While diabetes may affect the way we celebrate our holidays, those holidays should never be about diabetes. Holidays are about family, about G-d, about freedom, about love... not about chronic diseases and disease management.

That being said, I sometimes find the holidays give me greater insight into my diabetes, and ways to deal with it. While changes in diet (rarely good for my numbers!) are certainly a component of most of my religious and family holiday celebrations, when I am "properly introspective" -- that is to say, doing the sort of "soul searching" that one is supposed to do when approaching these holidays -- I find many ways to put myself "at peace" with this condition, and to turn it from a negative into a positive. I believe some Christians refer to this as "giving it up to G-d (or Jesus)"...

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A man is not dead until he is forgotten. -- African proverb

Saturday night, the vice-president of our Friends of Faire group delivered a well-worded "toast to the immortal memory", in which he named Robert Burns "the Bard of Scotland"  in the way that Shakespeare is "the Bard of England" (not to mention most of the rest of the English-speaking world!). As our festivities were dedicated to a member who had recently and unexpectedly died, her life was also celebrated in this toast, and her passing, mourned.

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Back when I was in Junior High, I took a summer creative writing course at our local public library. One of the prompts the instructor gave us for developing a story was, "There are two types of people: those who like egg yolks, and those who do not." On the surface, it seems a ludicrous way to split up a population. But it's those egg yolks (and sticks of butter) that have been frustrating me, and that's giving me some insight into some of our fellow PWDs' daily frustrations. 

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Last week, a rabbi I follow on Twitter mentioned that she was beginning to work on her sermons for the Jewish High Holy Days. A bit off-the-cuff, I threw out the topic of "G-d forgiveness, versus self-forgiveness, versus forgiving one's fellow man". While the first of these sits squarely within the framework of religion, the other two often sit at the same table as the many theories of diabetes management. Especially where caregivers, and type 2 diabetes, are concerned.

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"Pot luck" has been on my mind as my Friends of Faire group prepares for its annual Burns Night, and with it, the close of the winter holiday season.

While most of the United States population assumes that "the holiday season" starts with Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday in November) and lasts until New Year's Day (or if New Year's is on a Sunday, January 2nd), for some of us the season may begin as early as Samhain (Hallowe'en), or last until Epiphany, Eastern Orthodox Epiphany, Imbolc (Groundhog Day)... or Burns Night.

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Thursday evening was the awards dinner for two of the three New Jersey Tours de Cure (the third will take place in two weeks). Since The Other Half couldn't get off work, I had to go solo. I'm not completely uncomfortable going out without an escort, but I am rather shy about reaching out to meet other people.
I need a hook -- a segue -- something to break the ice. I knew that there would be some folk I'd met before -- Taran (the Skylands Tour's coordinator) and a couple of the committee folk and riders. I also expected them to not have a lot of free/mingling time, or to be with other folk. The sit-down-dinner nature of this event in a way forced me to meet new people.

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