Well. It’s been a year. At least (almost) all of us succeeded in making it round the sun one more time.
Sending love and best wishes to everyone who posts on, lurks around or just reads this forum.
Peace for us, for you and for everyone
Aly
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Thank you, Aly. And the same to you.
This is a special time of year, evocative and full of happy and sad, near term and long ago and cultural memories. Where I live, a lot of people put up colourful lights outdoors. Wasteful of electricity but a beautiful way to light the long dark early winter evenings of December. Also wasteful but heartwarming is the Christmas Eve tradition of the local volunteer fire department here. They take the fire truck and a few emergency vehicles with lights ablaze, have someone dressed as Santa Claus outside on top of the fire truck, and drive through the community. People go outside and wave to them as they go by and call out Merry Christmas, and the little ones are thrilled.
This isn’t the first time that Israel has been assaulting Gaza at Christmastime but it’s certainly the worst since 1948. Utterly heartbreaking and nauseating.
I wish peace, prosperity and good health to everyone for the new year.
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Thank you Jackie, nice to see your post and as for the wastefulness of Christmas lights it hardly seems a biggie in the overall scheme of things. LEDs are very low-powered in any case.
This tradition of bringing light into the dark exists in many forms and across cultures. Your pen picture of the fire crews really reminded me of the slo-mo scene very near the beginning of Blue Velvet. Lynch can seem to wallow in the dark underbelly, but it is always very clear which side he is on. The fact that such community-based events are derided by so many, parochial and gimcrack, like an obviously fake robin, is very saddening. Let’s all hope for better things in 2024.
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Postboxes that size are becoming a rarity now, I only know two locally, one is right next to the other. They both get a wooly topping too, not just at Christmas e.g. a beret and poppy around Armistice Day, sheep and chicks at Easter, etc.
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