Over at the Huffington Post, a post titled Holiday Advice for the Single Woman: 8 Reasons to Enjoy It, is getting teased this way:

“Instead of feeling down on yourself the next time Grandma asks you when you are going to meet a nice boy and give her grandkids, focus on why it’s sweet to be single over the holidays.”

I agree that single women (and men) should enjoy the holidays and brush off obnoxious questions. To my sensibilities, though, there is something not quite right about these kinds of articles. They seem to assume that if you are single over the holidays, you are going to be feeling down, you need to be told to focus on why single life can be sweet, and you need to have those reasons spelled out for you.

Using my “turn the tables” heuristic, imagine an analogous article:

Holiday Advice for the Married Woman: 8 Reasons to Enjoy It

“Instead of feeling down on yourself next time your neighbor asks when you are going to leaving your whining, boring spouse, focus on why it’s sweet to be married over the holidays.”

I had a pretty sweet Thanksgiving. My friend Susan Hurt was here. That’s the two of us on my deck in the picture below.  Even for Summerland, it was unseasonably sunny. Three fellow Californians joined us on Wednesday evening. Lunch on the deck featured a friend from England on Friday, a Santa Barbarian on Saturday, and three more in-state visitors on Sunday. Over Christmas, I may have no visitors at all, and that’s fine, too.