Opinion

Happy New Year Coffee and Chaos readers! I hope that your New Year is filled with contentment and happiness. My family celebrated our out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new with a family game night and watching the Times Square Ball drop.

The New Year is when we take stock. In some cases, like my husband Peter’s, this is literal.

“And that’s another thing,” Herb said, with finality, “Changing that dang year on everything we write, every January. Goes against human nature.” “Well I might just have an answer to your problem, Herb,” said Doc, sipping and dunking and stirring.

It’s the week after Christmas! The last of the Christmas cookies have been eaten (by mom, for breakfast because Christmas food has no calories and nothing goes better with coffee than Christmas cookies) and we’ve got about three hours before a kid complains about being bored. Every mom in America can pat herself on the back because we did it again! Santa came, the people were all fed, the decor was perfect, the wrappings and trappings all glorious, and we made it all look so easy.

Across several U.S. states and many years, each community that I have visited or lived in has had some version of the same opening line of questions to any “new” people they meet: “Who are your people? Where are your people from?”

It doesn’t really take much prompting to get ol’ Windy Wilson to start holding court on all things strange … not at the Mule Barn truck stop. All it takes is someone slowing down enough to listen to our aging camp cook. Someone accidentally said the word “quail” and that was enough.

Merry Christmas Coffee and Chaos readers! This is our last article before the big day. In mom world, this compares to the effort an athlete puts into prepping for the Olympics culminating into the day of their event.

As we enter the final weeks of 2021, I have had an opportunity to reflect on the year that has given us so many unexpected highs and lows. It became apparent rather quickly that there has been a prevalent theme throughout the last twelve months: face adversity head-on and come out stronger than ever.

Just barely a week until Christmas Day! If you’re a dad this means, well it means nothing because the mom in your house is flying around like a blind chicken trying to pull off the annual Christmas miracle at your house. If you’re a mom, well, if you’re a mom it means you can see the finish line from here, but you must hurdle a couple of Christmas programs, a mound of presents that need to be wrapped, one elusive musthave gift, all the teacher gifts, and the Christmas dinner shopping list in just barely a week.