Are you the person who faces the holidays with dread? Who cringes when you see the number of days remaining until Christmas? Are you tempted to block people on Facebook who post that they already have their Christmas tree up before Thanksgiving? If you are, you join a host of people who face the holidays with anxiety due to the stress you feel. However, a real truth is that the holidays are not stressful, it is each individual who creates their own stress. We create our own stress in many ways, and we do it to ourselves. We create unrealistic expectations of how the holidays should be…ones we can never meet, and therein lies the stress.

Now that we finally have kids back in school and pre-school, the age-old problem of what to pack for lunch and snacks has surfaced. How do I pack things they will eat but that are also nutritious?

The win for Rowan County was to have an infusion of 22 plus students each year, many bringing families along and staying two years. Many of the students are newcomers to our community choosing to house locally, frequenting our wonderful restaurants, shopping, and joining in on the events of our community such as the Dragon Boat Race and the Hospital Foundation Patron’s Ball. One of the motivations of the medical center is hosting the medical students was to introduce them to Rowan County with the hopes that they would return to establish their practice here once their training was complete. Rowan County has so much to offer for these students. The loft apartments in downtown Salisbury are an attractive option for many, and the new Bell Tower Green is anxiously awaited. The students are quite a diverse group and include some who graduated from our local high schools and went on to college and medical school, to others from across the nation. All are US citizens, and there is about a 50/50 male to female split, with all being under the age of 30.