Monday is Rosa Parks day. This was the Black woman who, in 1955, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. She was arrested and the incident is credited with having triggered a series of protests that eventually led to the end of segregation.

 Well, it’s back to work for many of us after a long weekend. Raise your hand if you’re carrying a couple of extra pounds with you to work today, (my hand is up.)

 I can’t think of any traditional celebrations that don’t include food. Someone once told me, ‘food is the great unifier.’ It’s true. As I’m sure you noticed these past few days, when people gather at someone’s home, they always wind up standing around in the kitchen.

 Perhaps instead of having all these ugly little wars, we should make the leaders of the warring nations and their generals host a pot luck for one another. Or even a barbecue. They could settle their differences with a cook off.

Gretchen Mayer

This next six weeks will be absolutely packed with traditional celebrations - Thanksgiving, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, etc.

 I like to notice the smaller traditional things that occur, things that have a grassroots beginnings. Like the cutout of a child’s hand hanging on grandma’s fridge - the four fingers colored like the tailfeathers of a turkey, the thumb is the head. This fine piece of art made its way safely in some kid’s backpack all the way from school where he or she then proudly handed it to grandma who, just as proudly, hung it on the fridge.

 Or the way a family with an already crowded table makes room for a neighbor who has nowhere to go on Thanksgiving day.

 These are the traditions I hold most dear. The ones we make for ourselves, not created by some flashy ad campaign.

 In our home the tradition is to drag my sleepy children out of bed and force them to watch the Macy’s Day parade with me.

What are your traditions? e-mail diversity@nvc.net and I’ll be glad to post them.

Gretchen Mayer, Executive Director

I knew it – I was born in the wrong country - or perhaps in the wrong century. I just found out that in the Middle East woman is considered beautiful if she’s “amply proportioned.” I learned this from the book “Multicultural Manners, Essential Rules of Etiquette for the 21^st Century,” by Norine Dresser.

 In Farsi being well-endowed is called “kopoly.”

 Hey, I’m ‘amply proportioned.’ So in Iran I’d be considered “drop-dead-gorgeous.”

 Even in America two centuries ago, thin was not in. Fat was related to health and wealth. It is only recently in our history that women decided “you can never be too thin or too rich.”

 The upshot of all this is that one must be cautious when complimenting another person on their weight. “You look great, you look like you’ve lost some weight,” could prove to be an insult to someone from the Middle East or someone who is trying to recover from cancer or struggling with AIDS. These folks struggle every day trying to put weight back on.

 On the other hand, saying “You look great, you’ve obviously put on a couple of pounds,” would be a pretty good insult for most American women.

 It’s probably best to just avoid the subject altogether. Tell someone they look wonderful and leave it at that.

 As for me, I can either go back in time to the 1990s or just wear a t-shirt that says, “I’m not fat, I’m from Farsi.”

The United Nations has declared this to be World Television Day. I feel a deep need to honor and respect this day by watching television and doing little else. This shoud be declared a national holiday.

It’s a good day to snuggle in under the comforter with a big bowl of popcorn and your favorite beverage - 8 degrees when I woke up this morning.

Hey, if the calendar looks a little skimpy, that’s because there’s not a lot to post right now. I suppose it’s because of the upcoming Thanksgiving Day week, (it really does wind up being a week, what with all the comings and goings.)

Don’t know if you take in the Black Friday shopping spree that begins, I’ve heard, at 4 a.m.!!! One woman, who has shopped on the Friday after Thanksgiving in other towns told me that Aberdeen is the most courteous and most fun. She said that in Fargo people were fighting and stealing items out of other people’s carts.

There is, indeed, something about Aberdeen. When people are in crisis, they come together. In situations where one would expect anxiety and discourtesy, quite the opposite is true, we become more polite. We stop and let other cars pull out of a parking lot. If we have a cart of groceries, we let the guy with one item go ahead. One of many reasons this is a great town.

Oops, my little blog got a little long! Gotta go, “I Love Lucy” reruns are on.

Gretchen Mayer

With all the autumn events winding down, the calendar page is pretty skimpy. Please be sure to e-mail me with any events I may have missed.

 On Dec. 12 there will be another Spanish Mass as it is the celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe. More on this later when I find out the details.

 In the very near future this site will have another page - “About Us.” It will go into greater detail about our history, our plans for the future and our mission. It’s ‘under construction,’ as they say.

 Please feel free to contact us with any suggestions for this site. If you wish to become a part of the Aberdeen Area Diversity Committee there are many ways to do this - levels of time-committment are up to you. You can be actively involved or just lend a hand when you have a little extra time. Simply e-mail diverse@nvc.net

In the near future some of you may open your e-mail to find a survey from the Aberdeen Area Diversity Committee. The first one is a short “re-visit,” sent to the members of our April focus groups. The second one will be sent to a larger cross-section of the community. Every effort has been made to keep the survey short and to-the-point. We hope you’ll take the time to complete the survey to help us keep a finger on the pulse of Aberdeen - many thanks.

Big day today - Business After Hours is at Malchow’s and the book discussion on Multicultural Manners is at 7 p.m. tonight. Try to take in one, or both.

 I’ll be there and hopefully my hubby will record “The Office” for me.

Gretchen Mayer

Awhile back after a heated political argument about the government and war, a veteran of three wars told me that I should be grateful for all the freedoms I enjoy. At which time I felt I needed to set him straight. I don’t know about most Americans but I have NEVER taken our situation for granted. I’m grateful every single day that I can get up and work at a job, drive on roads that are sound, have an education and sleep soundly in a bed that I own in a house that is mine. Our airways are not government-controlled. We can vote politicians in or out of office depending on their performance. I can write an article in the paper complaining about our President, if that’s what I want to do.

 Every day of my life I’m grateful. But I still don’t like war. I think it should be a last resort rather than a first threat. I believe rational, intelligent humans can come up with a better plan. All too often, war is declared out of emotion rather than logic, a desire for control rather than a humanistic motive.

Thank a vet? I do. Every day.

Nov. 6 was declared by the United Nations to be a day of recognition - “International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment.”

After the weather we’ve had lately, one wonders who’s exploiting whom?

I don’t want to leave a carbon footprint. My dog has no problem leaving muddy footprints, however.

These are certainly interesting times we are living in. The Democrats are in the White House and we have a new African American President and First Lady. By a landslide.

It would have been just as interesting had the Republicans “made the show.”

I never listen to those who predict the outcome of an election - they try to cubbyhole the American public as having a similar mindset or viewpoint. They try to plug us into blue states or red states. They label us conservative, liberal, Southern, Northern, Midwest and East Coast and attribute our values based on those things.

We are none of those things. We are a complex, intelligent, thinking bunch made up of people from so many cultures and backgrounds - people who were born in desperate poverty and made themselves wealthy, people living in poverty who have a Doctorate in physics, people who were born here and people who came here.

Now the pundits are going to theorize on why the elections went the way they did - both local, state and national and forcast the next four years. I might hang onto those newspapers for four years and then go back and read them and measure the accuracy of the predictions. I suspect a coin-flip will be just as accurate.

Can’t cubbbyhole me - I think I might be a Republicrat. Or maybe a Democan.

Perhaps I’ll make this a new feature. “Things you probably knew but I didn’t.”

Anyway, I did not know that on Nov. 11, Veterans Day in the US, it is called Remembrance Day in Canada and the UK. They commemorate the soldiers killed in WWI and WWII. They even wear red poppies, as we do. In the US it was originally call Armistice Day to commemorate the end of WWI (Nov. 11, 1918.)