Imperfect holidays
I was watching one of my favorite YouTube channels, Escape to rural France , where Dan the builder was explaining what he was doing, and you could see his breath because it was so cold. This brought to mind my least favorite cable channel, Hallmark, and its famous Countdown to Christmas movies. I've been forced to watch a lot of those movies with my elderly clients. Sure, the movies are great, nothing traumatic ever happens to anybody, and the endings are always happy, but they are never based on real life. If you watch any Hallmark winter movie closely enough, several themes emerge. Nobody's breath fogs up, ever. This is impossible to achieve in natural settings. Also, people don't button up or zip up their coats and don't wear hats in the middle of piles of snow. The characters in Hallmark movies can walk up and down sidewalks with their coats open or talk to each other outside the front doors of palatial homes in their shirtsleeves without ever getting cold and the...