Holidays

I am not, as a rule, much for Holidays.

Thanksgiving with it's obligatory turkey--Christmas and all the surrounding insanity and expense--do nothing but stress me out and depress me.

I grew up in a large extended family where we all lived about three blocks apart:  Grama, Grampa, my Aunt and Uncle and two cousins.  Holidays were joyous then.

But they are all gone now and the memories are both painful and precious.

Valentine's Day is the one Holiday I do love, with all the bright red hearts and red roses and paper Cupids everywhere--

My Mom has been gone many years now, but I have a very special memory of her and the Valentine's Day party at school so long ago.

I am old enough to remember the old Five-and-Dime store, and we used to go to one in Marshalltown, some 20 miles from where I currently live.

Going to town was a BIG DEAL then, since we seldom ventured far from our own little town.

On this occasion, Mom got the car out of the garage and drove us all the way to Kresge's in Marshalltown...  what a wonderland for a little kid with it's cases of cheap plastic rings and rubber balls, costume jewelery and Evening in Paris cologne and most importantly to a little kid, the BULK CANDY AISLE!!!

Mom asked the clerk to please try and sell us equal amounts of  red, pink, and white sugar hearts, please, since they were going to a Kindergarten class.

She bought a yard of red netting, a spool of red curly ribbon, and a bag of the heart-shaped suckers, the ones so sickeningly sweet that only a kid can stand to eat.

Bagging up our wonderful treasure, we took it home where  Mom cut big circles out of the netting and inside, placed  one red, one pink, and one white sugar heart and tied each little bundle with curly ribbon and a sucker.  Of course, I was in charge of sorting the sugar hearts!

It was such fun and I was so proud of those little candy heart bags--a little bit of candy doesn't really sound like much, but back then it was money spent that could have gone for groceries and bills.

Each and every Valentine's Day, I still think about those little bundles with one red, one pink and one white candy heart inside, and the love that went into them--and isn't that what Valentine's Day is all about anyway?

I got brave

Okay--I did it.  I took the plunge and decided to enter this brave new world.

I'll tell you right now I'm no computer geek--but I do have to admit this wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it would be!

Hopefully I will have some entertaining, perhaps even thought-provoking things to say, but for right now, I think I've done enough heavy thinking for today--