Holiday parties are the new weddings

Yes, I'll admit it, I've been too ensconced in holiday party decadence to sit down and blog. It's been a busy week in celebration of this ending year but the wedding traffic in the Times is slowing down to a nice trickle of Jews and Gentiles, old and young, just in time for Christmas and Chanukah.

There's a couple of things I'd like to talk about in this week's edition of the times, so bear with me as I power through my holiday party induced exhaustion. First of all, because it's lunch, I'd like to to point you to this lovely piece on a Pittsburgh wedding tradition where the families bake cookies to be distributed at the wedding. Apparently these are a bigger hit than wedding cakes and ensure that the guests are riding a massive sugar high straight through the reception. Check out the video for nice scenes of cookie bliss.

This video also has a cookie bit but explores the much heavier concept of marrying later in life, after the death or divorce of a previous spouse. There's a message of hope amid tragedy that I really like in this one. The Times also explores lasting marriage from the vantage point of middle age here. I'm left thinking: what if you have a lasting marriage that ends, because of death or divorce, can you still find someone to grow old with? The fact that Irene and Tony managed to find each other, fall in love, get married, and morph into a modern-day Brady Bunch shows that there's something to the "post-marriage marriage." Love, it seems, can help ease the wounds of death and divorce, without just throwing it under the rug to clean up later. Now there's a holiday message I can get behind.