World Peace in a Quilt

View from my porch. My house would love to cuddle up and sip orange-cocoa inside that house. :) We ended up with about a foot of snow and my nephew's car.

You know what it's like to wake up after a really satisfying nap, or all-night sleep, and look out the window where the wind is blowing and the snow is piling up on your garbage can lid and fence posts, and you smile and snuggle into your pile of fourteen quilts, close your eyes, and dream about waking up much later and making hot cocoa? Without disturbing the kids? Or the dogs? Or the whatever-else-lives-in-your-house-with-you? Just you alone with the cocoa and the snowy yard. For like five minutes, until the aforementioned whatever-else-lives-in-your-house jumps out of bed and piles onto you?

Yeah. That was the entire Christmas holiday for our family.

There were no explosions of any kind--either people or chocolate. There was plenty of snow--which we love--and my tree didn't die--which I really love. Psychotically love. Like, I can't take the dead-after-two-weeks-and-now-my-house-might-burn-down trees anymore. And this year I threatened to get a fake tree but was mutinied against until I found a place where we chopped down our own, thus guaranteeing a live tree through Easter. Anyway, tree-angst was gone--and we spent Christmas Eve with family, eating hot-wings and trading embarrassing stories and laughing our guts out until all hours. (Which at our ages and road conditions was only until about 9:00 p.m.) It was grand. We did wrap the whole thing up at New Year's with a rather distasteful gastro-bug, but even then, we stayed friendly. It stayed snowy. And we stayed cozy.

That is the way to start a new year. And I'd like it to stay that way. I'd like us as a world to dump all the spazziness of the past decade or so--and especially the past year--and just be a nice, happy, friendly, kind, laughter-filled population for a while. I'm sure we're more than capable of doing that. We live in a generally civilized world after all.

So, can we do that for the new year? Set a goal to keep it nice. And respectful. And happy to be different from one another. Not threatened. Working to help each other. It's what will make the world keep going 'round. I'm willing to throw that out there and give it a try. You?

If we do it and make it another year, then you're all invited to come snuggle under my fourteen blankets and watch season 3 of Sherlock and season 4 of Downton. I'll provide the cocoa. You can bring the French toast.

Happy 2013, peeps. Time to prove the Mayans wrong.