I own this print by VatnInk from Etsy.

You’re all busy this week, I assume. The making of the holly and jolly for everyone else in your household is a part-time job on top of everything else you do. I’ll be busy writing up to Christmas and then after, so we’ll keep the lifting over here extra light for us all.

So let’s have a song from the Wreck Your Heart playlist. Yes, there’s a full playlist here.

This song is meaningful to me, because it reminds me of my dad, who died in 2019. He loved to have a big group of people eating together. Let’s have a chili supper out in the barn. Let’s turn this family dinner into a pizza party. “Crowded Table” by the Highwomen is about country music, about gatekeeping the genre.

Why put up barriers to being in a musical genre? Some people are very invested in country being just one kind of thing. (Their kind of thing.) Some people feel that way about, oh, everything you can think of. Crime fiction, for instance. Crime fiction authors, for instance.

But if country music was only one kind of thing, if crime fiction was just one kind of story, if I wrote the same book over and over… life would be a lot less interesting, wouldn’t it?

Hope you have a Happy Holiday You Celebrate and a crowded table of all the people you love most.