I love make overs—this time thrift store makeovers. These transformations are relatively easy and quick to do! Try yard sales or thrift stores—go hunting for what could be instead of what’s there!
Take old lamp shades-remove the shade part-if necessary, paint the metal frames—hang upside down as planters!
Spray paint an old cookie sheet—use contact paper for the flat bottom and turn it into a magnetic memo board!
Turn any old picture into a chalk board with chalk board paint!
Glue a pie pan to a candle holder and it becomes…a candle holder…LOL
Turn an old diskette holder into a mini greenhouse!
In Cantonese, it’s known as the “Snake’s Head Moth” and is said to resemble a cobra. In Indonesia, locals call it Kupu Gajah: the elephant, or “large” butterfly. And large it is!
This is one of the largest insects in the world, and one of the top three biggest moths. Named after a Titan of Greek mythology, the Atlas moth lives up to its name.
It’s a member of the Saturnids: a family known for their dazzling colors and enormous size, and it certainly doesn’t let the family down.
Atlas moths inhabit tropical forests and shrub lands across South and Southeast Asia.
They have the largest wing area of any moth, and its body is disproportionally small in comparison to its wings. This surface area gives it an advantage when it comes to defending against predators, but it makes the animal cumbersome in flight. As such, it prefers to relax for its short life as an adult moth, only taking action in defense or response to the smell of a mate.
These gentle giants can cause havoc in a citrus plantation, but they’re becoming very popular for their silk. This has led to a lot of research being done to figure out what they like to eat and the best living conditions for them. They also have some cool defense mechanisms!
Let’s take a look at some of the things that make this huge insect so special.
Interesting Atlas Moth Facts
They are the third largest moth in the world
Their wingspan can measure up to 9.4 in and only the white witch (Thysania agrippina) and Attacus caesar moth have surpassed it. The white witch (Thysania agrippina) holds the record with an incredible 12 in wingspan.
They don’t eat
At least, once they emerge as adults, that’s the end of their feeding.
The mature moths have vestigial mouth parts that are small and useless, and as such, the adult stage will only live long enough to mate, which is usually no longer than a couple of weeks.
Atlas moths fly as little as possible
This means that they’re reluctant to use up their precious energy, and with such cumbersome wings, flying is quite resource-intensive. Instead, they spend most of their time within a short distance of the site of their emergence.
At night, or in the evening, they use their huge antennae, each one built like an FM radio antenna, to pick up on pheromone cues from the opposite sex.
Their wing motion is a species feature
Most insects have a rigidity to their wings that aids them in flight. In moths, the beating of a wing involves twisting and bending, which makes the motion very hard to analyze. Researchers trying to figure out the mechanics behind a moth’s flight found it too complex to compare against non-deformable wing simulations.
It’s thought that the nature of a wing’s motion in insects is so unique that it can be used to tell species apart. There’s still quite a lot that doesn’t make sense with these wing motions, and unlocking the mysteries might help engineers design new technologies.
They have a high mortality rate
Moths, like most (if not all) insects, reproduce using what’s known as R-strategy.
This is basically the scatter-gun approach to making babies, where an animal gets out as many eggs and offspring as possible and hopes for the best.
In Atlas moths, this translates to an 89% mortality rate, with most larvae dying not long after hatching from their eggs.
Their silk is prized
Though the silk from the silkworm tends to be produced in longer strands, it’s said that Atlas moth silk is stronger and more durable as a textile.
These properties have led to the cocoons being traditionally used as coin purses in parts of Taiwan, and have led also to more contemporary applications in shoes, jackets, lampshades and scarfs.
This has led to a lot of information on how to rear them
Despite the fact that each species has a supporting role in the sustainability of the ecosystem we live in, it seems like the world only takes an interest in one if there’s a financial gain to be made from it.
Fortunately for the Atlas moth, the quality of its silk has prevented it from being considered a pest – even though it eats a bunch of mango leaves – and instead, great care has been placed in the healthy rearing of captive specimens, to the point where there are entire catalogues of information on how to design the best artificial diet for them.
This information is primarily designed to help people get the best possible silk out of the caterpillars, but it’s also interesting for hobbyists and researchers alike.
The larvae have butt canons
When threatened, the caterpillars of this moth have a very irritating defense.
There are special glands in the abdomen that contain histamine, a compound responsible for allergy symptoms (the one that you take antihistamines to suppress), that, in response to a threat, explode out of pressurized channels to deter predators.
They also look like poo
The bizarre-looking caterpillar of the atlas moth is thought to mimic bird feces as a way of avoiding predation. It produces a waxy white secretion that does make it look a lot like something even less appetizing than a caterpillar.
This wax also functions as a physical barrier against ants and parasites and presumably helps the animal maintain hydration.
Atlas moths even mimic snakes
The adult moth has a dappled and enormous wing area that is said to resemble a snake.
When attacked, they’ve been known to thrash around on the ground, apparently mimicking an uncurling serpent. They’re also known to play dead, blending in with the leaf litter of the forest.
Their local name in Cantonese translates to “snake’s head moth” because of the protrusions on the wings resembling a snake’s head.
June’s third birthstone, moonstone, was named by the Roman natural historian Pliny, who wrote that moonstone’s shimmery appearance shifted with the phases of the moon.
The most common moonstone comes from the mineral adularia, named for an early mining site near Mt. Adular in Switzerland that supplied this gemstone. This site also birthed the term adularescence, which refers to the stone’s milky glow, like moonlight floating on water.
Moonstone is composed of microscopic layers of feldspar that scatter light to cause this billowy effect of adularescence. Thinner layers produce a bluish sheen, and thicker layers look white. Moonstone gems come in a range of colors spanning yellow, gray, green, blue, peach, and pink, sometimes displaying a star or cat’s eye.
The finest classical moonstones, colorlessly transparent with a blue shimmer, come from Sri Lanka. Since these sources of high-quality blue moonstones have essentially been mined out, prices have risen sharply.
Moonstones are also found in India, Australia, Myanmar, Madagascar, and the United States. Indian gemstones, which are brown, green, or orange in color, are more abundant and affordably priced than their classical blue counterparts.
This beautiful gemstone’s weakness is its relatively low hardness of 6 on the Mohs scale, making it prone to stress cracking and cleaving. Care is required with moonstone jewelry like rings or bracelets; so, sometimes brooches and pendants are preferred for long term durability.
(This article from 2018, written by Thomas Lipscomb, details briefly the problems with governmental records and their safekeeping. Of note is former President Obama and former Secretary of State Clinton and their egregious behavior with destroying public records.)
By Thomas Lipscomb
June 10, 2018
In the middle of directing the difficult task of transferring the historically important records of the Obama administration into the National Archives, the archivist in charge, David Ferriero, ran into a serious problem: A lot of key records are missing.
A first-rate librarian, Ferriero has been driving a much-needed digital overhaul and expansion of the National Archives over the nine years of his appointment. This will greatly improve the ability of digital search locally and remotely, as well as accessing the files themselves.
To support this effort, in 2014 President Obama signed the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments. For the first time electronic government records were placed under the 1950 Federal Records Act. The new law also included updates clarifying “the responsibilities of federal government officials when using non-government email systems” and empowering “the National Archives to safeguard original and classified records from unauthorized removal.” Additionally, it gives the Archivist of the United States the final authority in determining just what is a government record.
(Pat’s Note: How is that constitutional? No one has power superseding the President.)
And yet the accumulation of recent congressional testimony has made it clear that the Obama administration itself engaged in the wholesale destruction and “loss” of tens of thousands of government records covered under the act as well as the intentional evasion of the government records recording system by engaging in private email exchanges. So far, former President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Lynch and several EPA officials have been named as offenders. The IRS suffered record “losses” as well. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy called it “an unauthorized private communications system for official business for the patent purpose of defeating federal record-keeping and disclosure laws.”
Clearly, America’s National Archives is facing the first major challenge to its historic role in preserving the records of the United States. What good is the National Archives administering a presidential library, like the planned Obama library in Chicago, if it is missing critical records of interest to scholars? And what’s to prevent evasion of the entire federal records system by subsequent administrations to suit current politics rather than serve scholars for centuries to come?
The National Archives in Washington has evolved from a few dusty shelves in 1934 to an independent agency with over 40 facilities nationwide. These include field archives, military records, Federal Records Centers, 13 presidential libraries, the Federal Register, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
Its electronic records system alone, which only began in 2008, has already compiled close to 1 billion unique files from over 100 federal agencies totaling well over 400 terrabytes. The archive describes itself as “the U.S. Government’s collection of documents that records important events in American history. … the Government agency that preserves and maintains these materials and makes them available for research.”
Federal records have solved historical mysteries and provided key information ever since the archive’s founding. Adm. Hyman Rickover’s investigations there proved his suspicion that the U.S. battleship Maine had not been sunk by a Spanish mine, but rather an explosion caused by careless proximity of gunpowder storage to coal bunkers.
And in my own research, I found a detailed report of the debriefing of Nazi Deputy Reichsfuhrer Rudolf Hess by MI6 the day after he parachuted into Scotland — a report that was not in the British Archives. It established that in May 1941, over seven months before the Wannsee Conference formalized the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” Hess had told the British: “We are exterminating the Jews.” It established as lies the Allies’ claims they only learned about the Holocaust later.
The archive sensibly only collects a fraction of the federal records for its permanent archive. That number varies between 2 percent and 5 percent of the total. That can be a good thing, according to historian Arthur Herman. “In studying a bureaucracy, too much evidence may be a greater danger than too little,” he said. “The amount of material often seems to be inversely proportionate to the value of its evidence.”
And Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis points out that it is not always the record itself that is key: “Sometimes it is the marginalia. There were 28,000 notations in the John Adams collection that were critical to my interpretation of the relationship between John and Abigail Adams.”
And marginalia may be the key to solving the puzzle of just what the late Sandy Berger, acting as former President Bill Clinton’s representative, was destroying during his 2005 trips into the National Archives, where he stuffed papers into his clothing. Berger only got away with this twice before archive personnel kept tabs on him, but the first trips involved as yet uncatalogued material so no one really knows what he took. But there seemed to be copies in the archive of everything they caught him with. And archival libraries dependent upon physical papers are vulnerable.
Every archive in the world suffers attacks, resulting in the theft of its records, the amending or destroying of them, and the archive has had five it knows of since Berger. Digital storage and authentication will be a great help in securing all holdings.
Berger was supposedly reviewing records for a Clinton response to the 9/11 Commission’s considerations of mistakes made leading up to the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Dean Emeritus of Boston University Law School Ronald Cass wonders if there was telling marginalia by Clinton or others on some of these documents that were not on the file copies. The Clintons seemed to have a longstanding problem with records, since the disappearance in 1994 and reappearance in 1996 of the subpoenaed Rose Law Firm files in the Clintons’ private White House quarters.
Now the National Archives is faced with Hillary Clinton’s history-making assault on government records while secretary of state, which Cass describes as fitting a pattern of “destroy, deny and corrupt the process.” (This is no doubt why Harvard just awarded her the Radcliffe Medal citing her “transformative impact on society.”)
How does David Ferriero plan to deal with this unique challenge to his institution? First, it’s not just his problem, although he must address the realities of gaps in the record and how it will affect plans for the new Obama presidential library. But will there be penalties for violating the 2014 law? Is it even possible to continue the great tradition of maintaining an authentic record center for the United States that President Franklin Roosevelt founded 83 years ago, if that law is not supported?
Obama’s presidential library…
Thomas H. Lipscomb is the founding publisher of Times Books. His news reporting has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, New York Sun and other papers. As a digital entrepreneur he has founded and served as CEO of two public companies based upon his patents.
Today is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and I found an article on the History.com website detailing some little-known facts about that horrible event.
Booth initially planned to kidnap Lincoln.
After meeting with Confederate spies in the summer of 1864, Booth spearheaded a plot to abduct Lincoln, bring him to the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, and use him as a bargaining chip to secure the release of rebel prisoners. On March 17, 1865, Booth and his fellow conspirators hid along a country road in Washington, D.C., intending to commandeer the presidential carriage that was scheduled to carry Lincoln to a matinee performance of a play at Campbell Hospital to benefit wounded soldiers. Lincoln, however, had a change of plans and never showed. Some of the co-conspirators abandoned the plot thereafter, and Booth soon had a change of plans as well. After the fall of Richmond and Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, he decided to kill, rather than kidnap, Lincoln with help from the remaining co-conspirators.
Ulysses S. Grant was originally scheduled to be at Lincoln’s side.
Just days after accepting Lee’s surrender, the Union general accepted Lincoln’s invitation to attend “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre on the evening of April 14, 1865. The general’s wife, however, had recently been the victim of Mary Todd Lincoln’s acid tongue and wanted no part of a night on the town with the first lady. Grant backed out, citing the couple’s desire to travel to New Jersey to see their children. Lincoln had a surprisingly difficult time finding a replacement. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax and even son Robert Todd Lincoln turned down the tickets before Clara Harris, daughter of New York Senator Ira Harris, and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone, accepted.
Lincoln’s murder was part of a larger plot to decapitate the government.
Booth and his conspirators plotted to not only kill Lincoln, but Grant, Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson. Grant’s unexpected departure removed him as a target, and George Atzerodt lost his nerve and failed to follow through on his assignment to slay Johnson at his residence in the Kirkwood House hotel. At the same time Booth shot Lincoln, Lewis Powell stormed Seward’s house and repeatedly stabbed the cabinet member, who was bedridden after a near-fatal carriage accident. Seward somehow survived the savage attack.
The lives of the Lincolns’ guests at Ford’s Theatre ended in tragedy as well.
After shooting Lincoln, Booth slashed Rathbone’s left arm from his elbow to his shoulder. Rathbone recovered from the stab wounds but not from the trauma of that night. After marrying Harris—who also happened to be his stepsister—in 1867, he grew increasingly erratic and perhaps suffered from post-traumatic stress. Two days before Christmas in 1883, he fatally shot and stabbed his wife before stabbing himself repeatedly in a suicide attempt. Once again, however, he survived the knife wounds. Rathbone lived out the remaining three decades of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane. (The fourth member of the presidential box on the night of the assassination, Mary Todd Lincoln, was herself institutionalized in 1875.)
Lincoln’s death was not universally mourned in the North.
As Martha Hodes recounts in her book Mourning Lincoln, some Northerners who thought Lincoln too dictatorial and some Radical Republicans who thought him too lenient toward the Confederacy welcomed news of his assassination. After a meeting of Radical Republicans hours after the shooting, Indiana Congressman George Julian recorded in his diary that the “universal feeling among radical men here is that his death is a godsend.” Michigan Senator Zachariah Chandler wrote to his wife that God had permitted Lincoln to live only “as long as he was useful and then substituted a better man (Johnson) to finish the work.”
Mary Todd Lincoln thought the vice president was involved in the conspiracy.
Hours before shooting Lincoln, Booth had mysteriously called on Johnson at the Kirkwood House and left a handwritten calling card that read: “Don’t wish to disturb you. Are you at home? J. Wilkes Booth.” The first lady, as she wrote to a friend, believed “that miserable inebriate Johnson had cognizance of my husband’s death. Why was that card of Booth’s found in his box? Some acquaintance certainly existed.” Atzerodt’s failure to attack the vice president was even seen by some as proof of Johnson’s complicity.
Lincoln and Booth had a previous encounter at Ford’s Theatre.
On November 9, 1863, the Lincolns watched a performance of “The Marble Heart” starring John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre. Mary Clay, one of Lincoln’s guests, recounted after the assassination that “twice Booth in uttering disagreeable threats in the play came very near and put his finger close to Mr. Lincoln’s face.” After Booth gestured menacingly toward the president a third time, Clay said, “Mr. Lincoln, he looks as if he meant that for you.” The president replied, “Well, he does look pretty sharp at me, doesn’t he?”
Lincoln’s deathbed quickly became a tourist attraction.
In the hours after Lincoln died in the back bedroom of William Petersen’s boardinghouse across the street from Ford’s Theatre, souvenir hunters ransacked the property and snatched numerous relics of the martyred president. Deciding to cash in himself, Petersen began to charge admission to the hundreds of curiosity-seekers who came each day to see Lincoln’s bloody deathbed, which incredibly continued to be slept in by tenant William Clark each night. Petersen fell into financial difficulty in 1871 and died after being found on the lawn of the Smithsonian Institution following an opium overdose.
Robert Todd Lincoln was in close proximity to two other presidential assassinations.
Sixteen years after being bedside for his father’s death, Robert Todd Lincoln was serving as President James A. Garfield’s secretary of war when he witnessed Charles Guiteau fire two gunshots that mortally wounded the chief executive inside a Washington, D.C., train station. On September 6, 1901, Lincoln arrived in Buffalo to attend the Pan-American Expo at the invitation of William McKinley only to learn that the president had just been shot. Lincoln visited McKinley’s bedside several times before the president ultimately succumbed to his wounds.
Another deadly tragedy struck Ford’s Theatre during the funeral of Booth’s brother.
When John T. Ford attempted to reopen Ford’s Theater to performances on July 10, 1865, Stanton, who was “opposed to its ever being again used as a place of public amusement,” dispatched heavily armed soldiers to prevent the show from going on. The federal government eventually purchased Ford’s Theatre for $100,000, gutted the auditorium and converted the building into war department offices. On June 9, 1893, at the precise moment when funeral services for Edwin Booth began inside New York’s Church of the Transfiguration, three floors of Ford’s Theatre collapsed into the basement and killed 22 federal workers.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines more than a half million words and it took more than seventy years to research and write the original “twelve tombstone-size volumes.” It is the gold standard of the English language.
On August 14, 1879, Scottish polymath James Murray was given the go-ahead by the Philological Society of England to begin the work of tracing the history of every single word in the English language and providing a definition faithful to its meaning. As the editor of the OED, he had the task of finding all the words as used in classical and standard written works in English. His historical starting point was the year 1150 AD.
Denholm, birthplace of James Murray, is located in the Scottish Borders Council Area
Murray was a “self-educated country boy” from the Scottish Borders village of Denholm. He had to leave school at fourteen for lack of funds, but he continued learning on his own, with a special interest in etymology — “He was captivated by words and strange languages.”
Murray mastered Spanish, French, Catalan, Italian and Latin and, “to a lesser degree”, Portuguese, Vaudois, and Provençal, as well as other various dialects. He also acquired a working knowledge of Gaelic, Dutch, German, Danish, Slavonic and Russian. He knew Hebrew and Syriac well enough to sight read the Old Testament and picked up to a lesser degree Coptic, Phoenician and Arabic. He taught school and worked in a bank as an administrator in London, but his real passion was language.
James Murray lived in this Oxford home on Banbury Road from 1885-1915
By 1879, at the age of forty-two, James Murray began his real life’s work creating the Oxford English Dictionary. All eleven of his children lived to maturity and they, his wife, and eventually, grandchildren all helped in the project. He was permitted to use an iron shed on the property of the school where he taught, which he had outfitted with a thousand pigeon-holed rack to hold the quotations slips for the words.
Before long, the “scriptorium” was ready and the project was begun. Through the Philological Society he issued “An Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public” in Great Britain, America and the British Colonies, asking for a thousand readers for the next three years to supply him with good quotations, thus determining how various English words were used over the centuries. They were to avoid Bible Concordances, Shakespeare, and Edmund Burke — sources already combed.
Image Credit: Oxford University Press, LA Times
Dictionary slips and their sorting became a major part of life for the Murray family. People from all over the world sent in slips with the desired information. Several sub-editors and the children sorted through them and into the pigeon holes they went. One of Murray’s sons provided 27,000 quotations on his own, according to the introduction in the first volume.
The entire story is amazing — the perseverance, erudition and dedication of Murray became legendary, as did some of the characters that sent in quotes. One of the best, most erudite and apparently brilliant contributors turned out to be a murderer from America, locked up in a prison for the criminally insane in England! (As recounted in “The Professor and the Madman” by Simon Winchester).
Seven of the twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary
When William Chester Minor heard about the project, he heavily got involved with it. At that point in his life, the former American army surgeon was a patient at Broadmoor (an asylum). William had murdered a stranger named George Merrett in 1872 due to paranoia. The assailant thought that his victim had broken into his room. The court ruled that William was not guilty by reason of insanity, and he was sent to the psychiatric facility in Crowthorne, Berkshire.
Image Credit: Unknown Author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In fact, William got a pension for his military service and was not adjudged to be dangerous. Therefore, he had access to comfortable housing and a plethora of books at the facility. This is why it is not surprising that he became one of the biggest contributors to the dictionary. He sent in more than 10,000 entries! It is true that the widowed Mrs. Merrett used to visit him and bring him books on his list. Even though Winchester’s writing suggests that they could have had an affair, the author did say he was unsure about this facet of the surgeon’s life.
Winchester further said this about the man— “Minor concentrated very hard, and some synapse(s) in his brain presumably fired in such a way as to eliminate his symptoms of schizophrenia.” All this time, James had no idea about William’s past. However, when he finally learned the truth, their relationship was unaffected. The lexicographer even described the “madman” as “a fine Christian gentleman, the same as myself.”
However, in 1902, William’s paranoia became worse. He had delusions wherein he was being abducted every night and was made to go as far as Istanbul to commit sexual assaults on children. Therefore, he cut off his own penis. By 1910, James campaigned for William’s release as well. Winston Churchill was the home secretary then and ordered that the patient be deported back to America.
There, William was admitted to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington D.C. (which is where his schizophrenia was diagnosed). He passed away in 1920 in Hartford, Connecticut. James had passed away in 1915 due to pleurisy. Up until that point, however, he continued to work hard on the dictionary come hell or high water. The year before his death, he was awarded an Oxford honorary doctorate. Moreover, despite being knighted for his efforts in 1908, James continued to be a relative outsider at the university.
After reading all the quotations sent in for a particular word, Murray would write the “concise, scholarly, accurate, and lovingly elegant definition for which the Dictionary is well known.” The task was enormously difficult but for thirty-five years Murray stuck to it till the day of his death.
The dictionary was completed after the two passed away, however, their contributions to the book cannot be ignored. Did you know that in the end, all the information was compiled in 10 volumes? There were 414,825 words that had been defined, and 1,827,306 citations were used to illustrate their meanings.
The magnificent story of this singular Christian lexicographer was finally told by Murray’s granddaughter K.M. Elizabeth Murray in “Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary,” (1977).
K.M. Elizabeth Murray
Words have meaning, but when a culture redefines the fixed understanding of words, demagogues take advantage of the uncertainty and chaos that results, to change the culture itself. We must be wary of the malleable ways that enemies of the original intent of words, deconstruct meaning, to the destruction of morality and truth.
Did you know that the book “The Professor and the Madman” was made into a movie with Mel Gibson and Sean Penn? The script was adapted from Simon Winchester’s book called ‘The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words.’ (It was, however, renamed ‘The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary’ for the audiences in America and Canada).
CHRISTMAS CARDS -The tradition of sending Christmas cards originated in the mid-1800s when a few people began to design handmade cards to send to family and friends. A man named John Calcott Horsley is credited as being the first to actually print Christmas cards. The card depicted a family enjoying the holiday, with scenes of people performing acts of charity. The card was inscribed: “Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year to You.” Some of the other cards of the era were rather bizarre!!!
CHRISTMAS GIFT! –
A greeting used on Christmas morning, with the first person saying it traditionally receiving a gift. The custom, which has been traced back to as early as 1844, is no longer observed but ‘Christmas gift!’, which used to be a far more popular Christmas greeting than ‘Merry Christmas!’, is still heard among older people.”
CHRISTMAS PICKLE – Pickle ornaments were considered a special decoration by many families in Germany where the fir tree was decorated on Christmas Eve. It was always the last ornament to be hung on the Christmas tree, with the parents hiding it in the green boughs among the other ornaments. When the children were allowed to view the tree they would begin gleefully searching for the pickle ornament. The children knew that whoever first found that special ornament would receive an extra little gift left by St. Nicholas for the most observant child.
EPIPHANY – January 6 is known in western Christian tradition as Epiphany. It goes by other names in various church traditions. In Hispanic and Latin culture, as well as some places in Europe, it is known as Three Kings’ Day. Because of differences in church calendars, mainly between the Eastern Orthodox and the western Catholic and Protestant traditions, both Christmas and Epiphany have been observed at different times in the past.
Epiphany is the climax of the Christmas Season and the Twelve Days of Christmas, which are counted from December 25th until January 5th. The day before Epiphany is the twelfth day of Christmas, and is sometimes called Twelfth Night, an occasion for feasting in some cultures. The term epiphany means to show” or “to make known” or even “to reveal.” In Western churches, it remembers the coming of the wise men bringing gifts to visit the Christ child, who by so doing “reveal” Jesus to the world as Lord and King.
GOD SPEED THE PLOUGH; PLOUGH MONDAY – God speed the plough, ‘a wish for success or prosperity,’ was originally a phrase in a 15th-century song sung by ploughmen on Plough Monday; the first Monday after the Twelfth Day, which is the end of the Christmas holidays, when farm laborers returned to the plough, soliciting ‘plough money’ to spend in celebration.
HARD CANDY CHRISTMAS – A bleak Christmas — one where the family is so low on money that everyone gets hard candy for Christmas instead of gifts. The phrase is the title of a song written by Carol Hall and sung by Dolly Parton: “Lord it’s like a hard candy Christmas.I’m barely getting through tomorrow.But still I won’t let Sorrow bring me way down.I’ll be fine and dandy.
MERRY CHRISTMAS – England of the Anglo-Saxon period and the Middle Ages was not a very happy place to be, let alone ‘merrie.’ So why the phrase “Merrie Christmas” indicating revelry and joyous spirits, as if England were one perpetual Christmastime? The answer is that the word ‘merrie’ originally meant merely ‘pleasing and delightful,’ not bubbling over with festive spirits, as it does today.
The same earlier meaning is found in the famous expression, ‘the merry month of May.'” Note: In “A Royal Duty,” Paul Burrell said the Queen preferred “Happy Christmas” because she believed “Merry Christmas” implies drunkenness.
SANTA CLAUS – Today, people around the world are familiar with the popularized depiction of Santa Claus: a chubby old gnome with a snow-colored beard, eight tiny reindeer, and an army of freckle-faced elves who leap at his beck and call.
Though commonly thought of as an American folk legend, Santa Claus owes most of his existence to old religious customs that came to this country with immigrants from Europe. Interwoven in our holiday tradition are the traditions of Spain, Germany, Italy and, above all, the Dutch Netherlands, where one of the clearest connections to the Santa tradition can be found.
Before becoming known in America as Santa Claus, this magical gift bearer was commonly referred to as “Sinter Claes” or “Sinterklass,” a Dutch language corruption of both the name and the religious title of Saint Nicholas, a fourth century bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church. And as Dutch tradition tells it, Sinterklass doesn’t travel by sled or live at the North Pole. He also doesn’t dress up in a red velvet suit trimmed with faux polar bear fur, or manage a year-round sweatshop staffed by toy-making elves.
Sinterklass
Making a list and checking it twice to keep an accurate record of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice throughout the year is a monumental task, even for a magical old dude like Sinterklass. So assisting him with his gift-giving enterprise is Zwarte Piet (literally “Black Peter”), a Moorish youth with an old school feathered cap on his head and 24-karat “bling” in his earlobes.
A smiling St. Nicholas, “De Goede Sint” (“The Good Saint”), and Black Pete ride their horse and donkey as Dutch children crowd around them in this artwork by Dutch writer and illustrator, Marie “Rie” Cramer, 1929
XMAS – “The X abbreviation of ‘Xmas’ for ‘Christmas’ is neither modern nor disrespectful. The notion that it is a new and vulgar representation of the word ‘Christmas’ seems to stem from the erroneous belief that the letter ‘X’ is used to stand for the word ‘Christ’ because of its resemblance to a cross, or that the abbreviation was deliberately concocted “to take the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas.” Actually, this usage is nearly as old as Christianity itself, and its origins lie in the fact that the first letter in the Greek word for ‘Christ’ is ‘chi,’ and the Greek letter ‘chi’ is represented by a symbol similar to the letter ‘X’ in the modern Roman alphabet.
Hence ‘Xmas’ is indeed perfectly legitimate abbreviation for the word ‘Christmas’ (just as ‘Xian’ is also sometimes used as an abbreviation of the word ‘Christian’). None of this means that Christians (and others) aren’t justified in feeling slighted when people write ‘Xmas’ rather than ‘Christmas,’ but the point is that the abbreviation was not created specifically for the purpose of demeaning Christ, Christians, Christianity, or Christmas — it’s a very old artifact of a very different language.
SHOPPING DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS – American retailer H. Gordon Selfridge (1856-1947) coined this expression ” __ shopping days until Christmas” while working for Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago. Later he coined the slogan “the customer is always right” when he opened Selfridge’s in London.
Marshall Field & Company gained notoriety for a number of unique promotions and features, like the Great Tree, which was a part of the store’s Christmas celebrations. In late fall, the phrase “looking ahead to the holidays” appeared in ads, with a full Christmas promotion following after Thanksgiving. “The Store of the Christmas Spirit,” “A Gift from Field’s Means More,” and “Christmas isn’t Christmas without a day at Marshall Field & Company” were advertising lines used to promote the store during the holidays.
Families lined up to eat under the Great Tree, visit “Cozy Cloud Cottage” and admire elaborate window displays, telling the story of “Uncle Mistletoe” and “Freddy Fieldmouse” which were creations of the store’s promotion department. Notably, one of the store’s windows displayed a beautiful crêche for Christmas, in addition to the commercial promotions that were popular along State Street.
I was researching the web for details about the first Thanksgiving and came across this website for an Inn (The Captain’s Manor Inn) that advertises for the Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts:
Travel back in time to the 1620’s at one of the country’s most popular living history museums: Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, MA!
We’ve all heard the legends of the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock and the first Thanksgiving. Now you can learn the real stories – and so much more – behind one of America’s first settlements. Plimoth Plantation offers an immersive recreation of a 17th-century English Village.
The living history museum recreates 7 and a half months of 1627 every year. The exhibit includes actors portraying historical residents in a painstakingly researched and reconstructed environment. Even the livestock are heritage breeds.
The museum has been in operation since 1947 and includes a colonial village with a fort, water-powered mill, and barns. You can also visit a Wampanoag village and a replica of the Mayflower! Best of all, it’s all just a little over a half-hour’s drive from our Falmouth bed and breakfast, The Captain’s Manor Inn!
Exploring Plimoth
When you visit the 17th-Century English Village at Plimoth Plantation, you’ll feel as if you’ve tumbled through a hole in time. The careful attention to detail and character is completely immersive and truly stunning. You have to experience it to believe it!
The village is filled with modest timber-framed houses and costumed, accented role-players. The homes and many characters you meet represent historical residents of Plymouth Colony. The homes have thatched roofs and include typical furnishings of the time, gardens, and functioning kitchens. Don’t be surprised to discover a pot bubbling away on the fire.
Costumed interpreters act as your intermediary, explaining daily village life and answering any questions you might have. The two-story fort guarding the entrance to the village provides an excellent view of the surrounding area and is a great place for a photo.
Barns at the plantation are home to historic breeds of cows, goats, sheep, chickens, and turkeys. In fact, Plimoth Plantation is part of a global effort to save these old and endangered breeds.
Wampanoag Homesite
The plantation is also home to a recreation of a Wampanoag Homesite that was in the area at the time.
The homesite includes traditional “wetu” huts made of wattle and daub. Staff at the Homesite wear traditional Wampanoag dress. They also demonstrate time honored crafts and activities, such as baking cornmeal cakes wrapped in grape leaves in the embers of a fire.
Unlike the actors at the English Village, however, the staff here are not role-players. Instead, these real indigenous people speak from a modern perspective about their tribe’s history and culture.
The Mayflower II
While in the area, you can also visit the Mayflower II, a full-scale reproduction of the ship the Pilgrims sailed to Plymouth in 1620. The Mayflower II was built in Devon, England in the 1950’s. The faithful replica includes solid oak timbers, tarred hemp rigging, and hand-colored maps.
The ship is just a short drive away in Plymouth Harbor, near Pilgrim Memorial State Park. You’ll marvel at how over 100 people managed to live in this tiny space at sea for more than 10 weeks!
The Mayflower II has been away for restoration but will return to Plymouth Harbor in time for the 400th anniversary during Memorial Day Weekend, 2020.
The plantation is located on Warren Avenue in Plymouth, MA and is open 9am to 5pm seasonally, from mid-March through the end of November.
Everyone knows pumpkin pie is the go-to dessert on Thanksgiving. But sometimes I’m way too full for pie and a cookie will suffice. So I went searching for Thanksgiving cookie recipes, and I found several options. Many of these cookies obviously are geared for children—like the cookies with an abundance of candies on them.
Another option is almost painting with frosting! They can be cute or elegant and definitely time consuming, and it seems like a lot of fuss for a single cookie. What is so cool about some of these though is the creativity in choosing a cookie cutter! The turkey faces are actually made with an ice cream cone cookie cutter turned upside down. The turkey legs are made by using a fish cookie cutter.
Personally, I like the last 2 options best—they’re quick and they’re cute! One is a pilgrim hat—made with a striped graham cracker cookie (upside down), a dollop of icing, a peanut butter cup, and a dash of orange gel icing. A chocolate wafer cookie could also be used as the hat brim.
The second is even simpler! A Hershey kiss, a mini Nilla wafer cookie, a dollop and a dot of frosting and a mini chocolate chip!
Of course, you can always skip the cookies, do the dishes, and then later have pie!
Sew Colorful 