As I mentioned, over the weekend my family trekked down to the Cleveland Botanical Garden to have a look around before going to see The Lorax (which, actually, was pretty cute and not as terrible as everyone claimed). The Garden was featuring an exhibition entitled “Orchid Mania,” a lovely showcase of many types of orchid with an Art Deco theme including a live jazz ensemble. Among the things we learned included that in the 20s, the slang term “orchid” was used to describe things that are luxurious or expensive. I’m totally going to revive that.

Some of the many photographs I took are featured in this slideshow. Flowers are such perfect subjects: they’re standing still and all you have to do is add a little sunlight to make them look gorgeous.

Over the years, my family has become more enthusiastic about giving experiences rather than “things” as gifts. Memories are the things that last, not the clothes or the shoes or even the iPods.

This past year for Christmas, we gave my mother’s brother and his family a historical, educational day drip to the William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum and the National First Ladies’ Library. We’ve visited quite a few of the presidential libraries and memorials over the years and even the little ones who really couldn’t care less for history had a great time. My dad even put together a little quiz based on the song “The Ballad of Czolgosz” from Assassins for my cousins.

This year, we’re taking the same cousins to see the new The Lorax film followed by a visit to the Cleveland Botanical Gardens to see some real trees. I’ve actually lived in Cleveland my whole life and not visited the Gardens so I’m personally thrilled about that. I’m given to believe they’re a photographer’s paradise. It’s also a chance to get a little closer to my cousins, the oldest of which will be in high school next year (when did that happen‽). Plus, I hope the girls take away a little more respect for their environment as they grow up. Hooray for sneaky fun ways of including education into everyday activities. Here’s to the weekend!

(Photo credit: Collider.com)

I have two younger sisters, one who recently finished college and is living in Dallas and the other who is headed off to college next year. The childhood toys that we treasured most are now long since packed up and put away for our own kids but over our holiday vacation, we pulled out our collection of Barbie dolls and gave them a photoshoot in my newly-built lightbox. Our dolls number well over 100 and lived in a place called Barbie Town—original, I know—regularly swapped husbands due to the dearth of male dolls that we have, plus suffered regular natural disasters to switch up the ho-hum, day-to-day operations of the Town. My sisters and I played together, mostly peacefully, for years, well into the time when it would have been thoroughly uncool to mention it at school.

The dolls you see in this post are pictured with their “families,” and have long, silly backstories that I can’t even begin to explain here. They’re definitely not the dolls of some Barbie collector; they’re well-loved, sometimes to the point of the Velveteen Rabbit. While I know that there will be shiny new Barbie dolls by the time we have our own children, I hope they enjoy these ones as much as we did.

Like many families, we have a tradition to cook the birthday child’s—or grown-up’s, as the case may be—favorite meal and dessert of choice for his or her birthday. My mother’s favorite dish is chicken and biscuits, made by her mother who, in turn, learned the method from her mother-in-law, a farmer’s wife from Iowa. Now, I’m also quite sure that most families have similar stories about their grandmother’s bratwurst, or dim sum, or enchiladas, how each is made with love, but as I watched my grandmother cook this meal, I noticed something strange. You see, in addition to tasting the gravy between additions of new spices and stirring until the consistency is just right, my grandmother adds yellow food dye. That’s right. A completely unnatural and unnecessary food additive whose only purpose was to deepen the warm, yellow color of the gravy.

As I stood there incredulous at this addition, my mother chimed in, “Chicken and biscuits just isn’t the same without it being yellow. I remember that so clearly from when I was a kid.” My grandmother went on to explain that she’d picked up this step too from her mother-in-law.  ”What a fascinating thing,” I thought. It seemed to me that food dye was something that you only found in restaurants from “real” chefs who cared about how their food looked in addition to how it tasted. But here was a home cook who was born at the turn of the century adding yellow food dye to her gravy. It made me feel good to think that somewhere in the middle of rushing around to feed the folks who had been working on the farm, Edna Hawn added a dash of coloring to make her dish perfect. I have to admit too that it’s a clever addition; the gravy does look ever-so-much more appetizing when it contrasts from the shade of the biscuits.

And so it was that when I wrote down the recipe to preserve it for my own family someday, I dutifully wrote down the addition of a few drops of yellow food coloring as the last step. Sometimes you can’t explain why your family does the things it does, but that’s just how things are.