All the Whos down in Whoville
There’s a difference between Going Green and Going Grinch.
It’s not the flavor of odd holiday foods we crave, but the taste of home
Foods like fruitcakes, pig’s jowls, and lutefisk are all but unpalatable, but we keep making them, year after year.
Hallmark movies: An antidote for a male-centered world?
Romances validate what women bring to the table.
Dating ethnic foods for Christmas
Our family of six sisters had a tradition as we dated in high school and college. If you brought a boy home for Christmas Eve dinner, you had to force him to bring along a traditional dish representing his ethnic heritage. This was how we learned to embrace exotically diverse non-Scandinavians, not to mention expand […]
A bad gifter
I give bad gifts. Size 5 shoes to size 11 feet. Yogurt makers to the lactose intolerant. Diaries to the discreet. Sheet music to the relentlessly tone deaf. It’s not that I am thoughtless—I’m thinking, I’m thinking, believe me. It’s just that I have this holiday weakness of idealizing my friends and family, sometimes to […]
‘Heartland’ is family-friendly but not unbearably cheesy
For all its wholesomeness, “Heartland” is not sickly sweet and doesn’t sidestep the realities of life.
In ‘Severance,’ a bleak look at soul-stealing office culture
The Apple TV+ series “Severance” sends us back to work in prepandemic corporate America.
How Molly Burhans is helping the church fight climate change
A young cartographer is helping the church catalog its land holdings so it might address the environment, human migration, and sustainable land stewardship.
‘Ted Lasso’ shows a better way to be a man
Apple TV+’s ‘Ted Lasso’ is a skillfully crafted story about masculinity that is compassionate and supportive.