Happy Holiday Wishes

andrea_lunsford
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‎12-23-2022 07:00 AM

close photo of red and silver ornaments hanging from a tree.jpg

 

With so much chaos, cruelty, and suffering in our world, it seems presumptuous to think about happiness. And yet. And yet we do think about it and strive toward it and, especially, we wish happiness for friends, family, and all those beyond. 

For me, as for so many others, this is a giving time of year. I have two friends who begin their holiday season by focusing on gratitude, on what they are grateful for, and they don’t stop until they have thought of as many things they are grateful for as there are years on their calendars. So far this year, they are up to 2022-specific gratefulness. Then they move on to focusing on what they can do for and give to others.

The kind of giving I have in mind is a giving of ourselves, straight from the heart. A gift thus given is truly received, and reciprocated, in the way described by Lewis Hyde in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.

So as fall term winds down and I peer anxiously toward the new year, I aim to give such gifts as best I can, and to send wishes for a bit of happiness to all. Hanukkah. Kwanzaa. Christmas. The Holy months of Islam. And so many other traditions that make room for the gift of such wishes. 

So good wishes especially to teachers and students of writing everywhere. May all the traditions you celebrate bring some respite, some light, and peace, and joy.

Happy Holidays, 2022.

Andrea

 

Photo by Sincerely Media reproduced under license from Unsplash.

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About the Author
Andrea A. Lunsford is the former director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University and teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English. A past chair of CCCC, she has won the major publication awards in both the CCCC and MLA. For Bedford/St. Martin's, she is the author of The St. Martin's Handbook, The Everyday Writer and EasyWriter; The Presence of Others and Everything's an Argument with John Ruszkiewicz; and Everything's an Argument with Readings with John Ruszkiewicz and Keith Walters. She has never met a student she didn’t like—and she is excited about the possibilities for writers in the “literacy revolution” brought about by today’s technology. In addition to Andrea’s regular blog posts inspired by her teaching, reading, and traveling, her “Multimodal Mondays” posts offer ideas for introducing low-stakes multimodal assignments to the composition classroom.