Merry Christmas

(NOTE: View a larger picture by clicking on the photo(s) above.)

SEASONS GREETINGS! Can you believe it! It is that time of year again. I know that all of you out there have all your shopping and holiday preparations done by now. No? Well, hop to it! I want to remind you that you can add comments to these blogs. Thanks Austin for communicating with us on last week’s blog. We appreciate the thought. We hope all of you enjoy hearing from us, but we like to hear from you as well, so get to it!

It will soon be Winter. It happens this year on December 22nd. You know how this seasonal dating works don’t you? Astronomical Winter (as opposed to Meteorological Winter), in the Northern Hemisphere, begins on different days at times because it is determined by when the sun is at it’s highest point in the sky over the Tropic of Capricorn (12 ½ degrees south latitude). For meteorologists, Winter begins on December 1. They seem to need a constant time in order to keep accurate weather data. So they use constant dates for the seasons, like March 1, June 1 and September 1 for the other seasons. As the newscaster Paul Harvey used to say, “And now you know the rest of the story.”

Let me share a little Christmas Trivia with you:

The traditional Christmas season begins at sundown on 24th December and lasts through sundown on the 5th of January. For this reason, it is also known as the Twelve Days of Christmas. You know, “Lords a leaping,” and all that stuff in the song.

An average household in America will mail out 28 Christmas cards each year and get 28 cards in return. Carolyn is way above average. That number barely gets her started. Try 80 to 100 cards!

In 1836 Alabama was the first state to declare Christmas a legal holiday, and in 1907 Oklahoma was the last state to do so.

Did you know that according to a 1995 survey, 7 out of 10 dogs get Christmas gifts from their doting owners. Our dogs did! Our last pooch, Rusty, a toy poodle, looked forward to opening his gifts. We would wrap his gifts only in white tissue paper. On Christmas day he would search under the tree for his gifts and only retrieve what was wrapped in white paper, then proceed to tear them open.

Christmas this season will be quite different for us. It will be the first time away from at least some members of the family. This year it is only Carolyn and I. The campground where we are spending the Winter is having Christmas dinner for everyone who wants to attend. The owners, John and Donna, are providing two large hams and a turkey. Everyone else is bringing a dish to add to the table. You see a picture above of the setting in the recreation hall where we will be eating. The pot of flowers is blooming outside the rec hall. The meal is scheduled for 3:00 PM on Christmas day. We will surely meet some new friends on that day.

This year is another big year in our life. On December 28th we will celebrate our 50th Wedding Anniversary. It sounds like a long time, but it seems short on the one hand, and forever of the other. All in a good way, you understand. If we can live in a home some 39 feet long by 14 feet at its widest, and not kill each other, I think we can make it for years to come.

Let me leave you with some profound philosophy from that little, bald character, Ziggy. In Art, and in Life: “Putting Problems into Perspective is the First Step in finding their Vanishing Point.”

HAVE A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!