One of the best things about the holiday season that stretches between Thanksgiving and Christmas (and beyond to New Year's Eve) is the return of expatriates to the homeland.

That means that at holiday parties, you will get to reconnect with folks you haven't seen since last year's holiday parties. On any given night at local watering holes, impromptu reunions break out. I can always count on catching up with pals who've moved away at Waterworks, where we can catch up on news over a Capri sandwich and a round of libations.

The holidays are all about tradition, and I'd like to share one of mine.

While most of the shopping public participated in the Black Friday holiday tradition of wrestling their fellow shoppers for the last video game on the shelf at Best Buy or Walmart, I have plotted my own shopping excursion. Even on a slow day, the malls and big box stores give me the heebie-jeebies, so I have pledged to do my gifting from locally owned galleries and stores. And I will start by wandering through the winter wonderland of LeMoyne Center for the Visual Arts' annual Holiday Show, which traditionally opens to the public on the day after Thanksgiving.

I love the lengthening nights of winter, when daylight is whittled away to a luminous sliver and everything seems lit from within by an inner incandescence.

The days count down to the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the solar year - a time of ice and fire, when darkness and light are weighed in the scales and the red-gold reign of the sun gives way to the silvered, frosty dominion of the moon.

Every month, I recharge my cultural batteries and refresh myself by making the rounds of the regular First Friday Gallery Hop. It's one of my favorite arty things to do in Tallahassee.

Along the way, I have made some wonderful friends - artists whose work I've admired (and purchased) and gallery owners who offer space and shelter for those artists. The gallery hop is nothing if not a social affair - you can hob-nob with old and new pals while browsing for art and other treasures.

A dainty pair of lady's leather shoes. A faux-ivory celluloid-backed hand mirror. A toothbrush. A jar of cold cream, half-used. A bottle of fine champagne, stoppered, with the dregs still left inside.
These things left behind - things as mundane as a tin of tooth powder and as elegant as a dainty hairpin - tell the human tale of the frigid April night in 1912 when the ocean liner Titanic was struck by an iceberg and went down in the North Atlantic. More than 1,500 souls perished, and more than 700 survived.

What do you do when a new friend from Spain wants to experience some real North Florida downhome culture?

Take her zydeco dancing at Bradfordville Blues Club, that’s what!

And that’s just what I did with a posse of pals a couple of weekends ago, when our friend Amanda, who grew up in Tallahassee, was visiting from Mallorca, where she lives now. She had brought her friend Lucia and wanted to introduce her to la dolce vita a la Tallahassee.

Wakulla Springs State Park is one of my favorite places on the planet. I have swum in the icy waters there, and I have napped on the grass with the chatter of children lulling me into a doze. I have hiked its trails, and I have taken the Jungle Cruise (my friend Linda Hall drives one of the boats) many times, never tiring of the splendid pageant of birds and alligators and silver, leaping mullet.

Let us now have a moment of silence for Tallahassee's venerable arthouse cinema, the Miracle 5 on Thomasville Road. 

The theater, which had been serving up edgy, indie and foreign film fare for decades, closed its doors Aug. 14 after parent company Regal Cinemas decided it had sunk enough money into an infrastructure that was, admittedly, shabby and crumbling around the edges.

Is there anything more delicious than floating face down in the clear salt water, scanning the sea grass for the multiple bright blue eyes of bay scallops?

I have spent the past couple of weekends enjoying the real Florida. 

I dipped into the salty world off the coast of St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge to scoop up scallops and snorkel through sponge and coral beds and banks of sea grass where tiny starfish lay snuggled like delicate five-armed jewels in deep green boxes.