Before there were any buildings in Rockefeller Center, there was a Christmas tree.

At the peak of the Great Depression, construction workers hungering for holiday cheer pooled their money to buy a 20-foot balsam fir and placed it in the center of the construction site. They decorated the tree with whatever they could find: strings of cranberry their wives made, paper garlands, tin cans, even foil gum wrappers.

Every fall the push to do more intensifies. Sharpen your pencil and dig in.

Produce more, study more, socialize more, exercise more, volunteer more. The calendar becomes the battlefield, its squares squeezed ever tighter. If summer is for vacation, fall is for achievement.

I submitted two articles tonight, and moments after I hit send, I was struck by the parallel.

Sure, they both involved retired Catholics. But in my focus on the specifics of their work — the intricate toothpick sculptures of a Minnesota grandpa, the winsome travel guide written by a New Mexico single – I’d nearly missed how their paths mirrored each other.

The sense of place and pull to the wild that inspired Nick Ripatrozone’s new book are tucked in his very name. The rip-roaring surname is the name of a mountain town in central Italy, which the 40-year-old writer has visited. 

George Corrigan never met a person who didn’t fascinate him. The delivery guy. The plumber. The barista. He wanted to know their names and their life stories, which came tumbling out when he flashed his megawatt smile and asked his earnest questions.

There are echoes of Romeo and Juliet, but the ending is happier.

This story of forbidden love took place long ago on a Mediterranean island – 1870s Sicily, to be exact.

Elizabeth Lagudice was a beautiful noblewoman with dark curls and big eyes. Dona Elizabeth, as she was called, made a fabled mistake: She fell in love with a tailor.

Dr. Seuss’ fourth book was published in 1940 and met with critical acclaim. It features an elephant whose large ears and long trunk provided the ideal infrastructure for the artist’s distinct lumps and humps.

Today, the homely hero of “Horton Hatches The Egg” feels like a symbol of what we are sorely lacking in a culture that sets us up to be flighty and fickle. He reminds me of a Gospel principle I have found more challenging now that I’m a parent. 

"Synchronicity.”

That’s the word one journalist used in a Nov. 3 Instagram post to describe the fact that Election Day fell on the feast day of St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of social justice. It was a timely reminder, he felt, to vote with those ideals in mind, to imagine the kind of world the 17th century Dominican lay brother was trying to bring about.

Can you come in?”

My grandma’s favorite question is one we now discourage her from uttering.

The impulse to swing open her door and her arms, honed over nine decades and stitched into her Irish-Catholic DNA, is not easily thwarted. Yet we have attempted to do so this year.

Paula Kraus wasn’t afraid to utter the wish burning on her heart, the one that seizes so many preparing to lose a loved one.

The color-coded books first caught my eye.

It’s become one of my favorite flourishes in interior design, one that always stops me in my Instagram scrolling. And here it was, on the cover of a book titled “Theology of Home: Finding the Eternal in the Everyday.” Four built-in shelves held coordinating books: reds, whites, greens and blacks. From there, my eye wandered to the massive stone fireplace with a Blessed Mother icon above it and a crackling fire below. 

Fifteen years after Richard Louv’s bestseller “The Last Child in the Woods” was published, it is more relevant than ever. I’m fascinated by his insights on the “nature-deficit disorder” ailing kids.

Tonight I wrote two events on my calendar: a birthday party and a baptism. They will be sanitized, scaled-down gatherings — and they will be fun — but still, it pained me to sully those blank boxes with black ink.

The nurses kept using the same word. The doctors used it too: Rock star.

It started with the Italians, whose arias rose from the balconies. They were on lockdown, but their voices rang out down empty moonlit streets. Ballads, the national anthem, improvised ditties over the barking of dogs.