{"id":10850,"date":"2016-12-20T23:02:36","date_gmt":"2016-12-21T06:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=10850"},"modified":"2016-12-20T23:03:24","modified_gmt":"2016-12-21T06:03:24","slug":"winter-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/winter-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This year, I&#8217;m spending Christmas with my family in Iowa. Even though I don&#8217;t leave until Thursday, I mentally checked out on Monday morning. Haven&#8217;t gotten hardly any writing or publishing work done since.<\/p>\n<p>Have I blogged about my thoughts on\u00a0Christmas before? Looks like I haven&#8217;t. There&#8217;s a lot of things that I really love about Christmas, but there&#8217;s also a lot that I can&#8217;t hardly stand.<\/p>\n<p>Things that I hate:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The movie Elf. Every single aspect of it.<\/li>\n<li>About 80%\u00a0of the Christmas music played in retail stores.<\/li>\n<li>The crass commercialism. BUY BUY BUY!<\/li>\n<li>The neverending war between &#8220;Happy Holidays and &#8220;Merry Christmas.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Pretty much everything about\u00a0the Santa Claus myth, especially the emphasis on convincing small children that it&#8217;s real.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Things that I love:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Charles Dickens&#8217;s\u00a0<em>A Christmas Carol.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Handel&#8217;s Messiah.<\/li>\n<li>Nativities and creche displays.<\/li>\n<li>Christmas caroling in general.<\/li>\n<li>Christmas trees.<\/li>\n<li>Secret Santa gift exchanges.<\/li>\n<li>Spending time with family.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To be honest, every December 26th, I let out a small sigh of relief. The holiday season is\u00a0a minefield.<\/p>\n<p>New Year&#8217;s is a much more enjoyable holiday. I&#8217;m one of the few people who actually enjoys setting New Year&#8217;s resolutions, and while I don&#8217;t always keep them, there have been some amazing\u00a0times when I have.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s\u00a0a sense of rebirth\u00a0that I really like with New Year&#8217;s. It&#8217;s a time when we all decide to put away the things of last year and focus on the possibilities ahead of us. That&#8217;s what resolutions are all about, and why I love setting them.<\/p>\n<p>Then there&#8217;s Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere anyways). It&#8217;s always insane how short the days get in winter. Even in Utah, which is not that far north, the lack of sunlight can really get to you. So it&#8217;s always nice to know that the shortest day is here and from now, they will only get longer.<\/p>\n<p>So yeah, that&#8217;s pretty much the holidays. I probably won&#8217;t write much between now and January 1st, though I do hope to finish a short story. I figure that&#8217;s a small enough goal that I can actually get it done.\u00a0As for blogging, I&#8217;ll at least\u00a0do a New Year&#8217;s post, after I figure out my 2017 resolutions. Can&#8217;t promise anything other than that, but you&#8217;re probably all busy doing holiday things yourselves too.<\/p>\n<p>Merry Christmas and Happy New Year&#8217;s! I&#8217;ll see you on the other side of the holiday minefield.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This year, I&#8217;m spending Christmas with my family in Iowa. Even though I don&#8217;t leave until Thursday, I mentally checked out on Monday morning. Haven&#8217;t gotten hardly any writing or publishing work done since. Have I blogged about my thoughts on\u00a0Christmas before? Looks like I haven&#8217;t. There&#8217;s a lot of things that I really love&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/winter-update\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Winter update<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[1079,274],"class_list":["post-10850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christmas-2016","tag-holidays","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2P0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10850"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10852,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10850\/revisions\/10852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}