Oh, the holidays

Wow, you blink and a fortnight is gone. Here I was feeling good about keeping up the Web log which is good therapy but all of a sudden the last thing I wrote was about the dead Beethoven.

The dead Beethoven!

How about the dead Web logger?

My aunt, my Auntie Rose, used to say, "Oh, the holidays." It would absolve you of any guilt over anything.  This was the same aunt who loved "The Thorn Birds," remember? And whose photographs miraculously survived the Great Flood of '08.

"Oh, the holidays," Auntie Rose used to say. And all would be forgiven.

Once my brother George and I were staying with Auntie Rose in California where she lived in, you guessed it, Santa Rosa. And something went wrong, we were all fighting about something, Auntie Rose was mad about something.

And I said, or George said, "Oh, Auntie Rose, I'm sorry. It's just the holidays --"

And she said: "Oh, the holidays."

And all was forgiven!

Anyway, I hope my spotty Web logging can be likewise forgiven. Oh, the holidays. We went to my sister's in East Aurora for Christmas. I took a picture of her magnificent tree. Katie always has these strange skinny trees and they would look terrible in anyone else's hands but in her hands they look like out of Martha Stewart magazine.

What a picture! I must have been into the eggnog. On the Second Day of Christmas I made amazing cookies, the recipe to which I shall presently share. Yesterday, George and I and Georgie and Barbara celebrated the Fourth Day of Christmas by viewing the Festival of Trees at the one, the only, the iconic Robert Moses Power Plant.

And do not fall over from shock but I have been doing a lot of work pulling the book together. Hence the gap in the Web log. But I will be more reliable correspondent. I have to say I enjoy it. It is good therapy.

Oh, the holidays.

They continue!