November 2014 – GringoPotpourri

Thanksgiving Reflections – 2014

It is the day before Thanksgiving as I write this. 2014 has been a tough year. It started out great – bonding with the family dog during an extended winter break, returning last January to my job in Mexico City with eager new students, and enjoying a day trip with a good friend to the former spa town of Tequisquiapan. But I was living in Mexico on borrowed time, and just as I had finally expanded my local friend circle to a satisfying degree, the time came for me to return.

I have spent much of the time since then in a sort of daze. Although I’ve enjoyed scoping out my new surroundings in Eastern Tennessee, I can’t help but feel that I’m not living up to my full potential…whatever that may be. That being said, I know that 2015 will be a better year, and I’m going to do my best to find direction and stability in my life and to take on a more positive general attitude…as of this moment. For starters, I look forward to spending Thanksgiving with my parents for the first time since 1999. I can taste the cranberries already!

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Top Ten Holiday Songs

Can you believe that Christmas is just over a month away? Where did the year go?!?! What makes time fly even faster is the fact that between unseasonably cold temperatures and endless snowfall near the Great Lakes, the calendar has seemingly flipped directly from October to December!

I don’t mean to bypass Thanksgiving by writing that; I am working on a Turkey Day-themed post for sometime next week. It is merely that everywhere I turn, it feels like Christmas. Even the radio is filled with holiday carols. As such, I have decided to embrace the season’s early arrival.

Last year I blogged about my top ten favorite holiday movies. (I even threw in one about Thanksgiving for good measure!) For this year, I toyed with writing a post entitled “Another Top Ten Holiday Movies,” but ultimately decided to share my taste in holiday music with you instead. Here are a few of my seasonal favorites – festive and somber, spiritual and secular, English and otherwise. I selected their best renditions (remakes mostly suck) and put their YouTube links below. I make no promises that the links are ad-free; you have been warned.

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Germany: A Love Affair

This past November 9th marked 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That historic day in 1989 saw the reunification of a divided country following three decades of Cold War hostilities. The transition wasn’t perfect, but it was a non-violent and triumphant event for a small corner of Europe that, throughout much of the 20^th century, had seen (and often instigated) more than its fair share of violent, non-triumphant happenings.

I was a freshman in high school when the Wall came down. My German I course was the last class of the day, if I remember correctly, and although it was my favorite class, I nevertheless was an ADHD-addled teenager without much interest in actually learning. My German teacher, Frau Francik, entered the classroom, beaming, and said that something very important had happened. She spent the entire hour explaining the history leading up to the day’s monumental event. She shared her memories of leading a class trip to Germany and crossing Checkpoint Charlie, the designated border crossing for Americans between East and West Berlin. We were impressed and not a little bit scared.

It wasn’t until my junior year of high school that our class had the opportunity to visit Germany over Spring Break. Frau Francik decided to focus on just Bavaria this time around, saving a still-in-transition Berlin for another time perhaps. Alas, I didn’t have the money to go, but I promised myself that one day, I would make it to Germany.

It was a promise I kept…many times over.

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25 (MORE) Things about Me that You Might Not Know

Roughly one year ago, I authored a post called “25 Things about Me that You Might Not Know.” The initial idea for the post was in response to a silly Facebook challenge going viral at the time. In the spirit of good fun, here are 25 MORE things about me that you might not know. (The key, I think, to a fun and revealing challenge is to answer honestly.)