Bad Manners and Brimstone

I'm in Houston too.
I'm straight but a friend of mine (also straight) and I often do Steak Night (well, we used to in normal times) and have been to gay bars and lesbian bars for it. Never had any issue.

I'm a huge fan of Houston Steak Night and my goal was to hit as many of them as I could. Can't wait to be able to do that and other normal stuff again... someday!

Anyway, congratulations on getting married soon and welcome to Houston!

Awesome! I thing Julie ended up restarting it as take-out. I haven't really kept up.

I kind of fell off the face of the earth in a lot of ways after my previous reply. I ended up getting very serious about job hunting and now am about 2 months into a new job, finally got married (common law since it was by far the simplest way to handle it,) and now are moving to a house in Katy. My work is remote and it greatly reduces my roommate's commute.

My life got busy after the start of the year and I haven't been around here.

It's just past 2 years since I moved to Houston.

My brother and I finally got the old family farm sold.

I started doing photos for a local drag king show and enjoy it. The performers in it are family of choice to me as are many who frequent the lesbian bar where it's held. I make the photos available for free to the show and cast. They need better photos for promotion reasons but have no budget for it and since they're an important part of my community space it's a piece of support that I can do.

I bought a car. Didn't get rid of the motorcycle. I bought it because...

I got engaged. Also married.

We had a wedding planned for early April...in Houston. That so didn't happen so we went the common law route instead (Texas has a very easy system for that) and will file the declaration of informal marriage once the county offices reopen (no, I don't know why the declaration document exists but it will allow her to change her surname as she wishes.)

Sometime later, when it's safe again, we'll have the wedding we planned. It's to be a brief ceremony as part of that drag king show. I had the big white wedding once and my wife is not comfortable being the center of attention so a brief moment at that is perfect for us.

I've settled into a nice life here and truly found home again, after having to leave a place that was very much home two years ago.

My Mom just ordered the cake and has names of photographers to call. I’m not wanting much in the way of “perfect” photographs, really so that wasn’t a big priority.

That's a perfect application for a phrase my then-fiancee and I used a lot when planning our wedding and her family insisted we had to do/have certain things that we didn't want, "if you want it then you pay for it!" In our case it meant it wouldn't happen because the people either had no money or were putting it toward another wedding that was 2 months before ours (we paid for everything ourselves as a result.)

Photos is the one thing I would do differently and then it would be to go cheaper. The album and most of the photos remained in a box across multiple moves. Even now, 20 years after the marriage, they're probably still in that dusty corner of the attic of my ex-wife's house. It was really the one point we had where we gave in.

I love the bourbon tour!

I think all parents have to come to the realization that children grow up AND out, and Jessica wanting to spend Christmas with her friends is a completely natural and normal way for her to express and experiment with her growing independence.

I saw that struggle so often among coworkers at a couple of my prior jobs. I do IT work and did for universities for 15 years so a higher than typical number of my coworkers were ones with kids in that age range (tuition benefits are a strong motivator for working there - the trade-off of lower-pay and worse work conditions than corporate pushed me out since I didn't have kids.) More than once I asked, "have you told them that this means these things to you?" It may seem obvious that a particular occasion is meaningful to the parent while it isn't to the kids and there are a lot of reasons for it, e.g. that what was an experience with a very specific beginning point was just "always there" to the kids.

I've been an eighteen-year-old girl with a younger brother, and neither of us was thrilled by the opportunity to spend time at home with the other: even a few years age difference is a big gap at that age, and not everyone is lucky enough to have a lot in common with their siblings.

That was me, and I had almost nothing in common with my brother.

The battle described happened twice in my life. The first iteration was during the first time that I was engaged. I was in college then and living at home as was my then-fiancee. Our respectively families invoked "my house, my rules" and we yielded. I'm sure they look fondly on those couple holidays but I don't and I suspect my former fiancee doesn't. This was about the time that I lost interest in celebrating the holidays at all and began to resent it.

A little over two years after the end of that engagement I faced it again. This time neither I nor my girlfriend was living with our parents; instead we were living together for two months at the point but our respective families didn't see that as a reason for anything different and invoked "but it's tradition!" We ended up giving in but there was severe damage to the relationships with our respective families. The result was that for a decade they only saw us on the holidays and we were only doing so out of a sense of obligation and to placate (taking the wind out of the sails of their complaints.) That came with a steep rice: the cost of a meaningful relationship with us for more than a decade. We'd see them at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter and then be incommunicado for the rest of the year. I could only hope that winning to preserve their sense of tradition was worth that price.

The lesson I learned from this is that it is an area to tread carefully because it can be easy to gain a Pyrrhic victory.

Quote from: lisastitch on December 14, 2018, 02:40:52 pm

And as a Christian, I really wish we could separate "the mass of Christ" celebrating His birth, from all the other winter solstice trappings.  I could celebrate both the religious holiday of Christmas and the secular holiday of winter solstice, if we could really separate them.  We've dragged in things like Christmas trees, and given them a religious symbolism, and I have to fight through the secular to observe the religious. 

 The secular bits aren't celebrating the Winter Solstice, though. That's a religious celebration in itself, or a spiritual one at least for those of us who observe it but who aren't religious.
 The secularisation of Xmas is one of the drawbacks of being a dominant religion. It gets simplified, genericised bastardised even, because it's 'tradition' or just What We Do instead of coming from actual religious observance.

  There was also some intentional conflation of Xmas with things like the Solstice to gain that dominance.
 
 Plus those of us who do celebrate the Solstice don't want the secularisation problem either.

When I lived near Scranton, Pennsylvania, there was an incident that it became public knowledge that a Wiccan group had held a Solstice celebration. The region is overwhelmingly Christian and most there did not take it well, even going so far as to argue that Solstice celebrations began only after Christmas was established. The furor continued for two full years and it lead to banning of all religious use of a town-owned facility that was managed as a rental hall when one faction of it demanded the town prohibit the other from ever using the facility. Part of the outrage went into incorrect claims that Christmas predates Solstice celebrations and the latter was only created to "attack" the former.

As it would happen there would subsequently be similar outrage because a small town in the area hadn't decorated one year. They had been unable to afford to replace their decorations after the old ones were no longer up to electrical code ($50,000, which worked out to $25 per resident - no small cost,) but so many there insisted it was due to a motivation against their religion.

I had to look it up the details because it's been so many years but I did remember being raised with some claiming religious significance of the plants. The traditions were that the blossoms represent the star of Bethlehem and the red leaves (which are due to specific cycles of light and dark for several days) represent the blood of Jesus. The latter always struck me as a curious one for the time of year and it felt like a desperate attempt by some people to claim religious ownership of the plants.