Tag Archives: tradition

Including Lost Loved Ones In Your Holiday Celebration

Losing a loved one hurts a lot. It’s a pain that never really goes away, it just becomes a little more bearable as time goes on. And while I am grateful that my religious beliefs are that we will see our loved ones again someday in the eternities, there is still the hurts of missing […]

Family Traditions – KEEP DOING THEM!

It’s always on a Saturday morning in October. Our family meets down at a place called the Red Barn. We get their homemade apple cider and freshly made apple donuts for breakfast and then we climb aboard a tractor trailer to ride on hail bails out to the pumpkin patch where we explore a corn […]

Be The Miracle

Wishing for your own Thanksgiving Miracle or Christmas Miracle this holiday season?  After all…this time of year does tend to be a time of miracles… But what if this holiday season you decided that rather than just wishing for your own miracle you were actually going to BE THE MIRACLE for someone else’s life instead? […]

He Did What We Could Not Do For Ourselves

“Years ago there was a little one-room schoolhouse in the mountains of Virginia where the boys were so rough that no teacher had been able to handle them. “A young, inexperienced teacher applied, and the old director scanned him and asked: ‘Young fellow, do you know that you are asking for an awful beating? Every […]

Why This Weekend Is One Of My Favorite Weekends Of The Year!

Twice a year, every year, over the course of a weekend, there is a conference held in which around 35 amazingly inspiring speakers give talks on everything from integrity, to attitude, to finding balance, enduring trials, education, forgiving, service, gratitude, family, hope, happiness, and a myriad of other important and inspiring topics.  I get so […]

The Most Stressful, I Mean Wonderful Week of the Year

I realize we refer to this month as “the most wonderful time of the year” and I don’t disagree with that, but let’s have a little #realtalk for a second…the week before Christmas is straight up the most stressful week of the year! Let’s start with the fact that every time you go to an […]

Adventure Is Out There

This past week has been one big adventure in my life and after a week of numerous public speaking engagements, several board meetings, two black tie events, and hardly any sleep, I just got home. It’s near midnight and I still need to prepare a powerpoint presentation for another speech I am giving tomorrow morning […]

Fireworks, Freedom, Fun and Food. Just four of the reasons I love the Fourth of July!

“You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You […]

Luck Is Just Believing You’re Lucky!

Happy St Patrick’s Day March 17th!  A for the sake of avoiding a pinch – remember to wear GREEEN! Here’s the answers to a few things at St. Patrick’s Day you might not have known (cause I sure didn’t until I looked them up!): Did you ever wonder why people pinch each other on St. […]

You are never too old to put on a costume for Halloween!

I am a HUGE fan of Halloween. First off, we all get free candy and who doesn’t love candy?! And second, we all get to put on a costume for a day and pretend to be something or someone else – it’s an escape from our everyday routine lives when we can get creative and […]

The Link Between Traditions and Happiness

This weekend marked the beginning of my family’s holiday season traditions beginning. Each year in October my parents and siblings and their families who are in the area all come together and we go to a place called Rowley’s Red Barn where we start by enjoying their homemade donuts and apple cider for breakfast and […]

The Things We’ll Remember

If you were asked what you did on any given day three weeks ago would you be able to remember without going back and checking your calendar first? Or what about a day two weeks ago? More than likely the answer is no. But what if you were asked where you went on your last […]

January Is The Perfect Time To Start Some Non-Holiday Traditions

January can sometimes feel like a little bit of a “let-down” month after coming off all the exciting holiday bliss of December. The decorations are all put away, the vacation time came to an end, there aren’t as many exciting holiday parties and family gatherings to be excited about, and what used to seem like […]

It’s Thanksgiving and I say “Thank heaven for stretchy pants!”

Each Thanksgiving we go around the dinner table and share what we are grateful for that year. It is a tradition we never miss doing. And every year in the back of my mind there is something I am truly grateful for on Thanksgiving, but I’m always too embarrassed to say it out loud, but […]

Bust Out Those Holiday Traditions!

Last week was a rough one. I was down sick the entire week and then Friday I had to haul myself out of bed and get down to Bryce Canyon Utah to attend the Open House for my son and his new bride. I made it through the evening and then crashed again, sick as […]

Weekend Forecast: Gain an Hour and a Few Pounds

Happy Halloween Weekend Ahead! Not only do we gain an entire hour of extra sleep Saturday night when the clocks fall back (yay, more sleep!….I am so happy about that!), but we get to look forward to gaining a few pounds from eating candy, candy, candy!!!  Dang that candy… We really love Halloween at our […]

It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving

Every Sunday when we sit down for our family dinner we have a tradition where we go around the dinner table and as we are eating each person in the family shares with the rest of us what they learned that day or week. We have done this since the time my children were little […]

The Power of Film – Sundance Film Festival 2015 Has Begun!

Tonight was opening night for Sundance Film Festival! The next ten days will be action packed with amazing movies, movie stars everywhere, speaker panels, and of course incredible parties. The streets of Park City, Utah will be packed with over 45,000 people who come to Sundance to enjoy the festivities each year. I serve on […]

“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most space in your heart.”

“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most space in your heart.” That quote from Winnie the Pooh is so true. In life it is those little things that are so meaningful to us and become our favorite memories. Growing up I remember our family dinners most. Every night we would all surround our huge […]

It’s Never Too Late To Start A New Tradition

Happy Christmas Eve to all of you! I want to wish each and every one of you a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday! Each of you touch my life and I am so grateful for all of you reading this. Thank you for being a part of my life and my life story as […]

Do It In Memory Of

For many people the holiday season is the happiest time of year, but for many people who have lost someone they love to death it can also be an incredibly difficult time of year. I was reminded of this over the last several days as a dear friend of mine lost his father and then […]

Schedule Life Experiences So “Stuff” Doesn’t Steal All Your Time

I’m busy, your busy, we are all busy.  It’s just that simple. Life is BUSY!  And if we are not careful we will find that our time is no longer our own, rather it gets taken over by this meeting or that meeting and those emails and these people to call.  Even if you don’t […]

Families are Like Fudge…

“Families are like fudge, mostly sweet with lots of nuts!” As we head into the home stretch before Christmas Eve’s traditional gathering together of families everywhere, we ought to pause a moment to prepare ourselves to deal with the chaos ahead. I come from a very large family of ten children. My husband comes from […]

Viva Las Vegas!

I mentioned last week that for UEA my husband and I decided to take my daughter and four of her close friends for a teenager’s getaway weekend- we spent that weekend in Las Vegas.  Yes, it was us and five 16 year old girls…Rollin deserves a medal for handling that trip as well as he did!  […]