because the soul is improved, and even enchanted, by its wounds.

 

Improved? I need to think about that. I remember being surprised by a French mother’s concern that her young child’s fall would result in a small scar. Life, I thought then, as I still think today, is the accumulation of scars visible and invisible. I remember, as a child, being very proud of the slightest scar, happy to have been visibly marked by life, with my own personal, unique history inscribed on my skin.

 

Another:

 

…Nothing happens once and for all. It all visits, it all returns. But ‘closure’ says once and for all. This is a misunderstanding of subjectivity, which is essentially haunted.

 

Enchanted. Haunted. It all returns.

"Love returns always"

A friend asked me to recommend writers who have addressed the question of the meaning of life, and her request alarmed me. Countless people through the ages have written books on the subject, from the simplistic and maudlin to the impossibly sublime, but why would anyone take a writer’s word for the answer? Why would anyone take anyone else’s answer? How could they? 

 

I can see, of course, the value of considering what other people have said, but I replied that I don’t think there is a singular correct answer to the “Why?” question (“Why are we here?”) or some unique hidden meaning already given for all to find by diligent searching. This is not intended to be an answer, mind you: I am only stating my personal belief, which is that we find our own life’s meaning by making it, find something to live for by giving our life to it. We can live for God or for love, for art or literature or history, for birds or dogs or elephants — the list is endless. We may attempt to grow a perfect apple or ear of corn or write a perfect sentence or build a perfect bridge or simply do our best in whatever small corner we find ourselves. Why not multiple meanings? And maybe, even probably, what is most meaningful in one phase of life will be replaced or enlarged by something else later on. 

 

My friend asked another question: How should we live in the world? I feel on more solid footing with that query and hesitate only to put my answer clearly and briefly: 

 

Toward others (and oneself), practice compassion. Toward the natural world, practice curiosity and gentleness. Pay attention to all around you and be grateful.

 

But then, maybe this answer too is an answer for me and not for everyone? I don’t know. I only know that it has been many years since I first felt that paying attention was my #1 job in life. It is such a miracle, after all, to be alive. And surely part of the gratitude we owe for that miracle is awareness of it in as much detail as we can take in. 

 

(Not that we can ever be fully aware of everything every moment. As I sit tapping out these words, it is all too easy to forget the patient dog girl waiting for my attention. And do I even notice the tiny spider in the corner of a picture frame? But what is not the central focus of my awareness is still there, nearby and all around. I smell turkey broth simmering and dried apples rehydrating in cider, see lamplight falling on a bowl of fruit, hear the wind driving snow across the meadow, and I remember noticing, only an hour or two before, that the tall dry giant bluestem grass in the meadow is the same toasted gold color of the highest branches of the black willow trees along the no-name creek.)

Not only is life a gift, but it goes by quickly. Friends who married each other in their 70s, a new start late in life for both, acknowledged that they were entering the game in the fourth quarter but realized that the game wasn't over. A widowed friend recently took the plunge and brought a new puppy into her home. I cut small cedar branches for the house for Thanksgiving and on Friday got out my little Santa band. Where there's life, there's life!

 

Winter beginning on December 21? For me, this year, it began November 29. It is here now. 

Christmas Present

The book I chose to give myself this year was North Woods, by Daniel Mason, one of my stepdaughter’s favorite reading experiences of the year about to end, but on Christmas Eve I had fallen asleep without finishing Rumer Godden’s Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, a book I had searched out in my shop’s storage area after reading the same author’s novel about a young orphaned half-gypsy girl, The Diddakoi, which I’d turned to after an interval of other books that succeeded my reading of An Episode of Sparrows. (Phew! Does this count as a binge?) In many ways quite different stories, the three Godden novels in this paragraph have one thing in common: each tell stories of girls and women, and the young girls in Sparrows and Diddakoi and the young woman in Five for Sorrow all have much to overcome in order to find strength in themselves and happiness in their lives. 

So there I was, awake at 5:30 a.m. (as usual) on Christmas morning, with an engrossing novel yet unfinished and waiting for me. Also waiting for me, as she is every morning, was my dear Sunny Juliet, the puppy the Artist knew I needed. “I could live without a dog, but you can’t, so we need a dog.” Then, “Take that motorcycle money. Go get the puppy. Yes, I’m sure.” This puppy (I still call her that) is three years old now, and she has a clear and steady grip on her momma’s morning routine. First the momma gets up to make coffee and brings the first cup (mug) back to bed, where she sits up with a book or a writing tablet. The puppy curls patiently at my side, un chien croissant, or drapes herself over the momma’s feet, biding her time. When the momma gets up a second time, the puppy knows it’s only for a coffee refill, not really “getting up,” per se. 

"This is subtle, isn't it?" Sunny asks wordlessly.

But when the refill finally begins to cool in the mug, Sunny feels it’s time to make her presence felt with greater immediacy. First she takes a position more demanding of attention than her Sleepy Girl mode. Then, increasingly proactive, she stands up and begins to give kisses. I say “give kisses,” but this move is as much a demand as an offering. Fair enough. She has been a very patient girl for an hour and a half, sometimes even two hours, and that’s long enough! Besides, who can resist a happy, wiggly little dog girl’s kisses? Who would want to try? She's no fool!

My “plans” for the day, laid in advance, were simple. It would be a day at home, just Sunny Juliet and me. We would have our usual morning ramble outdoors before breakfast. Breakfast would be special, with little bites of pancake and bacon for Sunny, besides her usual dog food, and then, while the momma opened a few presents for the two of them, a brand-new beef bone for Sunny to gnaw. And maybe that bone would give the momma some quiet reading time.

Later: waiting for the "Okay!"

Every morning Sunny lets me know when she’s ready for me to get out of bed, even though she knows that going outside is still maybe an hour in the future. If I tarry too long beneath the covers, she lets me know I’m disappointing her (bark! bark! bark!), but once I’m on my feet, her patience returns, and I can have another coffee refill. On this particular Christmas morning I have time to fry up the bacon and assemble separately the dry and wet ingredients for the pancakes I’ll make after our outdoor time, sneaking in a few more pages of my book. 

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy is one of Godden’s very Roman Catholic stories. The title refers to the rosary, and the protagonist’s continuing spiritual difficulty over the rosary stems from a painful episode—one of many—in her life journey. Lise, an American, a driver with the Army, arrives in Paris during the joyful chaos of the Liberation. When she becomes lost, on foot, in the crowds, her unintended life in France begins. I won’t spoil the story by revealing the many steps that take her from this beginning to her life in a French convent among a very special order of Dominican nuns, but I will say that the particular convent that comes to be her home sounds very congenial. There is hard work, with long hours, but also farm animals and the beautiful French countryside, and the work, while often dirty, is largely healthy farm work. The sisters eat well, too. Even during fast periods, there are feast days, so while not exactly lenient, the lives of the nuns are not uncompromisingly harsh.

 

In Chapter 8, Godden summarizes a year in the life of the convent called Belle Source, beginning in the earliest signs of spring in February: 

 

The Normandy February was usually wet and cold, but there were days of clear sunshine that reminded Lise of her childhood in England when there might be catkins; the willows turned red and the first snowdrops were out. There were no catkins at Belle Source but she found an early primrose in the bank below the aumônier’s house and a scattering of snowdrops.

 

At New Year’s Eve,

 

Another year was rounded, and nothing anyone could write or say, thought Lise, could tell the whole meaning of each succeeding year, of its unfolding; what is a day-to-day miracle is unexciting because usually it’s so sure—and yet it is a miracle; only if it’s taken away, as in a famine or drought, do we see that.

 

The day-to-day miracle of everyday life is what we so often overlook, isn’t it?

Sunny Juliet: my everyday companion

Living in the country with my dog, operating my little village bookshop, my life has its daily and hourly routines. Christmas Day is a quiet feast day at home. I am enjoying my reading of Rumer Godden and look forward to Daniel Mason’s book. Opening gifts and talking to and texting with family will be a pleasure. Will it sound strange, though, if I say I want to pay special attention today to my dog? The Artist never had a chance to meet her face-to-face, only to see puppy pictures, but this morning as I look at that furry face and into those bright eyes I say to her, “He knew I needed you.” By my side every day and precious in herself, she is a living gift from someone who knew me, who saw me, who loved me. I want to be present with my girl today. She deserves that. She is a miracle. Snow is a miracle. Love is a miracle. Light. Life.

(Now THAT is a Charlie Brown tree!)

-      12/25/2024, 8:25 a.m. And now, out into the snow we go!!!

 

Postscript: Images added before upload and after a lot of activity outdoors. In addition to all the usual neighbors—deer, rabbits, mice, squirrels—this morning we found turkey tracks in the orchard, wandering off into the woods. More miracles all around us! Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

Turkey track

Turkey trail

She always finds treasures!

Cozy With Challenges

My title today comes to you from a voice in my head whispering, “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs,” the title of one of my nephews’ favorite books when they were little, as well as from a couple of conversations with locals, two of whom, separately, told me that winter is their favorite season. Is it yours? Why or why not? One winter aficionado said he loves it because it’s “more like the way life used to be here.” (That must have been back in the days of the “old school,” when Northporters didn’t run to Traverse City every week to do their shopping--and then complain loudly and bitterly about traffic and crowds.) I’ll have to ask the other friend why she ranks winter #1 season of the year. 

Winter is beautiful.

Winter is quiet and cozy. I have to give it that. Coming into a warm house, stomping snow off boots and pulling off jacket and cap and mittens to enjoy a hot cup of cocoa … reading by lamplight in a big chair … gazing into a cheery, flickering fire or out the window at falling snow … going to sleep under mounds of blankets and comforters--all of that is richly cozy, and the colder the wind and the deeper the snow, the cozier one’s snuggly home comforts.

Kneaded dough

Rising dough

On a snow day, too, nothing is more satisfying than kneading bread dough, although making soup is a good snow day project, too. Anything that adds warmth and mouthwatering aromas to counteract the lack of sunshine! Onion soup or a stew made from scratch (here is a yummy cauliflower soup) is good, but sometimes shortcuts work out well, too. One recent evening I had leftover shrimp fried rice and added it to a can of Progressive tomato soup, throwing in a generous handful of okra and drizzling with hot sauce at serving time, and that made a very satisfying supper. 

Shortcut

You’ll also want to wash out and save the Progresso soup can for making English muffins. It’s just the right size.

 

Desk work can be enjoyable while it’s snowing and blowing outdoors, especially if the “work” is writing letters to friends. You don’t even have to sit at a desk. A cozy reading chair with a big book for a lap desk works equally well, and you’ll want a cup of tea or cocoa nearby as you write, chatting on paper and picturing your friend’s pleasure when she receives your news in the mail. More and more of our visits, I’m thinking, will be this kind as we grow older….

 

It goes saying (but why would I deny myself the pleasure of saying it?) that reading is a most delicious winter pleasure. Grass doesn’t need mowing, and gardens don’t need weeding, so after you’ve shoveled snow and exercised the dog, maybe done a bit of laundry, who can blame you for sitting down with a book? And if you’re like me, you’ll want several throughout the house. You need something to page through idly, perusing and skimming while tea water is heating. Cookbooks or art books, even a volume of cartoons work for those times. For me, the loveliest of my casual browsing books is one I'm keeping these days on my dining table: a book of the history and geology and agriculture of the canton of Blesle, in France’s Alagnon valley in the old Auvergne province. It was in the medieval village of Blesle that the Artist and I spent one magical evening, night, and morning. Everything about the place made such an impression on me that I find it hard to believe our time there was so brief.

Just right of center is the old fountain,
across the street from La Bougnate, where we stayed.

I usually have at least one serious nonfictionbook going, and right now that is John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Age of Uncertainty. Wow! Talk about a writer who can make economic history come alive! Such a witty and pithy maker of sentences, a clear distiller of thought! Still, economic history isn’t something to read straight through cover to cover, at least for me, so although the book is generously illustrated as well as entertainingly written, I take it in small doses.

 

For bedtime, I tend to choose novels or memoirs, because I almost invariably fall asleep and then wake up at 3 a.m. to read a bit more before my second sleep, and if I attempt something serious or, worse yet, something horrifying (think political!), how will I ever get (or get back) to sleep? Margaret Hard’s A Memory of Vermont filled the bedtime bill for two or three nights, followed by Miss Buncle’s Book, a humorous novel by D.E. Stevenson about a woman who wrote a novel about people in her little village and then found almost everyone in the village up in arms over the way they had been portrayed. Before those, Albert Murray’s four autobiographical novels carried me through many dark evenings, and after them Moberg’s Unto a Good Land lasted three nights. The bedtime book doesn’t have to be fluff, though a little fluff now and then never hurt anyone.

 

Having enjoyed The Book Charmer, by Karen Hawkins, a while back, I yielded to the temptation of its sequel, A Cup of Silver Linings, another tale set in the little town of Dove Pond. I wouldn’t call it fluff. I’m also hesitant to classify the series as chick lit, though it has some of the earmarks. And despite lurking love interest, the books are certainly not rom-com. Each story presents men, women, and young people in the Dove Pond stories, but the most important relationships – at least, those in the foreground  – are between sisters or mothers and daughters or friends. There are secrets that cause problems, but there are also problems that aren’t so secret and can’t be eliminated but have to be faced. Not heavy but not fluff. Interesting without being obsessing. Perfect for winter bedtime.

 

Problems that can’t be eliminated but have to be faced, I just wrote. That is the other side of winter: the challenges. Like cold. Like higher bills. Expenses go up, income goes down: that is one big challenge of winter in a nutshell. Heating is expensive, as is snowplowing. But walking and driving can be hazardous, too, without summer’s firm footing or clear roadways. 

 

Then there are the holidays, which present their own challenges. The Artist and I had long ago stopped traveling for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, weather and traffic being productive of stress, at best, and completely out of our control. Our last Christmas together, in Dos Cabezas in 2021, he pronounced “the most relaxed” he had ever had, when after a big breakfast and opening a few presents, we lay around snacking and napping and watching movies and petting the blissed-out dog until dinner time, enjoying the quiet, peaceful lack of fuss. 

What is “lack of fuss” with a soulmate, however, is different with just a dog. --You should excuse the phrase “just a dog,” please! Sunny Juliet is a great comfort but not a conversationalist or even much of a cuddler! Oh, and she needs and wants to go out and play in the snow, too!

Do I want to go out and play in the snow? When the temperature is hovering in the ’teens and the wind is more than nipping at my nose--biting my face, rather? It doesn’t matter. We must go out!

Out! What if the power goes out? It has happened before, but the Artist was here with me. Still, I am as prepared as I can be. With propane, I can use my stove and gas fireplace; I have candles and oil lamps; a couple of stock pots are filled with water for emergency use; and I have charged up the little portable phone charger my sister gave me last year. I’m also well stocked with dog food and paper products--life’s essentials!

 

So that’s what I think of winter—cozy with challenges—and I can’t call it my favorite season. In the old days, with the Artist, I might have named autumn my #1, since we traditionally took a little vacation every September, but now I’ll probably go with spring, the season of promise, of new growth, of lengthening days, long days not yet bringing the hectic pace of summer. 

Spring will come again, I remind myself.

And yet, truth be told, there’s no telling when a nearly perfect day will drop down on you. An unexpected encounter or an errand unexpectedly turning into a delightfully surprising and wonderful time, the making of a new friend while visiting old friends. It happened to me last Tuesday, and it can happen in any season of the year. There is no foretelling life’s gifts.

 

An old friend told me a few days ago that he often quotes me. “What on earth--? You quote me?” “You said,” he reminded me, “that what bothered you most about the thought of dying was that you wouldn’t know how things turned out.” True. I did say that. Delights and torments, adventures and schemes, will continue, but I’ll have to leave the party while it’s still going on. 

All the more reason, while still here, to get out of bed every day, even in winter, and bundle up and get out there! As the Artist and I said to each other so many mornings, throughout so many years, as we wondered what a day might bring, you never know!

 

Sunny Juliet is always ready!

And on Saturday the horses came to Northport!

I'm glad to be there for that!

Back at Last

 

…Time slowed until individual moments separated and grew plump, and I picked them, held them in my palm, and popped them one after another into my mouth, savoring them as if they were berries. I remembered childhood was filled with moments like that: plump and succulent. And, as in childhood, every snowflake and cedar frond, every fox and goldfinch, every car passing on the road and every cloud passing in the sky was unique, vivid, and vibrating with actuality. The world brimmed with an astonishment of things, and each was adjoined by all other things. 

 

-      Jerry Dennis, The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes

 

It’s coming again, our Great Lakes winter. Or is it? Last winter we had a little snow in January and none to speak of (at least, none to plow) other than that. Then spring 2024 was early and wet, and after that summer descended into drought, a long, dry spell that, while it lasted into early autumn, did nothing to dull the fall colors, which were seemed to go on and on and on until November winds came to strip branches and topple trees, until now, here we are looking for snow. There was a bit on the ground Thursday morning, our first, but it didn’t last long, and our long-range forecast is for a “wet” winter, 40-50% chance of wetter-than-average weather, as in rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, and hail. Does that mean the yo-yo continues to bounce back and forth, never a settled season? 

 

Whatever the weather, winter's increased darkness always brings an increase in indoor reading time. More on that in a minute, but for now I hope you noticed that Jerry Dennis's sentences are as savory and mouth-watering as the moments they describe.

One January day in 2024 -- real winter!

Where have I been?

 

Since September 13, 2007, my initial post on Books in Northport, this is the longest I’ve gone between postings, the most recent one before this dated October 29, 2024. The main reason for the long hiatus was the death of my laptop screen. I tried one day to work from my phone, posting directly to the Blogger platform, rather than working through a Word draft first, then uploading it, the result not quite an unmitigated disaster but when done at last I realized -- too late! -- that I’d uploaded to my photo blog rather than either this (primarily, or at least initially) book blog or even my dedicated bookstore blog. (Here is where that post ended up, for those of you who never happened on it.) With the laptop, I could have rectified the error easily. Of course, with the laptop I wouldn’t have been posting from my phone in the first place. 

 

Then one day last week a friend called and said, “I need your blog!” She clarified by adding, “I mean, I need you to write something new!” So now that I have a clean new screen and keyboard at my disposal (and all my old programs and files right where I want them, too), I’m jumping back in. Perhaps not a peak performance, but at least something to indicate that there still are books in Northport!

And bookmarks!

 

Still reading – and rereading

 

Away from my email for three weeks (that part, I have to admit, felt like kind of a vacation), I made a few feeble stabs at handwritten notes for a future blog post and kept my “Books Read” list up-to-date with handwritten additions but didn’t bother with long descriptions of or reflections on the books added to the list. I also wrote a few letters to distant friends, made notes about new books to order for the shop, and set aside Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi to reread Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, one of my favorites among his novels, which inspired me to pull RL’s Dream off the shelf next, a Mosley novel I read so long ago it was as if I were reading it for the first time. With the main character a musician originally from the South, and with Mosley’s brilliant sentences, I sensed many echoes of Albert Murray. There was also a historical novel squeezed in there, a 24-hour spell with The War Began in Paris, in which a former Mennonite woman from the American Midwest, working as a small-time journalist, becomes entangled with another American woman journalist with Fascist sympathies, glamor and excitement dulling her sense of danger. 

 

Oh, the world, the world! Even in fiction, there is no escaping it! Not that escape should be a relentless quest. Understanding, empathy, living other lives in other skins – that’s the magic offered us in fiction, don’t you think? I’m curious what my readers have to say on this topic, especially as not long ago I stumbled on a website where a writer proclaimed something like “Life is too short to read depressing books,” and her readers all agreed in their comments that they wanted nothing but escape from novels and therefore avoided any book that received a major prize and/or had been recommended by Oprah! Novels without conflict, characters without challenges? To me, this is a peculiar narrowing of the entire idea of reading, although I certainly understand the need at times for “happy endings.” But what do you think?

 

? ? ?

 

A little “playing tourist” –

My son and his wife came up for three nights, making for cheery alterations to my usual schedule. After their Monday of hiking Whaleback and tasting at Tandem Ciders while I took Sunny to the dog park and did a bit of housework, the three of us reconvened for dinner. Having company is inspiration to the cook in her tiny Paris kitchen: On Sunday evening there was a curried soup made from Hubbard squash and coconut milk; Monday’s vegetable dish of cauliflower and mushrooms with parsley exceeded my expectations, and the leftovers were even delicious cold. As for the rice pudding, while it was hardly a failure, next time I’ll let the rice steam much longer so that it disappears a bit more into the custard.

Tuesday the three of us went out together, visiting Samaritan’s Closet in Lake Leelanau and the Polish Art Center in Cedar before dinner at Dick’s Pour House in the evening. Shopping! Dinner out! Not things I usually do on my own, and it was even more fun to know that Ian and Kim were enjoying their little Up North vacation. Kathleen at the PAC in Cedar is delightful, too, as is her shop. 

Deer season and outdoor dog activity

 

Sunny and I are challenged in our outdoor time during firearm deer season, although she has no idea why mornings are different. When it isn’t raining, we still have tennis ball play in the yard or even in the two-track, but there is no off-leash running along the edge of the woods these days. All the more reason, then, to take Sunny to the dog park when I can. But the extra round trip to Northport is only worthwhile on days my bookshop is closed (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday), as the morning’s first regulars don’t arrive early enough to provide Sunny with playmates if we get there at nine o’clock. By ten, though, we can usually count on another Aussie, a couple of Pyrenees, a Bernadoodle and a smooth-coated collie. A few times there was a little fierce barking (some from my Naughty Girl, some from others), but a tennis ball hurled through the air quickly distracts everyone from conflict. And it is so good to see dogs running off-leash!

  

New Books: Arriving Soon!

 

My new book order, usually sent in on Mondays, finally (after not happening at all for a couple of weeks) got done on Thursday this week, a bigger order than usual, making up for weeks missed. There will be an assortment of new board books for the pre-reading crowd of babies; a fun book of dog poems for “kids” of all ages; Robin Kimmerer’s new book, Serviceberry, as well as a version of Braiding Sweetgrass for young adults; a couple editions of Wind in the Willows for those who need to re-immerse in it or discover it for the first time; and, as usual, a few surprises. The order should come in early next week, so I may be in the shop on days you’d expect me not to be there, because opening boxes of new books is a delight not to be postponed but indulged as soon as possible.

The run on jigsaw puzzles has already begun, though, so don't wait too long to make your selections for those long winter evenings ahead.

  

And the season rushes on!

 

Next Thursday is Thanksgiving already -- the best, I always think, of American holidays, being all about gratitude rather than hoopla. Hoopla fun will come two days later, though, never fear, with Saturday evening’s lighting of the Christmas tree in Northport and a visit from Santa – and then the race is on! Hanukkah begins at sundown on December 25 this year and continues to January 2, with Kwanzaa from December 26 to January 1, so the end of one year and entry into the next will be rich with holidays. 

 

We need our holidays. We need to shift focus from competition to celebration, from conflict to love. We need festive lights during the shortest days and longest, darkest nights of the year. We also need to take time to remember those in less fortunate circumstances (far too many!) and do what we can with our end-of-year contributions. Writing those checks, like writing a holiday letter or addressing cards to friends, is a good December ritual.

A couple of longer bookstore days

 

My 11 a.m. -3 p.m. hours will be subject to some stretching for the days following Thanksgiving. I’m not sure how late I’ll be open on Friday, November 29, but I’d love to see local shoppers in my bookstore on that day, and if there are enough of them, I’ll be happy to stay open as late as 5 p.m. 

Indie Bookstore Day!

The next day, Saturday, will definitely be a later business day, as Northport's tree lighting doesn’t take place until 6 p.m., and I don't want to miss that!

Lights are strung, ornaments are on. All systems are GO for a week from Saturday!