Day 265 - the Bagginses have a birthday

 Today is the 6th day of the 38th week, the 22nd day of the 9th month [but I am not at all positive how that translates into Shire reckoning], the 265th day of 2023, and:

• Astronomy Day
• Business Women's Day
• Chainmail Day - when we went to the Jamestown Heritage park, my son had an opportunity to try on a shirt of chain mail.  Years later, whenever he would DM a D&D game, any player who tried to swim with chain mail on immediately sank - and if they got caught in a rainstorm, they had better dry it off or it would rust
• Dear Diary Day
• Hobbit Day
• Independence Day - Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire in 1908 and Mali from France in 1960
• International Day of Radiant Peace
• Love Note Day
• National Bakery Day
• National BRAVE Day
• National Centenarian's Day
• National Elephant Appreciation Day
• National Girl's Night in Day
• National Ice Cream Day
• National Legwear Day
• National Online Recovery Day
• National States and Capitals Day - to this day, my friend can still recite the names of all fifty states and their capitals
• National White Chocolate Day
• Native American Day
• World Carfree Day
• World Rhino Day
• the first quarter of the moon at 3:32 PM EDT

Quote of the day:

"The original 'Hobbit' was never intended to have a sequel - Bilbo 'remained very happy to the end of his days and those were extraordinarily long': a sentence I find an almost insuperable obstacle to a satisfactory link."

~ J. R. R. Tolkien

Today, as any Tolkien fan can tell you, is the birthday of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, born on this day 78 years apart.  

'The Hobbit' was originally published the day before this momentous day in 1937, although Americans had to wait until 1938.  I never heard of it.  It was neither in our school library nor the little community public library.  So it wasn't until I was a teenager that I found Middle-earth by reading 'The Fellowship of the Ring' because it was recommended by Seventeen magazine [a subscription gift from my godmother in my teen years].  Hungry for more, I found and read the original book then, but found it childish after the soaring oratory of the Lord of the Rings tribology.  Because Tolkien became such a big part of my life, of course, I tried reading it to my kids.  Neither of them cared for it, and I don't think my son actually read it until the movies came out.  

My granddaughters prefer Harry Potter and Minecraft, although Lemony Snicket gets an honorable mention.  Neither they no my kids have become fascinated with the books I remember reading in grade school so avidly, books like Mary Poppins [although it is one of my daughter's favorite movies] books and the Freddy the Pig stories.  None of them have delved into horses, or read Bambi, or took advantage of the books I had about Paul Bunyan and Robin Hood and the other books of the classic youth collection [I think it was part of a set that I was given that Puffin books published back in the 1950's].    Of course, I abandoned all those books for Sherlock Holmes and Jules Verne by the time I hit junior high school, so maybe I haven't promoted them very much.  

Then too, neither my kids nor my granddaughters are quire as enamored of sitting still and reading as I was.   They have the internet, streaming video, and games - a world where they are all digital natives and I am just a nomad immigrant.  Their imaginations are fired by different things and  go different places than mine went, and that's okay.  

After all, as much as I love the Shire, I really wouldn't fit in very well there unless they have very robust bandwidth available!