Author Archives: Linda

Took a mini-vacation to Las Vegas.  Stayed at the Orleans.  Had a really good time.  It’s good to get away for a few days now and again.  Makes coming home so sweet!

Must be nice to have a housekeeping department and a maintenance department.  Someone to dust and vacuum and make the beds every day and someone to call whenever you want a light bulb changed or whenever something needs to be fixed.  Oh, wait.  The former is me and the latter is hubby!  The pay isn’t much, but we make our own hours, work when we want, how we want, and if we want.

Home Sweet Home!  It’s not much but it’s ours and it’s paid for!

I wonder if everybody else has the same problem I have…when there’s a holiday in the middle of the week, I expect the day following the holiday to be a Sunday or a Monday. It throws me off for the entire week. Maybe that’s part of getting older or maybe it’s being retired. It really doesn’t matter if today is Monday or Thursday. (except when it’s time to take the garbage out!)

Of course, most of our holidays are now scheduled for Mondays so folks get long weekends. When I lived in Canada it was really strange to have Thanksgiving on a Monday!

Canadians also celebrated today as “Boxing Day”.  Observed in most Commonwealth countries. One tradition is that it is the day when servants and tradesmen would receive gifts from their bosses. Another is that it’s the day when you pack up the old (having received new on Christmas) into boxes and give them to the poor.

Just a few more days until New Year’s. Here’s something interesting about a custom in Scotland called First Foot Day:

The superstition goes back to the era of the Viking raiders when a fair-haired Norseman at a Scotsman’s door meant trouble.

If the first person to set foot in your house on the morning of January 1 is a dark-haired male, you will have good luck for the entire year. Ideally a first footer should bring gifts, such as:

• a lump of coal to symbolize warmth all year
• a silver coin for wealth and prosperity
• some bread so you’ll never be hungry

After greeting everyone in the house, the first footer must exit through a different door from the one he had entered. Nobody should leave the house before the first footer shows up because the first traffic across the threshold should be coming in, not going out.

Blonde and red-haired male first footers bring BAD LUCK.
A female first footer spells DISASTER on the entire household.

I guess some dark-haired males have to stay out all night long so they can enter houses and bring good luck. Doesn’t say that the dark-haired male can’t enter any number of houses. Wonder if the luck gets weaker in the second house than in the first?
Who said superstitions had to make sense?

This is my very own personal website!  What eventually appears here is totally up to me and that’s scary!  I’m faced with a blank canvas, an empty page, just waiting for me to add to it and make it valuable or beautiful or distinct or at least interesting.  Let’s get started.

Today is December 23, 2013.  We are skipping Xmas this year.  I’ve always loved the holidays – especially the lights, the tree, the music, the favorite old movies.  But, as we get older we find that the work of putting up the lights and the tree is getting more difficult.  We had a cold snap right after Thanksgiving this year so we put off decorating.  By the time it was warm enough to work outside, it was only a couple of weeks before Christmas and it hardly seemed worth the work for just a few weeks.  Hopefully we’ll make up for it next year.  I’ve seen some of the old movies on TV and I’ve listened to a lot of Christmas music so I have the spirit of Christmas in my heart.

We have lost a nephew this year; my good friend lost her son; my sister-in-law lost her brother.  These deaths have served as a good reminder that every day of the year, Christmas or not, someone is mourning, someone is grieving.

BUT, we also welcomed baby Lillie, our great-grand-niece.  The circle of life continues.  And life is good.