I shared this quote a few years ago, but it’s been on my mind a lot for the last few weeks. The older I get, the more true it seems to be!
The world has become more worldly. There is more of dissipation, and less of enjoyment. Pleasure has expanded into a broader, but a shallower stream, and has forsaken many of those deep and quiet channels where it flowed sweetly through the calm bosom of domestic life. Society has acquired a more enlightened and elegant tone; but it has lost many of its strong local peculiarities, its homebred feelings, its honest fireside delights. Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories, “Christmas”