The Week In-Between

We are not a “ski vacation” family. I liked skiing the few times I tried it, but nobody else in the family did, so, no ski trips. So that popular choice for how to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s is out.

It’s too bad, because at this point I imagine we could all use a little extra exercise. But not the gym. Exercise during holidays should be fun. Something more fa-la-la than treadmills or Stairmasters.

There is absolutely nothing fa-la-la about a Stairmaster.

Ice skating has some fa-la-la elements. When I was a child we used to go ice skating on a pond near my house. It was still a wild place then, just pond surrounded by some woods. Then the county bought the land and turned it into a park. On the plus side they added a warming house. On the minus side, they added park police who kicked kids out of the warming house if they decided you’d been there long enough. I don’t remember the park police ever helping a child who bonked his head on the ice or couldn’t tie his skates on properly. As far as any of us knew, they were really only there to kick us out of the warming house. Needless to say none of us wanted to join the park police when we grew up.

I’ve been living in Texas for a little over a year now. It’s nice to see Texans going out of their way to create skating rinks in downtown parks. Not a lot of warming houses — it was almost 80 degrees on Christmas Day this year, so who needs a warming house? We were actually running the AC here, a first for me.

2025 brought a lot of “firsts” for me. I wonder what 2026 will bring.