Boxing Day Update and some Links

Yesterday was Boxing Day, or the second day of Christmas as we call it in these parts*, so Christmas 2010 is officially over. Of course, inofficially the Christmas season lasts up to New Year and even to Epiphany Day, i.e. January 6th, i.e. the day the three wise men arrived in Bethlehem,** since many people don’t have to work “between the years”. Schools starts up again on January 5th (no idea why they didn’t extend the holidays to Epiphany, so the Catholics among us can celebrate), so I still have some free time.

On Boxing Day, my uncle visited us for lunch. He’s all alone this Christmas, since my aunt is in hospital and has been for a while, so we invited him for lunch to get his mind of his and my aunt’s troubles for a while.

Present update:
In addition to what I mentioned before, I also got:

A very nice necklace of wooden beads. I presume my aunt bought it before she fell ill, because I somehow cannot see my uncle shopping for jewelery.
A package of cinnamon star cookies.
Money

Finally, the mailman also deigned to deliver mail to us once more today (we didn’t get any mail on December 23rd and Christmas Eve, because of the heavy snow), so we got a few late Christmas cards. And my Mom had one of her Christmas cards come back, because the postage was supposedly too low. Sometimes I hate the post office.

And now for some housekeeping: I added some links to the “Inspiration and Fun” category on the sidebar, mainly to generators, idea prompts and the like. I like using those tools to jumpstart my creativity, when I’m feeling drained and blocked. I’m lucky, I even get a sellable piece of flash fiction or a short story out of it. And if not, if the resulting drabble stalls after a few paragraphs, I still get some writing practice out of it, not to mention flushing the creative pipes to make room for bigger and better stuff.

Finally, here are some writing links:

Lilith Saintcrow has a great post on the gifts of writing.

And here are two wonderful older posts from Jim van Pelt on the local, the exotic and a sense of self-worth (so very true) and an interesting concept called the plot daisy.

*In the US, December 26th is also Kwanzaa.

** Christmas Day to Epiphany is of course the 12 Days of Christmas from the song.

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4 Responses to Boxing Day Update and some Links

  1. Estara says:

    Interesting. In Bavaria the winter school holidays have always been up to the 6th at least. This year school starts January 10th. Hmm.

  2. Cora says:

    That’s because Bavaria is majorly Catholic, while Lower Saxony is approximately half Protestant with about 20 percent of Catholics concentrated in the Western part of the state (Emsland, Cloppenburg, Vechta). So January 6th isn’t an official holiday here. Though usually, the school holidays still try to include January 6th, so Catholic students can be Sternsinger or go to church. I don’t know why they changed it, though it seems rather rude towards the Catholics in Vechta, Cloppenburg and Emsland.

    • Estara says:

      So did this change only happen this year for the first time?

      • Cora says:

        Most of the time, January 6th is still included in the winter holidays to accommodate the Catholic population. I suspect they changed it this year, because they squeezed in three free days after the Halbjahreszeugnisse.

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