Day: December 31, 2017
Our Traditional New Year’s Eve Dinner: Wieners & Potato Salad
16 Tasks of the Festive Season: Square 16 – New Year’s Eve / St. Sylvester’s Day Tasks for Hogswatch Night: Make your favourite sausage dish. As it so happens, wieners and potato salad are my mom’s and my traditional Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve food. This year we cheated (store-bought instead of homemade potato […]
Read MoreDinner for One
I know I’ve posted this before, but it simply isn’t New Year’s Eve without it hereabouts … Original post: ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/1628304/post
Read More16 Tasks of the Festive Season: Square 8 – Las Posadas
Tasks for Las Posadas: Which was your favorite / worst / most memorable hotel / inn / vacation home stay ever? Tell us all about it! I think I am going to divide the honors three ways here — and very fittingly, two of the three hotel stays in question were in Spanish speaking countries. […]
Read MoreThe Women I Respect the Most
16 Tasks of the Festive Season: Square 14 – Quaid-e-Azam Tasks for Quaid-e-Azam: Pakistan’s first leader – Muhammad Ali Jinnah – was a man, but both Pakistan and neighboring India were governed by women (Benazir Bhutto and Indira Gandhi respectively) before many of the major Western countries. Tell us: Who are the present-day or historic […]
Read MoreVictor Gunn: Death in December
16 Tasks of the Festive Season: Square 3 – Armistice / Veterans’ Day Murder at Castle Cloon This novella by Victor Gunn (one of several pseudonyms of Edwy Searles Brooks) also forms the centerpiece of the second British Library Christmas mystery short fiction anthologies edited by Martin Edwards that I read this month (Crimson Snow), […]
Read MoreA Cornucopia of Holiday Stories
Turns out I already knew five of the ten stories in this anthology: Ellis Peters’s The Trinity Cat Julian Symons’s The Santa Claus Club Ian Rankin’s No Sanity Clause G.K. Chesterton’s The Dagger With Wings and Marjorie Bowen’s Cambric Tea. So I skipped those (though I do really like the stories by Ellis Peters, Julian […]
Read MoreTruman Capote: A Christmas Memory, One Christmas & The Thanksgiving Visitor
Southern Holidays Truman Capote’s charming, magical memories of his childhood Christmas and Thanksgiving with his mother’s Monroeville, Alabama family — particularly his much elder and much-beloved cousin Miiss Sook, who thanks to her own child-like nature was mother, grandmother and elder sister to him simultaneously; but, most importantly, the greatest source of warmth, love and […]
Read MoreCharles Dickens: The Chimes
16 Tasks of the Festive Season: Square 16 – New Year’s Eve / St. Sylvester’s Day Prophetic Bells Well, well — nothing like ringing in the New Year (albeit a day early) with Charles Dickens: What he did for Christmas in the story about the old miser Scrooge, he did again a year later for […]
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