Last years was the first time I did anything, for the holidays, after losing my sister, mom and aunt in 2015. My niece ORDERED me to fly down to Florida, to spend Thanksgiving with her and her new husband and then they flew back here, for Christmas. It was the best thing, for me.

Now they have moved back to Michigan, and it's been made clear that I have no option to 'opt out' of any more holidays. I'm not much of a Christmas person. Ok, I'm not at ALL a fan of Christmas, but I am a fan of family and good food, so I guess holidays are going to be back on my schedule.

Enjoy the day!!

I am so glad you and Rick's family have a good relationship. It's very hard to lose someone you love and having others with you who also loved the same person -- it helps.

You probably don’t realize how many people you touch, amuse and inspire through your posts here on DU. I always look forward to your posts, and when I’m discouraged with the whole mess we’ve made of our country, I look for one of your uplifting critter stories to wrap up my day on a positive note.

And because of that, I am thankful for you, catbyte.

Having suddenly lost a fiancé many years ago, I feel for you this holiday season. But I do believe that not only will your kindness help his sisters, but it's probably the best way to ease some of your sadness.

And thank you for sharing your plans. It made me think of this article in The Atlantic about kindness being contagious. Your story might ripple in ways you never know.

"...Kindness and its cousins—altruism, generosity, and so on—has societal effects as well. Fessler’s research has indicated that kindness is contagious. In one major forthcoming study, he and his colleagues showed some people a video of a person helping his neighbors, while others were shown a video of a person doing parkour. All the study participants were then given some money in return for taking part, and told they could put as much as they wanted in an envelope for charity. (The researchers could not see whether the participants put money in or how much they put in.)

People who saw the neighborly video were much more generous. “One of my research assistants said: ‘There’s something wrong with our accounting; something’s going haywire,’” Fessler told me. “She said, ‘Well, some of these envelopes have more than $5 in them.’” People who saw the first video were taking money out of their own wallets to give to charity, they figured. “I said, ‘That’s not something going wrong! That’s the experiment going right!’” It suggests that families or even whole communities could pitch themselves into a kind of virtuous cycle of generosity and do-gooding, and that people could be prompted to do good for their communities even with no expectation of their kind acts redounding to their own benefit.

Interpersonal empathy might translate into political change, Hunt added. “We see this [research] as being civically very important,” he said. “Take homelessness in L.A., for example. How do we get the electorate to become more empathetic and support policies necessary to make a meaningful intervention? That’s not something you can just do by fiat. People have to be brought along.”

This holiday season, there are so many ways to bring yourself and your community along—among them little things like taking five minutes to meditate, calling your mother, and paying for someone else’s coffee. Maybe kindness is not a distraction from or orthogonal to change. Maybe it is a pathway to it."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-be-kind/602488/
More:

Your post are very uplifting and I look forward to them. Thank You.