Christmas Cookies!!

Thanksgiving always seems to be one of the biggest holidays concerning food in America. When it comes to our family though our favorite food tradition comes just before Christmas. Every years about two weeks before Christmas my grandmother and I start baking dozens of gingerbread boys, caramel brownies and fudge. We generally bake around two to three hundred a year and give them out to family and friends. I've been helping my grandma ever since I can remember as she did with her mom, we even use her mothers original cookie cutters and recipe. It is always one of my favorite holiday memories when my mom, grandma and I can get together and talk and have fun, while the smell of the baking cookies overtakes the house. After they were all baked my brother and I used to just sit around for hours and frost them with fancy little outfits and designs, occasionally starting frosting fights and eating the cookies when no one was looking. This tradition will always be a part of me and I hope to start it with my own children as well as my brothers daughter and I hope they share the same experience I've always had and loved.

Furthering Your Education is a Community

As I look around my classrooms everyday, as i do love to people watch, I see many people like myself. Though they may be of all different age, look, or personality everyone there all strives for the many of the same things as I. We are held together by the want to better our education in order to obtain better jobs, lead a better lifestyle, to follow a dream, or simply wanting more knowledge. We talk over homework assignments hoping to be right in our thinking, we sit, crunched over a desk, slightly at odds, cursing ourselves for not studying more for that big math test, and provide encouragement for each other before a big speech, knowing how much anxiety they can cause. We all share the needs of understanding the material and doing well overall in the class, while still maintaining our own lives separate from school whether it be family and fiends, favorite hobbies, or at our workplace. We value the organization of time, there never is enough! There are many things working to get under our skin while continuing our education. For example the trials of supporting and caring for a family, having a work load too big for you to handle, or simply not having much interest in a "required" class. This can cause us to become sick much more often, something I have been more than exposed to, and having larger amounts of anxiety, and stress.
I am very much a part of this community. I am a full time student and worker, hoping that after all this effort I can accomplish my goal of graduating form Western with a degree in Business Administrating and Accounting. I too feel the exhaustion after a long week and the pride I have in myself after I do well on a particularly hard assignment or test. I love being part of a community that has the same goals I do. It helps me to stay on a straight path to graduation.