Merry Christmas, from Linda “Peaches” Tavani!
My Covid 19 Thanksgiving into Christmas, 2020
I am inspired to share the way I feel during the pandemic with you. About what I am thankful for in this very crucial time in our world. I am thankful that I am not doing any traveling right now. I was lining up a tour overseas to sing, ready to enjoy being out of the country and out of town a little bit. I’m thankful that Spotify and social media platforms play my music that still goes around the world. WOW COVID-19 hit hard!
I was stunned, frozen like everyone else at the sudden rate of people losing loved ones, their own lives changing drastically forever. Now when I do leave home I’m masked, asked to keep at a 6ft distance and advised to stay home unless its essential that I go out. It’s a lot of bad news but it’s a blessing too. Time to rethink, renew and restore. I am thankful I chose an uplifting performing arts career for a living. It’s a good news profession that I love. And am blessed to be able to continue to create new music during this time! I hope you will check it out here!
Now ironically being home has given me contentment and gratitude.
It has made me even more thankful for what I have. Especially my friends and family ties that we call “familia”. My husband’s Italian father explained the importance of that kind of relationship to have with our family and our neighbors. I’m thankful for being happily married 34 years and seeing one of my twin girls give my husband Stephen and I a new son–in law.
Linda “Peaches” and Biscotti
I appreciate being healthy and staying young at heart. I’m grateful for my eyesight to see all the freedom we have watching nature doing its thing. The variety of flowers and the splendor of the sky. Having pets. For all the things I’ve learned through experience. What I have learned and worked hard to earn and what I do to help others feel better because I care. Especially those who are having it rough right now.
I’m thankful for how much I’ve grown spiritually ever since I was a child growing up on the East Coast. I’m now living my California dream. I’m very thankful getting through racial struggles and surviving like my parents did with dignity and style. I’ve only been able to manage because of the love, faith and the importance of family ties, believing all people are no better than others. Realizing we are all here for various reasons and knowing that LOVE is the most important thing! It’s what I need, and what we all need – Covid-19 can’t take that away. Here is my recent video about the most important thing:
Knowing a tiny bit of my family history stories makes me thankful to share birthdays and holidays together with my loved ones. I cherish memories of living in a beautiful rural area of the DMV (DC Maryland, Virginia), twenty minutes from Chocolate City, another name for our nation’s capital where I got most of my education.
I remember well how much I loved doing my homework, sometimes while sitting on the steps of the library of Congress. I enjoyed attending Leonard Bernstein‘s Young Peoples Concerts and developed a deep appreciation for art museums. I’m thankful for the handed-down clothing I wore from my mother’s boss at her job at the U.S. Department of Labor. I truly grew up in the most stylish era of all times, so excellently today revised in my favorite designer, Ralph Lauren’s, collections. Coffee table magazines and TV variety shows also gave the visual tools to apply my ideas to sketches that kept me thinking and always tinkering with things. Growing up I watched my dad who was a carpenter by trade so I thought I could fix anything too.
That is why my big brothers nicknamed me Tinker Bell. Thanks, Walt Disney. That gave me a brave spirit and a kind of incentive to do daring things. It also kept my mom and her mom praying for me together on their knees. Now as a mother I am still doing the same for my own children. When I wasn’t daydreaming of being a nurse or a singer like Diana Ross or playing for my mom’s choir at our community AME church, I dreamed and prayed I’d get to travel around the world someday too. What a blessing I’ve been able to travel so much, especially to one of my all time favorite cities, Paris, France, the City of Lights!
Another childhood memory I’m also incredibly thankful for being able to see Martin Luther King speak his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington. It was a real wakeup call when he was shot and killed, leaving us his dream to keep alive. I know it’s a long shot for all kinds of reasons but still I hope to see the day when all mankind can say we are sisters and brothers and we don’t have to fight because we have no right to hurt each other.
Most of all, I am thankful for Love.
Merry Christmas from Linda “Peaches” Tavani!
The real reason for the Christmas season. The healing in the gift of peace and love God gave us. It is my favorite thing of all to be thankful for. So, wherever you find yourself this year, I pray that healing, love and a merry, merry, Christmas will be yours!
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