TToT: Tis Better to Give Than to Receive – Two In One, #10Thankful

No Internet when I tried to post last week. Two weeks in one and here it goes.

I wasn’t able to link up, for the first time since I joined back in May. I don’t know what it is with my Internet connection lately. Perhaps I am just being impossibly picky, but I may need to consider another Internet provider because this keeps happening, more than I feel like it really should.

TEN THINGS OF THANKFUL

For my father on his 60th.

We’d had the bigger celebration already, but on the actual day we had a smaller dinner at one of our favourite family restaurants.

I gave my father chocolate and the gift of tears.

No, not my main goal, but when my words are my best idea for a gift to him and all he means to me, crying is, it turns out, inevitable.

Giving Words On My Father’s 60th Birthday

I am thankful for my father, for the life he’s always worked so hard to provide for me, and for the man he is. His love has shown me my worth and what love truly means. This could represent all ten things for the week alone.

For Giving Tuesday.

With all the consumerism of the Christmas season, it is refreshing to hear people focus on giving back and doing a kindness for someone.

I went to my cousin’s salon for a hair cut and she told me about a fundraiser they’d held a few days earlier. She just happened to mention the makeovers they’d given to women rebuilding their lives after crisis and that there was one woman who didn’t show up to claim her makeover and her gift.

My cousin, on a whim, decided to give me the gift set, as a sort of Christmas present, and it was the nicest surprise I’d had in a while. It was an unexpected act of giving and that’s what made it so great.

10 Reasons Why Life Simply Wouldn’t Be The Same Without Our Cousins

For being included as one of the 89.

A travel blogger put out a call and I was one of those to answer.

89 Travel Bloggers Share Their Favorite Natural Sites on Earth

I am in there somewhere between Greece and Slovenia. Upon reading this I now have added many more items to my travel bucket list.

For a mystery object.

Well, if I said any more it wouldn’t be a mystery.

😉

My Mystery Object Speaks

It’s the story of a silver tin containing a blue pendant on a chain.

I got to bring the object for my new writing group’s Mystery Object Wednesday. Everyone seemed to approve. They all wrote stories based on said object. I felt happy I could provide the writing inspiration for the week.

For disability awareness.

December 3rd is

International Day of Persons with Disabilities

The 2015 theme was “Inclusion Matters”.

I could be displeased that there needs to be a day, set aside once a year by the United Nations, but I choose to use the awareness and recognition that exists to keep speaking out. The world is aware. Hopefully, with days like this made visible, action and more inclusion for a better world will follow.

For festive family.

I was a little out of it during the holidays last year and my family noticed. They know I don’t always know how to go about decorating and showing my festive side on my own, so my mother and sister both helped me with that.

My mom worked to give me a tree, real not artificial, and one that my cat hopefully wouldn’t mess with. My sister helped with the decorations.

I can’t see red, green, silver, or gold anymore, but I can still see the lights on a Christmas tree.

For geography lessons ad support on writing.

My second video chat was one where I did my best, once more, to learn all the names and voices of the TToT bloggers who participate.

I enjoyed our conversations on geography (where we learned that both New York and Peru share the same time zone) and writing advice and support was given (using humour and solidarity).

And I met a few more of them this week.

Thanks for the mention goes to Val.

Still getting it all straight, who everybody is, but I appreciated the shout out.

A few even found the patience to help me figure out which way to aim my iPhone’s camera so those I was talking to could see my face.

For Disney.

I happen to think every child should see Disney World at least once. I have never been to Disney Land, but I am guessing it is similar.

The man behind it all, the parks and the films, Walt Disney would have turned 114 years old, and I wanted to mark the occasion because those movies and the theme parks were a big part of my childhood, which he dreamed up and made possible.

For Christmas movies.

It was strange to watch It’s A Wonderful Life because of the time period it was filmed. The way movies were made back then was different, compared to the Home Alone films from my childhood in the nineties. There’s a whole cultural thing, a feeling of nostalgia, no matter when you watch or how old you might be.

I do think both It’s A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol are about redemption and a realization that we shouldn’t take life for granted and that we have it pretty good, even when we don’t fully realize it.

It’s just strange that both those movies have a climactic scene in a cemetery, a character brushing snow from a tombstone. More on that correlation next week perhaps.

I am no expert on the rules for this TToT thing yet, but I am going off of a few weeks I haven’t felt my best, still understanding how good I have it, but still I am going to invoke my father and his birthday or any number of the best parts of the Christmas season and stretching my ten things farther than they might usually go.

I will have more holiday thankfuls coming next week to be sure.

I wanted to end with a favourite of my brother’s music from the nineties (an instrumental and not one of their bigger radio hits) and to remember Stone Temple Pilot front man Scott Weiland, who died this week, haven’t even reaching his fiftieth birthday.

Daisy – Stone Temple Pilots

RIP Scott