BONUS Post #12 - Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving, my friends!
All this scrumptious bounty! Who else is there to share it with, but you? You're welcome to a seat at the table.
(For the record, I did test generating an image with Twilight's whole family all around the table, and it went okay, but it had the typical hiccups common to having four unique characters in the same generation, and it would have taken a whole bunch of refinement to get a result of full quality that would have been worth posting. Too much for a simple holiday message. Also thought about seeing if I could generate Twilight in a turkey costume, but that just wasn't wholesome enough for me. Do you want to try it?)
In recognition of Thanksgiving I wanted to put up a little holiday message. Thanksgiving is pretty special to me, as family is so important a value for me, because since the beginning Thanksgiving has always been made about family. It's an interesting quirk of Thanksgiving itself that it is sort of customizable in that way. Major holidays have much tradition, culture, custom, and ritual associated with them, and certainly Thanksgiving does too, but compared to other major holidays it has less of that fixed baggage, allowing people to impart a little more of their own meaning into it. Beyond the loose amalgamation of turkey dinner, American football, and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, there's a fairly open canvas to put your own message and meaning into the holiday. And for me that meaning has always been family.
I've been a very fortunate and privileged person in the area of family. We're tight-knit. My multiple siblings, my parents (themselves now grandparents), the new children of the next generation, the in-laws... altogether they have been and continue to be a collection of love which form such a powerful core of my life. It's not that we're together all the time, because I grew up quite some time ago and have spent more time grown and living on my own than them. We do see each other now and again, when we're able, but they are chances that come infrequently. The thing is, when you love people, and they love you back, you impart things on each other that you carry around everywhere you go. Those markings get stamped on you in a place they'll never be erased.
The love is deep and complex as well. The love for each of them individually is different from one to the next, but it is love all the same. And in a sign of love's great power and diversity, even my harshest family relationships are wonderful bundles of loves. One particular sister of mine, if you were to ask her, would tell you that I am not her friend, and if you were to ask me I would tell you just the same: we are not friends. We never have been, not even since youth, since the centers of our personalities clash so fundamentally. Simply put: we just plain don't get along. But we're brother and sister. She's driven hundreds of miles to come help me move. I've gotten up in the dead-ass middle of night (with work the next morning) to drive a far distance with a filled gas canister so as to rescue her starved vehicle on the side of the road. No, we'd never call each other friends, but we do love each other as family.
If you're one of the people where biological family has failed you, then I really hope found-family has come through for you instead. I'm devastated for anyone whose birth family hasn't given them what mine has given me, because I know so well the incredible value of it, but I also know the power of human relationships in general. There's nothing about family that needs to be formal blood ties, and your blood family is just the first chance at family. I wish—for those who really need it—that I could give you some solid, actionable advice on how to put together that found-family, but since I started with family so strong I don't really have the experience to share with you on that. I have put my love into action with other people in my life. When I make friends, I try to give them the same love as family, and there are friends in my life that I do hold dear as family. It can be done. Find that family, if you don't have them already.
Funny that the namesake of Thanksgiving is the giving of thanks and I haven't talked about that at all. I did mean to, but I don't like the blurbs to drag on too long. Maybe next year? One very small thing to be thankful for is that post's image is hi-res, so into the Hi-Res Collection it goes!
Thank you, my friends. Take care, and have a blessed holiday.