Page 5 2025 Home For The Holidays Lincoln Daily News holiday. It is all about the baby! Be prepared for your child to become the hot potato in the room, passed from person to person while the parents are completely ignored. And, finally, some of our family members are in the military and the odds that they are going to get to come home for the holidays are slim to none. In this year’s edition of Home for the Holidays, we want to drive home with each of our stories that the word “family” may take on different meanings for different folks, but whatever constitutes your family, we want you to have the best holiday season ever! We’re going to leave you with a separate thought, because it often weighs heavy on our heart. It seems that each year Christmas comes earlier and earlier. Oh, the date of the actual observance doesn’t change, it’s just that we start seeing signs of Christmas earlier. This year the “pre-Black Friday Black Friday” sales started before Halloween! The end result: Thanksgiving gets buried in the catacombs of our minds, and we drag it back out on the fourth Thursday of November, then bury it again at midnight when we head out for the real Black Friday followed by Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Christmas decorating, work parties, school and church programs, and so much more. It seems a little ironic that in our country we often celebrate our freedom to choose our own lifestyles from our work habits and political positions to choice of worship practices without thinking of how we got here. Thanksgiving is the foundation of that freedom. Pilgrims came to America to escape religious tyranny. It was their spunk and bravado that became the inspiration for a new country where people can be what they want to be without being told what they have to be. So, we ask you this year when you drag out that Thanksgiving holiday and gather your personal family, regardless of its makeup, around your table… take a moment. Whether you pray or toast or just give a little speech, you have that choice, and Thanksgiving is the foundation of that right to choose. Offer up a few words of gratitude for who we are as a people and how we got here. Then pass the turkey and enjoy what we believe should be the first day of the holiday season. Bless you one and all! Nila Smith With Karen Castelein and the LDN Staff and Stringers
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