"You picked the wrong time to come to Omaha," my brother says...

One way in which you can manipulate time and space is by re-visiting the place in which you grew up.

In a way, it's like entering another dimension. For me, that place is Omaha.

Though I spent the majority of my life there, it feels like a world away. Warm in a familiar, deja vu way, but cold in a way that whispers in your ear that you don't really fit--not so much--anymore.

Tomorrow, I'll fly there. I'll pack up as little as humanly possible, yet enough to get by, and hope to hell that there are lots and lots of heavy winter coats and sweaters and mittens to get me through. My own brother says, "You picked the wrong time to come to Omaha," as though I needed such positive encouragement.

After six years of L.A. winters, I'm not looking forward to freezing, nor am I really prepared. My Omaha treks usually occur in September~ for a reason. The current Omaha weather forecast alone is enough to make me cry, and the idea of existing in that climate for several days is enough to make me wear the ugliest, embroidered, hand-me-down, thrift shop Christmas sweater there is. (I don't care what I look like; I just want to be warm.)

And that's the beauty of it. When you go back to your hometown, nobody really cares what you look like--they're just glad to see you. And that warmth and familiarity will melt just about anything, except for maybe my holiday spirit.

Home may be where the heartland is... but it's certainly not where the sun is. This is what I'm flying into. Yup, the holidays will make you do crazy things.

OMAHA, NEBRASKA WEATHER FORECAST (12/15/07 and onward...)

ACCUWEATHER SIX-DAY FORECAST

	Sat.	Sun.	Mon.	Tue.	Wed.	Thu.
HI	24° F	32° F	34° F	38° F	38° F	36° F
LO	9° F	15° F	20° F	21° F	20° F	21° F

Photo credit: "Lightcicles" by Jim (the CG)/flickr
Copyright © 2007 Kendra Liedle

Waiting For God--is it that time of year AGAIN??!!

As the collective holidays loom near.... I've become increasingly aware of a strange phenomenon that seems to become more apparent every year:

Time seems to snowball faster and faster just...as...soon...as one passes the invisible line between childhood and adulthood. As a child, summers lasted FOREVER and the holidays could never come fast enough, especially for me, since my birthday lands in December, too.

Waiting...waiting...waiting...all those months for packaged gifts was tortuous, to say the least. I got in trouble (on more than one occasion) for slitting my Christmas presents open in the morning and sneakily re-wrapping them so they would appear untampered for the "official" unwrapping with family and the home video camera.

This "officialness" would not begin until after 6 p.m. Christmas evening, once my grandparents arrived. It was enough to make any kid scream ~ especially a Sagittarian one-- forced to wait nearly 11 months before any gifting.

Don't even get me started on the old, "This is your birthday / Christmas present" cheap shot I've heard many, many times in my lifetime...Historically, this statement has been uttered by my little brother most often, the same little brother who ratted me out on my clever "Slit/Re-wrap holiday scheme" after several years of successfully getting away with it, scotch-tape free, so to speak.

The funny thing is that now that I'm an adult, the receiving of gifts isn't really all that important anymore. The magic of the holidays has not lost its allure by any means, but now my greatest pleasure is giving gifts and spreading the happiness of the season with others.

Although that sounds even sappier than I had intended, the idea is the same: It really is better to give than receive. The greatest thing is that all that re-wrapping of childhood gifts has made me an excellent adult gift-wrapper!

Copyright © 2007 Kendra Liedle