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In the fantasy world that exists in my head, my 20s were going to be all about posh sophistication. I was going to use things like cocktail shakers and porcelain tiered serving platters to host lavish events, with a combination of new acquaintances and my regular group of friends in attendance. We would all share humorous and fascinating stories about our life adventures, then settle down for a classy bottle of wine and general camaraderie, and snack on bite-sized crostini. On occasion, we would visit trendy restaurants and coffee bars, where we would eat lavish food and marvel in each other’s clever wit and general awesomeness. There would be no debates about politics or religion, because we would agree on everything and all be in the same place in life.

It was going to be something like Sex and the City, minus the promiscuity.

It was going to be something like the many parties I read about every month in Real Simple.

I was going to “entertain” regularly, and I was going to be damn good at it, thankyouverymuch.

Based on every home-hunting or wedding-registry-suggestion-list I’ve ever seen, I would argue that I’m not the only person who has had this fantasy. Realtors are always talking about having the space to “entertain,” and couples are always falling in love with a place because “we can picture ourselves entertaining on this deck!”

But I ask you–how many people do you know who actually do this? Obligatory family holidays don’t count.

It seems that most of my city friends are too poor–due to high rent payments–or too cramped–thanks to small square footage–to host much of anything, while my suburban friends are too spread apart, worn out, or otherwise focused to plan much. People generally also seem to have a very limited geographical radius within which they will travel, so offering to host such an event isn’t necessarily effective either.

So where’s the disconnect?

This observation became particularly evident during this holiday season. For the last 11 years, my family and I have traveled south each Christmas to visit my siblings and their children. We began this pilgrimage when my eldest niece was born, as it was much easier for us to come to my sister’s newborn than for her to come to us. And so there was a cosmic shift in our holiday universe, and we changed what we had always done. It’s never felt quite like Christmas to me there, though whether that is due to warmer weather, lack of family traditions, or simply my maturation, I’ve never been able to say.

This year, due to a combination of circumstances, we didn’t head south. This, I thought, was our chance to reclaim Christmas. It was an opportunity to start our own traditions at the same time we were starting our own two-person family. I had grandiose plans.

What I also had, apparently, was an utter lack of follow-through.

I had most of two weeks’ vacation, but we only did one thing I would consider to be “Christmassy.” On Christmas Eve and Christmas day, all of our friends were busy or out of town, generally following their own longstanding family traditions. So as always, big families reunited and reenacted their must-have Christmas moments. Most of those friends, in some way or other, followed the traditions their parents established back when they were kids. Maybe some friends with children started their own.

And for me, as the holiday passed uneventfully, I began to wonder what it is for me that makes Christmas, Christmas. Is it the present exchanges? The holiday cookies? Visiting festive light displays? Caroling (really, who actually goes caroling)?

What would it take for me to feel like Christmas? What traditions should I start? What makes something a tradition in the first place? When do the traditions become the responsibility of the next generation? How big can traditions be with just the two of us? How do the posh parties of my imagination elude me?

So we’re going to try a little gathering for New Years’ Eve. You know, to take the pressure off. Make it a laid-back, rum-enhanced soiree. Nothing too big. No traditions required. But dammit, there will be crostini.

Dashing Gray is a 20-something lifelong learner who works in higher education and embraces her semi-yuppie, child-free life. Recently engaged, she spends way too much time in local coffee shops drinking high-calorie espresso drinks and blogging out the many questions of life and weddings. Because life is never just black and white, learn about her adventures navigating — and embracing — The Beauty of Gray.

I watched my maternal grandfather in the next room as he gripped his cane and struggled to get out of his chair.  My grandmother Esther (“Mormor” to us, since she was Swedish) gave me a sad smile and quietly said, “I see pity in your eyes.”

She was probably right.  I was 20 years old and in the prime of life.  Papa had always been something of a legend to us grandkids.  He was warm and kind to us but also quite reserved, and much of what we knew about him was second-hand.  Mormor’s wonderful bedtime stories included proud tales of our grandfather’s abilities and achievements.  It seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do, and to see him so debilitated by a paralyzing illness seemed tragically unfair.

Born in 1904 in a small town in coastal northern California, Carl McDonald had left home at age 13 and lived with an Indian tribe, commuting to elementary school in a canoe.  He spent his whole life working and learning.  During high school he lived in a shack he built for himself and worked on farms and in a barrel factory.  While earning a teacher’s credential at Humboldt State Teacher’s College, he did hazardous work building railroad trestles and formed a dance band, having learned to play the saxophone, banjo, and violin.  Somehow he found time to court Esther Holmgren, marrying her in 1925.

As a teacher and later a principal he would supplement his income fishing in the ocean with his good friend Cliff, using a 16 foot wooden boat they had built.  Carl built a cabin and three houses for his family, and learned how to overhaul car engines so he could keep his teenaged kids’ jalopies running.  He thought up highly effective – and amusing – disciplinary measures for misbehaving students.  Late in his career he completed a master’s degree program, such was his dedication to his work.  In retirement he hunted, gardened, formed another dance band, and traveled to Sweden with Mormor.  In everything he did, it seemed that Papa had been in charge.

He handled the limitations and indignities of his illness bravely, but it hurt me to see those capable hands no longer able to do the things that his mind knew how to do.  After Esther died in 1988, Carl spent his last five years in an assisted-living community near my parents’ home, and it seemed to me that he was largely waiting to join Esther in the old cemetery in her coastal hometown of Fortuna.

Life sometimes has a way of evening things up, inflicting the worst disabilities on those, such as Lou Gehrig and Stephen Hawking, who have accomplished much in other areas or other times and can live out their lives with no regrets.  Papa had certainly done more than enough for one well-lived life.  However, while going through some memorabilia with my mother recently, I found one pleasant little surprise: a certificate of appreciation from the assisted living facility for Carl’s participation in their security patrol.  It seemed that even then he hadn’t given up on accomplishing things and taking charge.

Author’s note: more tales from Carl and Esther’s life can be found at my sister’s excellent blog site, Fooleryland.com, under the category “The Mormor Stories” and, coming soon, “The Papa Stories” (title TBD).

Sunday night, November 27^th, fresh off a weekend marked by slow-roasting turkeys and shop-till-you-drop, get-’em-while-they’re-hot super sales, I settle onto the couch, tune into 60 Minutes. With Andy Rooney gone, the segments are a few minutes longer, and Scott Pelley’s “Hard Times Generation: Families Who Live in Cars,” serves as something of a reality check. It’s a deliberately timed story, one of the many that surface in the season of giving to remind us all that, even in better economic times, there is a world divide between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ Those of us that have hopefully give with an open heart. In this ever-more-precarious economic climate, the message is all-the-more urgent, not to mention poignant. Even though I don’t opt to buy into the insanity of Black Friday, I know I can.

A fifteen-year-old girl who looks more child bride than teenager, and speaks with a poise beyond her years, lives with her younger brother and their father in a truck he bought with his last $1,000.  They’ve been living in it for five months. ”It’s an adventure,” she says. They wash up in gas station bathrooms. And when classmates see the truck drop them off at school, they know it’s the closest thing to home for Austin and Arielle.

“It‘s not really that much of an embarrassment,” says Arielle. “It’s only life. You do what you need to do – right?”

According to the report, nearly 25 percent of children are living in poverty.  An eight-year-old girl tells of living in a car with her mom and dad, two dogs and cat for three weeks before they were placed in a motel.  Tears run down the cheeks of a father when he talks about not being able to provide for his family. His wife, who admits she never cried during the weeks living in the car, breaks down on camera.  She talks about feeling helpless.  They were down to a quarter of a tank of gas and one orange when they found a shelter to take them in.

“Poverty is no sin,” wrote George Herbert. It is the line that B. Morrison, a poet herself, chooses to end her account of her few years on welfare as a young mother.  How a middle-class woman, barely two years out of college, found herself in a situation where the only viable option she had was to seek public assistance, would shake the preconceptions from anyone about what it means to be a welfare mom.  It was the seventies, her husband took off, and, encouraged by a close friend in the same boat – and with much admitted reluctance – she applied for AFDC. The experience she chronicles in Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mom – is as much a personal reflection on the circumstances that shape us as it is an eye-opening look at a welfare system that, for all its original good intent, gets bogged down in petty bureaucracy and a collective mindset that pigeonholes anyone seeking aid as one of the ‘greedy needy.’

Anything can change on a dime.   The early snowstorm that wreaked havoc in the Northeast sent one of the largest trees on my property, a majestic white oak, toppling across my driveway. It wasn’t the only tree we lost but its sheer magnitude, ever-present weeks after the clean-up, is humbling. Had it fallen in a different direction, I’d be writing a different story. I’m reminded of that possibility every time I pass by that uprooted tree.

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I’m back.

It’s autumn in the Pacific Northwest, and I am driving past an ornamental tree farm whose poplars are delirious with color.  A honeycrisp apple, from a bagful I purchased at a farm a few miles back, makes a loud crunching sound with every bite.  A winery I visited yesterday gave me a spectacular view across its golden vines and out to the wooded hills beyond.  An old wooden barn, sitting unused on a scenic hillside, has apparently attracted too much attention from would-be buyers, because the owner has mounted a large sign on its wall:  “Barn and land not for sale.”

I had already returned to this region once, many years ago, in search of new career opportunities.  However, when I found a good one, I let it take me hundreds of miles away, and subsequent career moves took me even farther from my favorite place.  My second return is part of a new plan: choose the place first, and the career second.

The economy here is less favorable than the place I just left, but that didn’t stop me.  While I’m not willing to starve in order to live in my location of choice, I am willing to sacrifice some material wealth.  Many people acknowledge this region’s scenic beauty but could never live here because of the rain.  I, on the other hand, love the weather in my new home, and I won’t miss the four months of brutal desert heat I used to endure each summer.  The way I see it, my year has lengthened by four enjoyable months.  I’ve improved both my quantity and quality of life.

There are some things for which a man should be willing to live anywhere: the perfect job, ailing parents, a one-of-a-kind girl.  Having none of the above in the place I just left, I missed what I had traded for material success when I left here: green landscape, clean air, gentle climate, four seasons.  To be sure, I had wonderful experiences elsewhere and made some lifelong friends.  On the other hand, I just had dinner out on the coast with an old buddy I hadn’t seen in two decades.

So, for the time being at least, my life here is like that beautiful old barn:  I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with it, but it’s not for sale.