Category Holidays

Dear Santa

Michael 6 Comments

I was asking just last week, do kids still write letters to Santa Claus? For many children, the Letter to Santa was their first exposure to letter writing and a sneaking way for parents to teach their children the etiquette of personal correspondence. But now in this time of text messages, emails, and social media direct messaging, are the parents even aware of letter writing and getting that all so important wish list to the big guy at the North Pole?

Fast forward a few days to just last weekend and I uncovered some answers to some of those questions. Yes indeed, children still write letters to Santa, and the United States Postal Service is there to help. Who better than the USPS to promote letter writing, even if just to Santa? And they do it in an intriguingly organized program that nearly everyone can join, Operation Santa.

In 1912 (that’s 110 years ago!), Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock created Santa’s first mailroom and officially authorized local postmasters to open up letters sent to Santa, and when possible, to answer the children. Sometime in the 1940s the program was open to the public and the current program was born. Operation Santa has four “steps.” Children write and mail letters to Santa (if they, or their parents, need help with that, the USPS even has letter templates available on line), volunteer letter “adopters” read the letters and as much as they can fill the children’s wishes, they buy, wrap, and ship the presents, and the kids get a surprise under the Christmas  tree. 

There is more to the program than that simple outline but not much. Letters have to go to an official Santa address (123 Elf Rd., North Pole 88888). People who are interested in adopting letters must be vetted by the USPS. Only US residents can send and adopt letters.

I tried to find out how many children have had Christmas wishes granted through this program or how many individuals and teams have adopted letters but couldn’t dig those figures up. That might be proof that the USPS is serious about their commitment to keep personal identifying information of letter writers and adopters secure. I also tried to find out why I never heard about this before. You readers know better than anybody how arcane some of the information I share is, yet this didn’t even make it to my radar screen.  If you’re as intrigue by Operation Santa as I am, you can find all the information you could even ever want, or at least enough to join up, at the official Operation Santa website.  

Merry letter writing to all, and to all a good present!

On a related note, December 7 was National Letter Writing Day. In a day of quick text messages and emails, letter writing sets you free to pour your thoughts out completely, taking part in an activity so special you may call it noteworthy. Naturally we at ROAMcare had some ideas about letter writing in general. Read our letter to letter writers everywhere here.

📷 USPS Operation Santa

 

The sort of annual way too talked about Christmas movie controversy and why I’m right again

Michael 12 Comments

It’s the Monday after Thanksgiving and that can mean only one thing. Well it could mean billions and billions of things but if you’re here (and clearly you are) it means it’s time for this year’s My Favorite Christmas Movie post. If it’s my favorite why do we need to rehash this every year? Because, “I say my current favorite because like children there can be no real favorite among Christmas movies. The favorite is the one making you smile today or remember yesterday, the one encouraging a perfect alternative to an imperfect world and providing an escape from the ordinary.” –Me, 12/5/2019. One more thing. It’s the sort of annual because I missed a year here and there. Maybe more than here and there but I’ve done a lot of them!

This year I started watching Christmas movies early and I’ve already seen close to a dozen of them. And only one of them had “Christmas” in the title. And that got me wondering, how many movies have been released as Christmas movies and included the word Christmas in the title? There are plenty of movies and you often know from the title you are going to be in a holiday themed show, but in the grand scheme of things, precious few come right out and mention the word “Christmas” or even “Holiday” and leave no doubt. (Just so there is no doubt, Twentieth Century Fox and John McTierman could have shimmied out on that limb and title the 1988 disaster of a flick “Die Hard on Christmas Eve” and it still wouldn’t be a Christmas movie.)

“Miracle on 34th Street” could be about any inexplicable event happening in New York City in December but it’s pretty clear we’re talking Santa, and “Elf” could be about cookie bakers living in hollow trees but again Santa clarifies that point. The majority of Christmas movie titles themselves can be addressing almost anything. “Love, Actually” could be a garden variety romcom. “The Polar Express” might be an Agatha Christie mystery gone north. “Home Aline” could be about the plight of inner city latch key kids, “The Apartment” might be a prequel to “Rent,” and “Meet Me in St. Louis” a travelogue. Even my favorite from last year, which is still a favorite in any year, “Remember the Night” might be about the sinking of the Titanic if your memory is just a little faulty.

So I did some research and I tried to dig up all the Christmas movies with Christmas in the title. Naturally I mean theatrical releases, not Hallmark or Lifetime or any other movie mill cable network holiday offerings. It’s not an exhaustive list but a list until I became exhausted by it. (And you won’t find “Black Christmas” and “Christmas Evil” among them because even though they have Christmas in the title, see the Die Hard in Christmas Eve explanation above. And unfortunately you will not find “A Charlie Brown Christmas” among them either because it was released directly to television.)

  • A Christmas Carol (all 20-some versions)
  • A Christmas Story
  • A Christmas Story 2 (really, from 2012)
  • A Christmas to Remember (I didn’t)
  • A Muppet Christmas Carol
  • Christmas in Connecticut
  • Christmas in July
  • Christmas with the Kranks
  • National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
  • The Nightmare Before Christmas
  • White Christmas

Almost all worthy to carry the word Christmas in their titles, there are a couple that stand out for me. “Christmas in Connecticut” stars Barbara Stanwyck and that’s never a bad thing, and “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” made moose head egg nog cups complete with antlers THE gift in the early 1990s. But of them all, my favorite Christmas movie with Christmas in the title has to be “White Christmas.” It has singing, dancing, comedy, romance, a gruff old guy and a gruffer old gal. It’s one of only two movies with Vera-Ellen that I can name off the top of my head (“On the Town” is the other), and it’s just plain fun. How can you not look at the final scene when the wall opens and the first snowfall of the year is blanketing the Vermont countryside and not smile about it.  

What was that I said? “The favorite is the one making you smile today or remember yesterday.” I’d say “White Christmas” does a little of both. 

Merry Christmas Movies everyone!

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There aren’t any post about Christmas movies but there are lots of articles on refreshing your enthusiasm for life and finding the motivation to push through the day everyday at ROAMcare.org. I’d be honored if you were to visit.

Put Giving into your Thanksgiving

Michael 4 Comments

Several of you made the trip to the ROAMcare site to read last week’s blog, For the People Who Love Us into Being. There’s a second part to that just in time for Thanksgiving and I thought you might like to see it through. Briefly it says, “It is better to give than receive but just what do we give? How about us! Give thankfully knowing by giving yourself you could be loving somebody into being.” I would be honored if you read it all at Put the Giving into Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Used with permission

On being loved into being

Michael 6 Comments

I was working in adapting a post I wrote for my foundation site for here because, well, because I think it’s really good and would make a great lead up to Thanksgiving blog post. I thought after what we as country just went through having to experience the childishness that accompanied s years general election, that a word from someone who worked so successfully with children is just what the doctor ordered. So I ordered it.

And then Colorado Springs happened. You’ve heard of that incident. Five dead. Nineteen wounded. One nut case up with a f-ing assault rifle destroys the dreams of 24 People because he has a “right” to carry an assault weapon into a crowd and start firing. Of course you know that same day in Philadelphia, Mississippi nut case or nut cases unknown shot seven people, killing one, over a dice game.

If you’re keeping score, those are mass shootings #26 and 27 in the US for the month of November. Not the year – for November’s, which still has 10 days to go. One of them is Thanksgiving. Are you still thankful we have the “right” to carry guns at will? Maybe this will help. How are 602 mass shootings for this year.

It’s time to stop this madness.

The  post that  I was going to rework, you can read it here. And actually if I were you I would. It’s a whole lot happier and more positive than this dreck.

The theme running through that post is based in an idea voiced by Fred Rogers in his acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award, bestowed to him at the 24th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards in 1997, “All of us have special ones who loved us into being.” What a wonderful way of thinking of how we have become who we are, that there are people who have loved us into being. Gratitude is not, and should not, be an exercise is saying thanks for what we have, for in truth we will not always have. We should be expressing thanks because we are, because even when we do not have, we always will be.

Maybe the nut cases of the world didn’t have anybody to love them into being. We did. Be grateful. Be grateful you have people who have loved you into being. Say thank you to them, because without them, you are not the who you are.

Seriously, do yourself a favor, go read it. It will take you less time to read than you’ve spent reading this junk that I’ve written here.  Go find out about this idea of being loved into being. And then go out and love somebody that much.

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Used with permission

Trick or Treat -ish, Part Last

Michael 9 Comments

Well here we are. The big day. The day that began with people wearing costumes to ward off ghosts to a day to honor the dead, to a day for kids to fill their bags with candy, to the day when adults get as drunk as on St. Patrick’s Day. So here we are with some more of my ghoulish thoughts. Innumerable. And for the last time. (Yeah, yeah. Go ahead and cheer.)

 

THOUGHT 1

Did you know the 25% of all candy sold in the US is at Halloween. Take that St. Valentine! And last year, Americans spent nearly $500 million on costumes — for their pets! Both of those facts are courtesy of History.com. If anybody should know what has happened, it would be them. (Hmm I wonder…if anybody would know what has happened, it should be them. I’m not sure which way. If anybody has an strong opinion on that, I’d love to hear about it. Anyway…) I think that’s a TREAT, or at least it’s pretty cute.

According to the American Addiction Center, Halloween is the fifth booziest American holiday. That’s plenty enough on that topic. TRICK

 

THOUGHT 2

You might have seen over the weekend news about the tragedy in South Korea – over 150 people were killed and another 130-plus injured in a crowd surge. The details of what initiated the stampede were not clear by the last time I checked the news. What was known is that it started at a Halloween party and many of the victims were in costume. I’m a country not known for celebrating Halloween. TRICK, BAD TRICK.

I’m sure you didn’t see this in the news but around here almost every community’s fire company’s held Halloween parades, costume parties, and “Truck or Treats.” SUPER FUN BIG TREAT!!

 

THOUGHT 3

There is only one week left till the American general election. I hate to start a sentence like this but…I remember when candidates had pithy little sayings (remember All the way with LBJ?), and then they’d even mention some of their qualifications or at least attributes. Now it is more a matter of how bad can you portray your opponent? Here in my neck of the woods we’ve heard candidates called extreme, dangerous, radical, a fraud, and delusional. Imagine going into a job interview and telling your prospective boss, “You should hire me. I can’t give you any good reason to, but I can tell you that other guy who was just here is delusional.” How can you even say that in an ad. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. TRICK, DISGUSTING TRICK.

Yesterday was National Candy Corn Day. Candy corn is a superfood and a perfect food. I know because I said so here.  I also said, “As far as candy goes, Candy Corn is a healthy snack. Umm, healthier snack. Each serving, officially 15 pieces or one generous handful, is fat and cholesterol free, low sodium, and contains 22 grams of sugar and only 110 calories. Unlike real corn it is also fiber free so they’ll be no uncomfortable bloating.” What more could you ask for? (What more can you ask for? I have to research conditional tenses before next week. Anyway…) Candy corn leaves a good taste in my mouth. SUPER BIG BETTER THAN PEANUT BUTTER TREAT!!!

BONUS THOUGHT

Did you know we are forever learning, growing, and evolving, and are perpetual works in progress on a permanent quest for improvement. Read why we say never resist a temporary inconvenience if it results in a permanent improvement at ROAMcare.org. (Believe me, it will be a TREAT!)

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Happy Holidays

Michael 4 Comments

Today in the USA it is Columbus Day. That’s what it says in the Federal Register. Americans being Americans can’t let anything happen without controversy so the holiday named for a man who never set foot on North American soil is called by a few other names so we aren’t honoring the man who forcibly conquered entire populations of people who were here when he never set foot on American soil. But that’s a different post for a different day. Today’s post is just to wish you a happy day because for 99.7% of us, that’s all we’re gonna get.

The United States of America has 11 federal holidays. Proposals are floating around Washington to approve 7 more. And there are a handful of days (Armed Forces Day Inauguration Day, and others) which grant federal employees days off but have not been elevate to the rank of “Holiday.” Not that it would matter. There is a law on the books that says the federal government cannot force any state to observe a federal holiday and it cannot prevent any state from declaring its own holiday(s). I guess that’s the technical difference between a federal holiday and a national holiday.

Of those 18 holidays, only 7 are actually fixed days that commemorate something that happened that day either by history or tradition. Five of the approved holidays – New Years, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Veterans Day, and Christmas) are celebrated the same day every year. Thanksgiving is always the fourth Thursday of November regardless of date (likely to make the scheduling for Black Friday easier). Two of the six holidays that float so they will always result in 3 day weekends supposedly commemorate peoples’ birthdays (Martin Luther King, Jr. and George Washington) and you’d think if we were celebrating birthdays we’d celebrate it on the birthday date, but…well. Americans. What can I say?

Those floating days are important to the narrative here so let’s keep them, and 5 of the proposed 7 federal holidays that may join their ranks, in mind. The Uniform Monday Holiday Act (yeah, that’s what it’s called) of 1968 was enacted to create more three day weekend opportunities for employees. That’s about it. Oh and that’s the act that made Columbus Day an official federal holiday, so it instituted 2 things of controversy with one law. (Originally Veterans Day was also assigned to a floating Monday but reverted to November 11 in 1978.) Those federal employees are important here now too. Let’s keep them in mind now.

So, if you are a federal employee, Happy Columbus Day. Enjoy your day off.  Everybody else. Get back to work. Congress only has the power to enact federal holidays and grant days off, premium pay, or any other perk of the law for employees of federal institutions. Everybody else. Sorry. Unless you have a really generous boss, no law gives you those days off. Nope. It’s not one of your rights either. Generally, since the 1970s most business still conduct business on almost every day of the year.

If you’re like me and have always worked in hospitals or organized health care settings, emergency services, or some entertainment fields, every day, whether weekday, Saturday , Sunday, or holiday, could be a day of work. Some banks and schools celebrate every holiday and then some and might have more than just those extra 11 days off. But for many, holidays today are not like the holidays of the past. Few people experience days off or holiday celebrations for more than for New Years, Independence Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Which incidentally were the first four recognized federal holidays. You know what? Maybe that just about right.

So allow me to wish you a happy day. Even if you don’t want to call it anything!

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Why settle for a result where everyone loses? It’s better when everyone wins! Don’t compromise. Collaborate instead! Read now we do it at www.roamcare.org.

No, not yet

Michael Leave a comment

Across the USA and Canada, billions of people are celebrating Labor and or Labour Day. So there are probably millions of bloggers publishing the collective histories of the holidays. (Do you suppose there was some collusion that two countries came up with the same holiday within months of each other? It couldn’t have been coincidence, could it?) The few who don’t believe in organized labor but are more than happy to take the extra day off – with pay even – are celebrating the last day of summer. Now you see, that’s the one I don’t believe in.

Blog ArtFor as long as I can remember, which stretches back almost to halfway through the last century, Memorial Day has always been the “unofficial start of summer” and Labor Day its “unofficial ” end. Even the meteorologists get in on it, calling September 1 the start of Meteorologic Fall. According to my calendar, Fall doesn’t happen until the 22d day of this month and September 1 was National Tofu Day.

Yes I firmly believe Labor Day is NOT the end of summer. We might have furniture sales, we may frown on wearing white, and the pools might be closed, but the sun is still high in the sky, leaves are still high in the trees, and daytime temperatures are high enough to threaten heat stroke. That last point will be made several times, no, several thousand times over as high school and college athletes fall to the ground under the stifling weight and closeness of helmets and other protective gear in heat related injuries requiring no opponent contact, and marching band musicians and performers will do likewise in their often plumage featured uniforms designed for the coolness of autumn and the coldness of winter, football being a fall sport that often stretches into the still next season. We may not wear white but delivery and parcel service drivers everywhere will still be wearing short pants, and female TV news anchors won’t be giving up their sleeveless tops just yet. The pools and water parks might close but the lakes and swimming holes are still in business.

No, Labor Day is NOT the end of summer. We might be inundated with pumpkin spice everything and the food magazines may be featuring desserts with the classic fall warming spices, but in the backyard gardens the pumpkins are still only softball size on their vines next to the ripening tomato plants, loaded pepper plants, and never ending zucchini vines. Yard care still requires a lawn mower while the leaf rake and blowers stay hung on their hooks in the backyard garden sheds. Apple cider flavored donut holes may be featured in bakeries but cider presses are still idle waiting for the featured ingredient to ripen naturally.

So…Labor Day is the end of summer? Uh, no, not yet. Once again man makes up some oddball “rule”and then wonders why nature won’t follow suit. Well for me, I’m sticking with Mother Nature. Labor Day is NOT the end of summer. Stay tuned though. In a little less than a month you can consider having that tune up done on your snow blower. 

The grass in your side of the fence can be green too. The grass is reality, water is the motivation. Put enough motivation into a plan and you can accomplish anything. Let your motivation flow like water at www.roamcare.org. While you’re there, check out the rest of our site, then share us with your friends and family!

Revisiting the Middle Seat

Michael 4 Comments

Back in July of 2020, July 9 to be exact, I published “The Middle Seat Hump Syndrome,” a clever little ditty if I say so myself wherein I compared the then fairly new encounter with the coronavirus, which we don’t even call it that any more. Toward the end of an honest to gosh true tale of summer family vacationing, I said with much assurance that we will all be fine in the long run. Guess what? I was right! Politicians, social media “experts” in-laws, naysayers, leftist, rightists, centrists all aside, I was right! We are pretty much okay as long as you don’t ask the 6.35 million people who lost their lives. Yes that number could have been smaller had we paid less attention to the politicians, social media “experts” in-laws, naysayers, leftist, rightists, but we’re stupid so we didn’t. Maybe next time we will.

Because today is the Fourth of July, which of course everybody knows is officially American Independence Day, and because the entire country is out there burning gas we don’t have to pursue their right to a family vacation, I thought I’d regale you again, with “The Middle Seat Hump Sydrome,” with that pesky typo corrected even!

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You need to be of a certain age to remember summer vacations in the family car with enough family that it filled all the seats, three across, and the middle seat made the leg room in coach on Delta look generous for there, right where your feet wanted to be, was “the hump,” the growth in the floorboard that rose nearly to seat level, to allow whatever it was that transferred the up and downs of the engine to the round and round of the rear wheels to make it’s way from the motor to the where the rubber met the road. I am of that age and had been on those vacations and I got that middle seat.

It wasn’t always like that. For a while there were just two of us in the back and we would each get out own window seats with plenty of room between for the picnic basket and cooler that were only opened at planned stops along the way. Then the third one came along. At first it wasn’t such a big deal. She started out in the baby seat in the middle of the front seat (yes, that’s where we put them when we used them back then). After she outgrew that space, she shifted to the back but because those short, stubby legs didn’t even make it off the seat, the hump was not impediment to her comfort. Eventually though, she grew and with that, so did the complaining. “I don’t want to sit on the hump!” And the word came from the front, “take turns.” From then on, whenever the car stopped, the back seat crowd reshuffled, and everyone got a turn being uncomfortable where we decidedly didn’t want to be.

That’s a little like what’s going on in the world now. Each time it appears to be stopping, or at least slowing enough to risk opening the door and get off this crazy ride, the virus comes back, and we have to reshuffle. Do we limit contact, should we close down again, does this mask make my nose look big? Regardless of the answer, some bodies are going to end up decidedly where they don’t want to be doing what they’d rather not be doing or not doing what they’d rather do. Think of the world as an early ’64 Chevrolet and were all taking turns sitting on the hump.

I’m going to spoil the ending for you. It all works out. Nobody was permanently damaged from sitting with a leg there and the other one there. We climbed out of the backseat a little stiff and a little sore but we made. We’ll make it through this also. Maybe a little worse for the wear after this ride that you are certain we got lost on because no way it should be taking this long, but eventually we are going to climb back out into the world.

Middle seat hump syndrome was never that horrible and may have been the inspiration for some future engineer to design SUVs with higher cabins that clear all those mechanical doodads or to shift the driving wheels to the front and obviate the need for a hump running down the middle if the cars interior. Along those same lines it could be someday we might even get to go out and not have to check that we have our masks with us. We just have to wait for the right expert to come up with the right solution. They are out there. There will find it.

In the meanwhile, Happy Motoring!

roamcare_logo-3If you haven’t had a chance to visit ROAMcare yet, stop by, refresh your enthusiasm and read our blogs, check out the Moments of Motivation, or just wander around the site. Everybody is always welcome.

I’ll have mine with coffee please

Michael 2 Comments

This is the day sweet toothed snackers and pastry enthusiasts wait for every year – Pi Day, or as probably a large percentage of those pie eaters would write it out, and for as much as they care of its significance – Pie Day. Now that opens a whole new line of thought. Exactly what does pi actually do in the real world? And while we’re at it, why pi?

That second question is easier to answer. Everybody, even those insisting on it being Pie Day, knows pi (without the ‘e’) has something to do with math and some of those everybodies might even know it’s most closely associated with circles. Pi is the relationship of a circle’s, any circle’s circumference to its diameter. There’s a great two-minute video here that demonstrates that with a touch of humor and extra pepperoni. Although the concept of pi (again, without the ‘e’) was first demonstrated in the third century B.C., it wasn’t until 1706 on this side of the Common Era dividing line that British mathematician William Jones decided the Greek letter and symbol would make a dandy stand in for 3.14 etc.etc.etc. in calculations. But Leonhard Euler (yes, the is THE Euler) made it popular in his textbooks and justified the Greek Pi, corresponding to P, because pi is all about the perimeter (or circumference) of a circle. (In case you’re wondering, pie (with the ‘e’) has been around since about 6,000 B.C..)

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Now the first question isn’t actually hard to answer. It is hard to pin it down to less than a few hundred dozen applications that are possible only because somebody, sometime, somewhere worked out the calculations to make whatever it is work, using pi. These include radio waves that not only make AM radio possible, but blue tooth that is powering those high priced ear buds you have sitting on your desk.  Not straying too far from there, the GPS function of your phone wouldn’t be possible today if some engineer hadn’t tossed pi into an equation or three. And just that you can talk to your phone or home assistant is possible because voice recognition schemes all use pi to calculate and translate vocal waveforms into computerese. But, you ask, what can you do with it?

If you so wanted to, you could use pi to calculate how much water it takes to fill the kid’s backyard swimming pool, how much stain you need to cover the floor of the gazebo, or how much frosting to make to adequately decorate the surprise party birthday cake. Even more practical is determining what size electrical conduit to buy for that remodel you’re DIY-ing, or how much pie filling you need for the deep dish apple pie the kids are expecting after dinner. Yes, I know, there are charts and recipes for all these things. But now you know you could calculate the answer if all the computers in the world suddenly stopped working or worse, decided to take over and not talk to us anymore. Not too far-fetched you know. Didn’t you ever see “Colossus: The Forbin Project?” (Or one not so evil, like EMARAC from “Desk Set.” If the computers are going to take over, that’s the one I want, as long as Ms. Warriner comes with it.)

So now, go off and eat your pie today, today being Pi Day, or Pie Day if you must. And remember, ask not what pi can do for you, ask if you get whipped cream with it!

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