Merry, Merry Christmas to you, my cherished friends.  Today is the day that mankind celebrates Our Heavenly Father's birth, so Happy Birthday Jesus!!  I think we've grown to celebrate something else also.  It's called greed, and it's my sincere prayer that mankind will soon see what they've done to themselves and turn this tide around before it's too late. 

The weather here today is really nasty, so I've been sitting here watching the beautiful snow fall from the sky and cover the ground. If you take the time to watch snow you can see that there isn't one snowflake that looks like another one. It's almost dark right now so the snow glistens in the lights as it floats past them.  When I was younger I lived in a place that was on the 4th floor and had an enclosed balcony.  It was when I still lived in snow country so I would spend alot of evening hours on that balcony watching the snow falling and glistening in the brownish/orange hue of the street lights.  It was in a historic district of town so the street lights were actually oil lamps on tall posts.  An elderly man was the lamplighter for my section of the district and he had a long, long pole with a special wick on it that he used to open the window on the fixture and then light the lamp.  I used to love to sit with my binoculars and watch him light every light in the area I could watch him in.  I was just really relaxing and helped me 'come down' from the stress of my day at work.  I remember day dreaming while I was watching him.  I would think of what it must have been like to live in a time where it was 'normal' to heat your home by a fireplace or cookstove and you actually cooked on a stove whose heat source was wood.  One of my Grandmother's cooked on a HUGE wood stove until I was probably 15 -16 years old.  I remember her being really upset with the Mayor of the city she lived in because he had sent her, and all the others that were still using wood stoves, letters telling them that they were fire hazards and had to be replaced with gas or electric ranges.  That grandma was a very spunky woman who had immigrated to the U.S. from Norway when she was a teenager.  She marched to the Mayor's office, pushed her way past his secretary and walked right into his office and told him she would burn her house down before she would quit cooking on her wood stove.  I was with her and was doing everything I could to get her to hush-up and leave.  The Police showed up and were able to talk her into going home.  Grandma didn't have a telephone, but the police called my father and he came into town and got his mother settled down.  She didn't part with that wood cook stove either.  Well, not until she decided to sell the house and move to a smaller home that she bought that already had an electric range in it.  She made my father and his brother's agree not to get rid of her big, heavy wood cookstove until she had tried out the electric one.  She was delighted with it!!  She couldn't believe how easy it was to keep an even heat in the oven, so, yuppers, she parted with her wood cookstove.

Other memories I have