"Outside a dog a book is man's best friend, inside a dog it is too dark to read!" -Groucho Marx========="The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." -Jane Austen========="I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book."-JK Rowling========"I spend a lot of time reading." -Bill Gates=========“Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.” -Jacqueline Kelly=========

Saturday, January 17, 2026

Sunday Salon -- Hello 2026

Christmas is over but not our memories of it. Here is my daughter's nutcracker collection creatively displayed in her entryway. 

The past few Sundays I have posted lists of books to conclude my reading year in 2025, so today I am posting my first update of 2026. There is a lot to report, making up for a month of no posts:

Weather: Gorgeous! After our November and December of rain, rain, and more rain, we are being rewarded with lovely blue skies, with the temperature in the 40s and 50s during the day and 30s at night. Don actually is on the roof taking down our Christmas lights as I type this paragraph. He thought he'd leave up a few lights as an homage to the Seattle Seahawks since the bulbs are green and blue, their team colors, but he decided to take them all down saying, "When am I going to have another day like today to be outside?"

We are finished with Mom's house: Last week Don and I went to Eugene to meet with my brother and older sister to finish moving everything out of Mom's house, preparing it for sale. We'd gotten the lion's share of the task completed when we were all there in October and on the subsequent trips in November but we still had to deal with all the furniture she didn't take with her to her new place and pack up the loose ends to distribute to St. Vincent's for resale. We did it! The house is empty and new buyers are already in place which means we didn't have to spend a lot of time cleaning. Woot-woot! At one point Mom mused she had no idea how much work it would be to move and clean out a house. We all chuckled. She done all the emotional work while we did all the physical work, I guess.

Christmas decorations and misspellings: For family dinner on Christmas Eve I lovingly set the table ahead of time, using a tablecloth I rarely use, but one dedicated to the holiday. We had a lovely, candlelit dinner after we attended the late afternoon church service. I left the tablecloth in place after cleaning up the dinner, thinking it made the dining room look so festive. The next day, one of my daughters and I sat at the table to play cards. She looked hard at the tablecloth and asked, "How do you spell 'mistletoe'?" I looked where she was looking and realized the whole cloth was covered with a misspelling of the word, spelling it 'misteltoe'. Now I don't know how to feel about the tablecloth. Do I ditch the cloth or do I keep it and make fun of it forevermore? What would you do?


 And then there is this funny ornament: We think it is misspelling/misquoting of Luke 2:11. We put it on the tree every year anyway and then make fun of it. We've had it for years.

This says: "Today ie born wish us a Saviour when ir Christ the Lord." We think it is supposed to say from Luke 2:11: For unto you is born this day in the city of David a saviour, who is Christ the Lord.


Speaking of Christmas decorations: We finally put away all our Christmas decorations yesterday. We like to leave the decorations up through Twelfth Night, January 5th, because that is when the wise men arrived with their gifts. Before we had a chance to put things away we left for Eugene for part of a week and then Don was smashed with meetings when we got back. Anyway the task is done. We even got the stepstool out today to swap out our Christmas glasses and mugs for the regular ones. That is usually the last task we accomplish and it is often weeks after everything else is tucked away.  It is so much fun to put out decorations and so unfun to put them away. I'm sure this is a universal feeling.

End of the year lists: At the end of each year I wrap up my reading-year by putting together a bunch of best-of lists. Click on the links for any of these lists you haven't seen yet or are curious about:
Other blog posts you may have missed:
An aside: I just stepped outside and heard an unmistakable sound of a lawn mower. Someone is mowing their lawn in January!

Reading in 2026: 
  • Of the five books I've finished so far this year, four of them are five-star books: Wreck; The Wind Knows My Name; Mother Mary Comes to Me; and So Far Gone. (Two reviews pending.) It feels like a great start to my reading year. 
  • I'm currently reading: A Passage to India (for my 12-pages/day classics challenge; The Correspondent (for book club) and The Lion Women of Tehran (also for book club.) All of these books are also excellent.
  • My current reading challenges.
MLK Day: Monday is a National Holiday to honor the legend of Martin Luther King, Jr. Our racist President doesn't think it should be a holiday anymore which infuriates me. If something isn't about him, he hates it. Ugh. In honor of MLK, we will attend a program in our town.  I urge you to do something to honor his memory on Monday also. Find out what is happening in your community. If you don't live in the US, you are lucky, but I fear Trump may cause problems for you, too. I cringe to think of it (Venezuela, Denmark, Greenland, UK, Nigeria...)

Minnesota: While I'm at it, I am also so disturbed about what is happening in Minnesota around the death of Renee Good at the hands of ICE. Say her name. She was not a terrorist. She was a mother and an award-winning poet. What is happening to us? It is so, so ugly. 


I needed a palette cleaner after thinking about all the negative stuff happening in our country. So I visited this site Positive.News  about praise-worthy stuff happening this week in the world. Whew. I feel a bit better.

Happy 2026!

-Anne
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