These are the reasons.

My father makes the best jollof rice in the world. This is not an opinion. It is a fact that our entire extended family agrees on, which never happens.

My grandmother lives in a tiny city apartment with no yard, but she has the most beautiful garden I've ever seen. It's in her bathtub.

Every morning, outside the big construction site downtown, a woman named Fatou runs a coffee cart. She's there at five a.m., when the first crews arrive, with coffee, breakfast sandwiches and a huge smile.

On the last bus home from the city on New Year's Eve, around one a.m., the bus was packed with tired people in party hats and glittery dresses. Someone in the back started singing "Auld Lang Syne."

My dad is a retired carpenter. This spring, I asked him to help me build a little free library for my front yard. He was more excited than I was.

The schools closed, the roads closed, and my office closed. For the first time in years, our whole family was home on a weekday with nowhere to be.

This year, I volunteered to host Christmas dinner. I live in a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor. My family has fourteen people. My mother asked, very gently, if I had thought this through. I had not.

I'm the only Jewish person in my apartment building, and every December, my neighbors ask me questions about Hanukkah. This year, I decided to show them instead. I invited everyone to a latke party in the lobby on the Sunday before the first night.

On the first weekend of December, we drove an hour to a Christmas tree farm in the hills, with our two kids and a borrowed saw. We'd always bought our trees from a parking lot. This year, the kids wanted to cut one down themselves.

I teach English at a community college, and many of my students are international. This November, I learned that eighteen of them had never had an American Thanksgiving. Most couldn't go home for the break. So I invited them all to my house.

At sixty-six, I joined my church's handbell choir. I can't read music very well, and I'd never held a handbell. The director said that was fine. "Each person only plays two notes," she said. "You just have to ring them at the right time."

Our town's park hosts a dog costume parade every year at the end of October, and this year, for the first time, I entered my dachshund, Biscuit.

My office signed up for the city's dragon boat festival in October, and I volunteered for the team before I knew what I was getting into. A dragon boat is a long, narrow canoe with a carved dragon head at the front, twenty paddlers sitting in pairs and a drummer at the bow who keeps the rhythm.

Our neighbors have an antique cider press, a big wooden thing with an iron crank that's been in their family since 1910. Every October, they invite the whole street to bring apples.

It started as a joke. In August, my brother-in-law and I argued about who was better at cornhole, the game where you toss beanbags at a board with a hole in it. By October, it had become the First Annual Family Cornhole Championship, with a bracket, sixteen teams and a trophy made from a spray-painted bowling pin.

At seventy-one, I joined a pinball league. My grandson found it on the internet. It meets every Monday at a little arcade bar downtown that has thirty old machines, some from the 1970s.

Every September, before the High Holidays, our synagogue holds a rummage sale in the basement. This year, I was in charge of the book table.

We were sure her first word would be "mama." My wife had been practicing with her for weeks. I had secretly been practicing "dada" during diaper changes.

My nephew is twelve and spent the whole summer learning yo-yo tricks from videos. He practiced for three, four, sometimes five hours a day on our back porch, while I was supposed to be babysitting him.

In July, two Jersey kids, my best friend and I, drove to Wyoming for the Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo. We are both from New Jersey. We had never seen a cow up close.