Bloody cold out there this morning… not that I have much right to complain, since my judgment is made from looking out the window and one trip in shirtsleeves to refill the bird feeder, but I can easily see and feel that it’s bitter. I’m sure my wife, who went off to work, will attest to that, but I don’t want to provoke any comments, however justified they might be.

Windy, which is the real killer I guess, since I’m probably at the warmest place in the Maritimes, at about -9 degrees Celsius at the moment, while the temperature drops precipitously toward a -25 in Northern New Brunswick. They can have it, snowmobiles, trails, winter fun and all.

The little birds are clustered outside on the food tray, feathers puffed out while the snow blusters around them. In spite of the cold (or maybe because of it) they still have the energy to fight for position as though some of them could protect the pile of seed for themselves alone through the rest of the winter. Some kind of little finches are there now, I guess, not one of the few breeds I can identify, since I’m new to this bird watching stuff. There’s a flock of Grosbeaks around as well, and they take over for a time, while a few little Chickadees manage to flit in and out when no one else is looking, or come down onto the deck below for the scatterings.
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So…… Merry Christmas! And “Happy Holidays” too, to cover those days around Christmas, such as New Years.

I’m quite certain my blog doesn’t travel far enough to get me criticized, ridiculed, or arrested for the use of the “Christmas” word.

I do exaggerate, but as most of you know, not too much. It’s getting more annoying, if not outright worrisome how Christ is being taken out of ….. out of whatever we can politically correctly call this holiday.

The attempts of governments of every level to come up with some inoffensive terminology for what has always been a Christian celebration would be hilarious, if it wasn’t at times threatening to those working in schools and government institutions. Continue reading →

I’m troubled by Christmas. Have been for some time.

Christmas should be a high point in the year for Christian people. Although the date is likely all wrong, and the sequence of events like the arrival of the Magi all wrong, it is supposed to be a celebration of the birth of Jesus, the Messiah, 2000 years ago (2000 is close enough, because we apparently have the accuracy of that wrong as well).

I wondered how the whole thing got started… did the early church celebrate an anniversary of the birth of Christ, or was it started somewhere in the Middle Ages? My trusty Google soon told me that a celebration in December dated back long before the birth of Christ, as once pagan traditions that still linger on– such as the Yule Log, use of trees, and giving of gifts. Late December is the darkest time of the year, and a festival was just the thing to break up that somber cold. About a hundred years after Christ, these practices were cleaned up by converting the celebration to one remembering the birth of Christ, but obviously some of the traditions stuck and keep on today. Continue reading →

My mother passed away last Friday evening. She had been in hospital for the last eight months, a place she never wanted to be, though I think she had little realization of that most of the time she was there. She had taken a seizure of some kind in early December, at the seniors’ home that she never wanted to be in either. Fiercely independent, she tried in vain to avoid these places, knowing that when you enter near her age (91 last week), you seldom leave. Her avoidance of hospitals extended for years to hiding any illness or injury she had– not an ideal practice, since it jeopardized her health and sometimes concealed illness that her children needed to watch for in their own lives. Continue reading →

This article is rated PG! Not for the usual reasons— just keep it away from easily influenced minors in case they get any notions of duplicating the stupidity!

A few weeks ago we met with friends and at one point I mentioned some of the things I turned to as entertainment in the slow days of a teenage summer.  The focus was always the “practical joke”, which to a teenager is an excuse for almost anything, under a mistaken belief that adults will forgive almost anything if we excuse it by saying, “It was a joke!”   Now an adult, and a homeowner, I can see that it would be quite a leap for the victims of some of our pranks to see it in that light.  “It seemed like a good idea at the time!” remains our only poor excuse.

As a youth I once read a book called The Real Diary of a Real Boy, and although now I question whether it was a real diary or of a real boy, the antics in that book were a measure to me of what was “normal”, and as long as I fell short of that boy, I felt I was moving in an acceptable realm.

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