Snacking Your Way to 2026

Do I need more snack mix recipes? No.

But do I keep adding them anyway? Yes.

Susan raved about this one after a K-State football tailgate and got the recipe from a friend. I made it for the first time for our family appetizer Thanksgiving. 

But I also added it to the mix - so to speak - for the Christmas array of snack mixes. I made a total of eight different snack mixes this year. Lots of it is given away as gifts from the kitchen. But there's always plenty for our own family Christmas celebration, too. And I always provide plenty of plastic bags for much of it to go home with the kids. 

This one would be a good one to say goodbye to 2025 and hello to 2026. There's just a hint of sweetness and a little kick from some cayenne pepper. I was a little worried about the spiciness because Randy and I are wimps when it comes to heat. But it even worked for our wimpy palates. 

It also uses a fun combination of mix-ins.

So, whether you're looking for a last-minute snack mix for a New Year's Eve party or wanting something different for the full array of bowl games and NCAA football playoff games to come, check out this mix. It didn't really have a name. So I've christened it "Tailgate Snack Mix."

 

 Tailgate Snack Mix

1 cup butter, melted

2 packets ranch dressing mix

1/4 cup light brown sugar

3 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce

1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper

5 cups Chex (I used Life cereal for part of this)

3 cups mini pretzels

3 cups mini club crackers

3 cups Cheez-Its

2 cups Ranch Cheez-It Grooves

 

Preheat oven to 225 degrees and line two trays with parchment paper. 

 

Melt butter and mix first five ingredients together. Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Pour wet butter and seasoning mixture over dry mix and toss until evenly coated. Spread on the lined trays. Bake 1 hour, stirring every 15 minutes. Cool, then store in airtight containers. 

Pay Attention: Be Astonished

The first sunrise of 2023 - 7:34 AM, January 1, 2023

Instructions for living a life: 

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

Poet Mary Oliver

 

Mary Oliver likely didn't have a lot in common with me. During her life, she won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. I sometimes write in verse for my granddaughters, but I'm well aware I won't be collecting prestigious awards for those rhyming verses - or for anything else I write, for that matter. No National Book Award for me either.

Even though she died at the age of 83 in 2019, her poems and observations about life keep getting shared in memes and other social media posts. She grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, not on the plains of Kansas. 

But as we begin the new year, I am still drawn to her observations about life and how to live it. The city girl loved nature like this country girl. Her "Instructions for living a life" came up on Facebook as we turned the calendar page from 2022 to 2023.

For several years, I've taken photos of the last sunset of a year and then the first sunrise of the new year.  Sometimes, the skies are spectacular. Sometimes, they are not. This year was a little bit of both. 

December 31st's sunrise had pretty colors, but not a lot of drama. Because of the sun's position in the winter sky, I decided to use the Zenith branch of the Kanza Co-op for my farewell to 2022 sunset shot. It's as much a part of my "commuting" life as the Brooklyn Bridge is to New Yorkers.

At first, my "chauffeur" drove down the co-op's driveway, trying to get me in a position that the sun was setting between our version of city skyscrapers. That didn't work, so I settled for it landing underneath an auger.

Then we went back to the Zenith Road for a wider angle.

I've taken more dynamic and dramatic photos of the Zenith elevator through the years. But there's a simple beauty in the quiet colors of the setting sun, too. As the sun set on 2022, the co-op seemed a fitting place to say goodbye to a year when we retired from active farming. 

On the way home, we stopped for a snapshot of one of the many deer we have to avoid at dusk and dawn on our Zenith Road journeys.

The next morning, we drove down to my sunrise tree, just a half mile south of our house. With a little more cloud cover, 2023 dawned with a little more drama than the exit of 2022.

With the road illumined by our headlights as we first arrived.

I don't think I'd ever tried a panorama of the view from my sunrise tree. I'm sure it won't be the last time.

In other writings, Mary Oliver said that “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” In her essay "Teach The Children," she reminded us that contemplation of nature’s small wonders and life's simplest things have the power to change us in the deepest ways. In paying attention to our surroundings, we can invite joy to our lives and avoid letting our negative thoughts spiral. She reminds us we have a choice: We can let the world delight us, rather than let it beat us down.

It's a good reminder for me as a new year begins. It may not seem likely to combine quotes from a Pulitzer Prize winning poet with a zany actor. But I also liked a quote from comedian Jim Carrey that ended up in the email in box earlier this week.

I feel that we're all lighthouses, and my job is to shine my light as brightly as I can in the darkness.

Jim Carrey

 

Do you ever feel like God is trying to get your attention? My email devotional from The Upper Room continued the theme:

  

A Time to Think

I believe God embedded the miraculous in the ordinary, and it is our task to discover it and celebrate it.

Kent Nerburn

That's a good goal for 2023, don't you think?

***

On New Year's Eve, we also discovered this message on our dirt road from an unknown correspondent. I posted it to Facebook. So far, no one has claimed authorship, though everyone I've asked wished it had been their idea.

 

 

May it be true for you, too!

 

 

Goodbye, Hello!

I shoved my feet into Randy's boots, zipped up my heavy coat and ventured out to watch the final sunset of 2017 Sunday evening.

Earlier, I kept lifting the curtain on the front door and peaking out to see if the sunset would be worth leaving my nice warm house and my good book. The thermometer hadn't gotten above 7 degrees all day, and wind chills put the temperature well below zero.

But there's only one time to see the final sunset of a year, so I compromised. I used Randy's boots which were inside the house and, unlike mine, not on the frigid confines of the back porch. And I drove to the corner south to watch the final moments of day transition to night ... and likewise, to begin the transition from 2017 to 2018.

I then decided to use my "sunrise tree" from a different perspective. I drove past it, did a 3-point turn and then turned my camera to the west.

With the end of 2017 documented, I decided I'd also photograph the first sunrise of 2018.  True confessions: I probably should have gotten up a little earlier on New Year's Day. It's not like I'd been partying the night before. In fact, I didn't make it to midnight. But it was a holiday, so I decided not to set my alarm as early as usual.

I looked at the newspaper to find the time for sunrise and set the alarm for 15 minutes before that. My first shot of 2018 was similar to my final one of 2017. My sunrise tree - located to the corner south and just a bit to the east - was my "model" as the sun rose for the first time in 2018 in south central Kansas.

There were fewer clouds than the night before, so the colors painted the horizon without frills and texture.

I drove a little further to the east to another of my favorite sunrise spots - a windmill in a neighbor's pasture.

And then I ended my cold foray into 2018 in my own backyard, taking a photo of our old silo. I watched as a jet painted a streak in the sky, an unexpected symbol of moving forward into the new year.

This morning, I again opened a book I've been reading as part of my Advent devotionals, While We Wait: Living the Questions of Advent by Mary Lou Redding.

A shot of the tree before Christmas 2017

I sat in our living room with the Christmas tree still aglow, knowing that I've put "taking down the Christmas stuff" on my to-do list today. And I read these words:

We do seem in a hurry sometimes to put away Christmas. ... 'When it's over, it's over.' ... We also seem in a hurry after Christmas to box up once again our patience, our tolerance, our generosity and put them back in the attic, as if we can sustain good behavior for a few weeks but wouldn't want to risk making it a way of life. We may also put away our willingness to give a bit more, to be more forgiving, even to be more patient, as we often are during the holidays. Perhaps we even box up our desire to hope and our openness to miracles and mystery, as if the messages of the Christmas stories can't quite survive the rigors of real life the rest of the year. The Magi call us to continue our observance of Christ's coming after December is over.

Mary Lou Redding

Thankfully, the Light of the World came. He doesn't go away when we pack away the treetop angel or try to stuff the greenery and stockings inside the plastic tub of holiday decorations for another year.

And I'm reminded of that truth when I view His magnificent writing on the sky - whether it's the last sunset of the year ... the first sunrise of the year ... or any time in between.

Here's hoping you see the sunrises and sunsets of life in 2018 with new eyes and new hope. Happy New Year from The County Line!

Auld Lang Syne

A couple of books sit among a bevy of family photographs in my dining room. They have been part of my decor for nearly 20 years now, and, like most things we become familiar with, I haven't really given them a lot of thought for awhile now.

When we were sorting belongings after my mother-in-law's death, the two little books caught my eye, and, when no one else was clamoring for them, I brought them home.

One is called the Auld Lang Syne Birthday Book. There is no copyright, but it says that Marie Esther Ritts was given the book on June 3, 1942, in Springfield, Ohio, and, in parenthesis, it says, "Conference." I wonder if it was a gift at a Methodist annual conference, since Marie's dad, Alvin, was a Methodist pastor. She would only have been 10 years old at the time.

It's a birthday book with spaces to write down the birthdays of friends and family. Each page has a quote from poet Robert Burns. (Did you realize he wrote the lyrics for Auld Lang Syne? I didn't until I started looking for information about the book!)

The words "Auld Lang Syne' literally translates from old Scottish dialect, meaning, 'Old Long Ago.' It's about love and friendship in times past. The 'Auld Lang Syne' lyrics were first published in 1787, and the song has now become a tradition as we celebrate a new year.
 
I looked for information about the little book online, but didn't come up with any additional tidbits about it. For me, the value is in seeing important family dates written in Marie's hand. In the back of the book, she also has a Post-It note, where she remembered family collections. (Dana Fritzemeier collected keychains and bookmarks, and Wanda Morrison collected pigs, back when Marie made the notations.)

I wish she had lived long enough to write the names of other family members in the birthday book. She would have loved watching her grandchildren grow up and she would be over the moon with two little great-granddaughters.

The other book is titled, "Forget Me Not," but its purpose was the same. It originally belonged to Marie's mother, Laura Ritts. No copyright gives a clue to its age, but the binding is falling apart and the yellowed pages are fragile. When searching online, I found a copy of it on Worthpoint. The book is by Rev. Hugo W. Hoffman, Brooklyn, N. Y. There are 384 pages with a Bible verse and quote for each day of the year.

 

Each of the books has the two women's handwriting. Marie's is familiar to me. Laura's is not. By the time I met Laura, she was already fading into dementia, so I didn't have the benefit of knowing her in her prime. But her legacy was there in the family ties with her daughters and her grandchildren.

This poem was in the preface of the book:

... Images on this cold surface traced
Make slight impression and are soon effaced
But we've a page, more glowing and more bright
On which our friendship and our love to write
That these may never from the soul depart
We trust them to the memory of the heart
There is no dimming, no effacement there
Each new pulsation keeps the record clear
Warm, golden letters all the tablet fill
Nor lose their luster till the heart stands still. 

As we turn the page for another year, it's good to remember that legacy but also to look forward to new challenges and blessings and writing new friends and family members in the book of life.

The verse on the January 1 page says: 

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. 

Hebrews 13:8 

And the accompanying verse says,

"The opening year, Thy mercy shows; 

Let mercy crown it, till it close." 

That sounds like a good plan to me. Happy New Year to you and yours!