I still can not get to the bottom of this

It's Ice Cream and Violins Day today. I'm unclear whether or not you are supposed to listen to violins while eating ice cream or sad songs are played while you eat ice cream in the cold. (No one and I mean no one - I have literally read over a hundred blogs noting this obscure holiday - knows why.) )

But why wonder why?


Christmas video countdown - More wacky holiday parodies








I never recommend anything (except gin - Bombay Sapphire. I would be happy to accept gallons of the delicious botanical nectar to endorse the product (but I digress ...)



A good friend of mine, Claudia Sherwood, has a book of her photographs out just in time for the holidays:
Winter Musings: Images of Central Park


The book is a collection of black and white photography taken in various locations throughout Central Park in the winter. It starts off with a forward by Yoko Ono, and poetry written by a variety of different authors.

You can pick it up on-line at The Central Park Conservancy - it makes a great gift.


December 13, 303 -
The feast of St. Lucy (Santa Lucia). Because her extreme beauty attracted too many admirers, Lucy gouged her own eyes out (she had body issues). Miraculously they grew back. After refusing to marry, the Romans forced her to become a whore. She wasn't particularly thrilled with that choice, so she went for door number two and her Roman guards stabbed her to death but not before gouging out her eyes, again.

Early depictions show Lucy offering her eyes on a platter; she is now the patron saint of Sicily and of opticians.

Oh those wacky early Christians.


December 13, 1577 -
Sir Francis Drake set out on a three year (and not three hour) long journey around the world, on this date. He had started his career as a sailor in the slave trading business, but after some run-ins with the Spanish, he decided to devote his life to taking vengeance on the Spanish by disrupting their trade routes.

He became a semi-official pirate for Queen Elizabeth I, plundering Spanish ships, gathering intelligence about their naval activities and creating delicious little dessert cakes.


December 13, 1928 -
The Clip-on tie is invented on this date. Productivity soars as time lost in tying knots is made up and accidential strangulation rates drop as fewer workers ties are caught in the gears.

Little know fact - the term, dork, is also coined.


Christmas Trivia -
It's all the damn man in the can's fault. Christmas trees are known to have been popular in Germany as far back as the sixteenth century. In England, they became popular after Queen Victoria's husband Albert, who came from Germany, made a tree part of the celebrations at Windsor Castle.
In the United States, the earliest known mention of a Christmas tree is in the diary of a German who settled in Pennsylvania.

Don't even ask about the legacy of Prince Albert and tight trousers.


11 more shopping days until Christmas.

And so it goes.