We've made it to the last month of the year nobody wants to linger. Your challenge here is simple, from D.L., for "oatmeal cookies or muffins or any baked goods that call for oats."

DEAR ABBY: Marriage is considered to be imperative in my religion and culture. I'm 29 and still not married.

Perhaps you have been baking bread for the past many months and you have extra waiting in the freezer.

Before we get too far removed from Thanksgiving, allow me to share a tale a good friend told me a couple of years ago.

This is the world that Associated Press photographers captured in 2020, a world beset by every sort of catastrophe -- natural and unnatural disaster, violent and non-violent conflict.

I usually sleep seven to eight hours each night, but I still wake up feeling tired. Could I have a sleep disorder?

Douglas and Eugenia DeLong decorate the exterior of their Cleveland, Tennessee, home each Christmas, but visitors likely don't gaze long at the single strand of lights on the two-story farmhouse.

When Lonna Hamblen and Joe Scott moved into their Stringer's Ridge condo last year, Hamblen did something for their first Christmas there that she'd never done before: She hired someone to do the decorating.

DEAR ABBY: I am a nurse in New York City. My boyfriend lives in Philadelphia.

Dave Prowse, the British weightlifter-turned-actor who was the body, though not the voice, of arch-villain Darth Vader in the original "Star Wars" trilogy, has died. He was 85.

DEAR ABBY: My wife recently came back from a gold/silver/coin merchandiser event and told me she had sold an old U.S. $5 gold piece (for probably less than it was worth).

Ani Sirois, a respiratory nurse, has spent months caring for coronavirus patients at a Portland, Oregon, hospital, and she's only getting busier as infections — and hospitalizations — surge before the holidays.

It's a way different holiday season this year. How could it not be? We've been ambushed and overrun by this horrible COVID stuff. I hope that you're taking care of yourselves. I stay close to home these days. It's not much of a sacrifice. I always have, but it's been my choice to do so.

Late one stormy London night in 1763, a man filled with despair was determined to end his life. He hired a driver to take him to the river and was convinced that if he could only cast himself into the depths of the Thames, his agony could be finally put to an end.

The most extreme case of social distancing the world has ever know was, ironically, in the very beginning of creation.

Whew! What a year it has been. We've all been through the wringer, and it looks like this will be our reality for a while. How do we endure such adversity and not let it steal our joy, especially around the holidays?

Some books serve as fuel to replenish our spirits; others spark fire to mobilize our actions. While both types are needed to face the trials of this world, Rita Sims Quillen's "Some Notes You Hold" is the former type.

"Stressful" doesn't really begin to describe a year like 2020. Between the pandemic, the lockdowns, canceled classes, lost jobs and an election to rival trench warfare, you would expect a heavy toll on marriages and families.

DEAR ABBY: Our older son has had the same girlfriend for 11 years, but my in-laws still won't accept her because they aren't married, so they don't include her in some family functions.

The Walt Disney Co. announced plans to lay off 4,000 more workers in its theme parks division in California and Florida due to the COVID-19 pandemic's effect on the industry.

DEAR ABBY: I have a delightful, caring, loving man in my life. We knew each other years ago when we were married to other people. Three years ago, after a couple of years of courtship, he asked me to move in.

Rocky the stowaway owl is back in the wild.

Former President Barack Obama's "A Promised Land" sold more than 1.7 million copies in North America in its first week, roughly equal to the combined first week sales of memoirs by his two immediate predecessors and among the highest ever for a nonfiction book.