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by Lisa Kampeter

   The most wonderful time of the year can also be the most stressful time of the year. I choose to show respect to the turkey and Thanksgiving Day and to keep any Christmas decorations packed away until after the November holiday. It’s so worth it getting the house festive in time for the first holiday party of the season, the Dining Divas Christmas, but that means a jam-packed working weekend right after Thanksgiving in order to be ready for the girls the first Thursday of the month.

What brings us together every month is dining together, but that’s not what keeps us together. It’s the camaraderie and the friendships. It’s wonderful knowing that each month we’ll be getting together, and I can’t remember a time that we haven’t. And one tradition we all look forward to is the Divas Christmas. Originally, we used to dress up and go to a fancy restaurant in December, which is fun, but I think we all agree. It’s so much better with the casual gatherings and Divas Christmas traditions at home.

This year’s dinner was simple…soup, salad, and breads. Our Culinary Diva brought a delicious garden salad to start us off, and then we enjoyed taco and gnocchi soups. The Traveling Diva and the Overworked Diva brought delicious beer and soda breads as well as cornbread that we dipped into the soups. Fortunately, we weren’t overstuffed so we enjoyed sampling the dozens of cookies everyone brought for our cookie exchange.

As always, we collected toys for charity.   The classics were present like Candyland and Monopoly, and “Frozen” still is a popular item for just about every type of toy. We were close to having to break open one of the games just to get a pair of dice for our Rob Your Neighbor game. Thanks to modern technology, we had options, like Amazon’s Alexa. But we decided to go with a mobile app since that felt more like the real thing versus an interactive voice device.   Next year, we’re going old school again with a pair of dice. Paper weights were the “favorite” gift of the evening. “Who uses paper anymore?” said the Ungrateful Diva.

We talked politics. Of course, we did. It was the first time we’d been together since the election.   It didn’t matter whose side you were on. We all agreed the campaigning this year was embarrassing and disgraceful. We talked about the millions of dollars that were wasted on advertising for the election and pondered what great things could have been done had that money been used to help the community instead. We talked about the violent attack on the Ohio State campus just earlier in the day.

So, when we moved onto another Diva tradition, sharing of a poem with a message of hope or a reflection of the year prior, it really hit home. This year’s was written by Lori McKenna and made famous by Tim McGraw.

Called “Humble and Kind”, as we all listened to the melody and the words, it was a great reminder to remember where you came from, to enjoy the little things, to keep smiling, to be polite, and so much more. Nothing like what we saw during the campaign season. But something to strive for in 2017 and many more elections to come.

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