Vintage Tidbit Tuesday: Ride a Hobby Horse! (part 1)

Riding a hobby horse is one of the easiest ways to perk up and live.  Develop your interest in ceramics or electric trains...a doll collection or a dancing course...tennis, painting, weaving, jewel design...or star-gazing, stamp collecting, miniature railroads, sailing.

Take a subject like gardening.  There's a wide choice just from that one subject.  You can concentrate on radishes and onions, cabbages and parsley in your own backyard or even a window box!  Or maybe your taste will run to orchids.  You can raise them, too, in a window or an indoor container.  Or maybe it's waterlilies or camellias or roses.

It doesn't matter much which hobby horse you set out to ride...just so it's one that interests you.  One in which you can put your heart.

Did you know that there are societies for almost every hobby you can think of from canaries to African violets?  Some of the organizations are like craftsmen's guilds and have certain standards for membership.  Most of them, however, are open to healthy amateurs...and they are a good way of meeting pleasant people!  Grievances have a way of disappearing over a coffee cup...especially if the topic of conversation is a mutual hobby.  Most folks with a given hobby are broad-minded, ready to learn from the other fellow...willing to give credit where credit is due.  You'll find a fair and square bunch of people ready to help you with your hobby.

So ride a hobby horse!  Have a good time...but let someone else ride, too.  The hobby horse answer really will work for you as it's worked for hundreds of others.  Where ever you find folks interested in something which is constructive...something they can build with their hands or think about with their minds...you will find barriers being broken down and understanding growing up and flowering.

Some folks have a hobby of good eating.  They organize themselves into Epicurean Societies...and the menus are really out of this world.  Those people would never think of being alcoholics.

Art and music has been used on mental cases.  This cure works also as a preventative!

Get yourself a hammer and some nails, some lumberyard pieces, and dig out your tools from the basement.  Build a boat or toy horse.  Be Santa Claus...you'll feel as young as the grandchild who gets the toy!  Or take a paint-brush and make a picture...Grandma Moses and Winston Churchill both recommend it!

Try it once and then there's no stopping you.  The hobby horse idea is wonderful for you...it's not a dead-end street to nowhere.  It's an open window...a new horizon...a ride on a rainbow.

To be continued next Tuesday!