Welcome to 2025
Terry Odell
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Hello, and Happy New Year TKZers. I have the honor of being the first to post in 2025. I hope you’ve recovered from any celebratory events at your place.
What did I do during the annual TKZ hiatus?
Unlike Mr. Gilstrap, the holidays aren’t a big thing in our household.
I continued my weekly yoga practices. Had a hair salon appointment. Took the dog to the vet for her checkup. Had a massage. All of these are ordinary, everyday type events. Hanukkah began at sundown on December 25th, so while most of you were probably having a Christmas turkey, ham, or whatever, we gathered and had latkes, courtesy of our son. Host has the pleasure of having their house smell like grease for days afterward.
I brought the requested rugelach, which was a little easier this year because one of my daughters was in town and helped with the assembly.
**Those of you who are subscribed to my free Substack, “Writings and Wanderings” received the recipes for both of those dishes in my holiday post.
Tonight, we’ll light the last candles.
And I worked. Since my last post of 2024, I added about 25,000 words to the current manuscript.
I also checked with my editor, and I’m on her schedule for February 1st, which means I’ll be busy in January, finishing the draft and then getting it whipped into a shape I’m comfortable sending her.
As I write this, I still have no title or cover image selected, but I’m planning to pick an image from our trip to Copenhagen and the Faroe Islands last August.
Speaking of images, I put together a gallery of my favorite shots of 2024.
**My Substack subscribers have already received that link, too.
The Hubster and I welcomed the New Year in our own traditional fashion. An early dinner (late lunch) out, and then a bottle of bubbly at home for a quiet evening. I can’t remember the last time we managed to stay awake until midnight, and since fireworks are outlawed in our community—in fact, in the entire county with the exception of organized displays—it is a quiet night. If we were so inclined, we could go up the street a hundred yards or so and watch the annual Pikes Peak display, assuming there’s no cloud cover, and it’s not snowing. Or too cold for us. And we managed to be awake. So far, we’ve been here 14 years and have never seen the display. Not even the 9 PM test. Every year a group of climbers ascend the peak to set off fireworks. For them, it’s a two-day ordeal starting the night before when they climb to Barr Camp and spend the night. They climb to the summit the next day, and set off a fireworks display at midnight.
If you want the history and more details, you can find them here.
Note: When we lived in Orlando, we could stand in our driveway and watch the fireworks from the theme parks. It was never cold.
Okay, that’s the holiday summation. What’s next?
A thought has been niggling through my brain as I think about the year ahead. “May you live in interesting times.” I was curious about the origin and meaning of this statement, and I paid a visit to the Google Machine. I found this article at Wikipedia, and I’m blatantly copying and pasting it here. I’ve redacted the footnotes. If you want all the references, you can find the article in its entirety here.
“May you live in interesting times” is an English expression that is claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. The expression is ironic: “interesting” times are usually times of trouble.
Despite being so common in English as to be known as the “Chinese curse”, the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced. The most likely connection to Chinese culture may be deduced from analysis of the late-19th-century speeches of Joseph Chamberlain, probably erroneously transmitted and revised through his son Austen Chamberlain.
Origins
Despite the phrase being widely attributed as a Chinese curse, there is no known equivalent expression in Chinese. The nearest related Chinese expression translates as “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.” The expression originates from Volume 3 of the 1627 short story collection by Feng Menglong, Stories to Awaken the World.
Evidence that the phrase was in use as early as 1936 is provided in a memoir written by Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the British Ambassador to China in 1936 and 1937, and published in 1949. He mentions that before he left England for China in 1936, a friend told him of a Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”
Frederic René Coudert Jr. also recounted having first heard the phrase in 1936:
Some years ago, in 1936, I had to write to a very dear and honoured friend of mine, who has since died, Sir Austen Chamberlain, brother of the present Prime Minister, and I concluded my letter with a rather banal remark “that we were living in an interesting age”. Evidently he read the whole letter, because by return mail he wrote to me and concluded as follows: “Many years ago I learned from one of our diplomats in China that one of the principal Chinese curses heaped upon an enemy is, ‘May you live in an interesting age.'” “Surely”, he said, “no age has been more fraught with insecurity than our own present time.” That was three years ago.[7]
The phrase is again described as a “Chinese curse” in an article published in Child Study: A Journal of Parent Education in 1943.
“Chamberlain curse” theory
Research by philologist Garson O’Toole shows a probable origin in the mind of Austen Chamberlain’s father Joseph Chamberlain dating around the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Specifically, O’Toole cites the following statement Joseph made during a speech in 1898:
I think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times. (Hear, hear.) I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety. (Hear, hear.)
Over time, the Chamberlain family may have come to believe that the elder Chamberlain had not used his own phrase, but had repeated a phrase from Chinese.
That’s it from me. Any thoughts, traditions, events you’d like to share. The floor is yours.
New! Find me at Substack with Writings and Wanderings
Double Intrigue
When your dream assignment turns into more than you bargained for
Shalah Kennedy has dreams of becoming a senior travel advisor—one who actually gets to travel. Her big break comes when the agency’s “Golden Girl” is hospitalized and Shalah is sent on a Danube River cruise in her place. She’s the only advisor in the agency with a knowledge of photography, and she’s determined to get stunning images for the agency’s website.
Aleksy Jakes wants out. He’s been working for an unscrupulous taskmaster in Prague, and he’s had enough. When he spots one of his coworkers in a Prague hotel restaurant, he’s shocked to discover she’s not who he thought she was.
As Shalah and Aleksy cruise along the Danube, the simple excursion soon becomes an adventure neither of them imagined.
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Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.”