• It’s the holiday season and all is peaceful and bright.  Or is it?  Get some tips on How to Deal with Holiday Family Tensions by Raymond Moore.

• Or how about this one:

Now that I have hit sixty (and I don’t mean mph), I have lived long enough to see a few harvests. If you are reading this and you are in your teens or twenties or thirties, consider what you are diligently planting, because when you hit your forties and fifties, a harvest starts rolling in.

Read about Harvest Time over at the Femina blog

• Are you hurting this Christmas?  John Piper’s reading of The Innkeeper will be a balm to your soul.

• And finally, a perennial Christmas cookie favorite is the Sugar Cookie.  But not all sugar cookie recipes are equal.  When I was a little girl, we had a Sesame Street book (Big Bird’s Busy Book) with a sugar cookie recipe from the expert himself, Cookie Monster.  It was (and is) to die for.  I grew up with these cookies, and I make them every Christmas for my own children to decorate.  I found the original recipe along with photos of the pages in that very Sesame Street book that I remember so well.  It was a trip down memory lane for me.  And it may be one of the year’s best discoveries for you.  Without further ado, I give you: Cookie Monster’s Famous Cookie Dough.

Enjoy!