NEVER A CROSS WORD – ALWAYS A PUZZLE

Sharpen your pencils - it's puzzle time.

Ah, another one that didn't make the cut at the magazine. I do love being able to use the leftovers. 

Puzzles, brain teasers, have been intriguing mankind for centuries. From the Labyrinth that held the Minotaur to the word square puzzles found in Pompeii, to the modern Rubik’s Cube, puzzles take many forms. Pencil and paper puzzles are probably the most popular.

The Maze at Hampton Court.
They say if you keep on hand on the wall as you go through,
you'll eventually make your way out, but I didn't want to
venture in when we were there years ago.

Crossword puzzles have been around now for over one hundred years. Many people do them every day, many tackle only the Sunday puzzles like those in The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Los Angeles Times.

Some people would call it cheating, but when you don’t know the answer to the clue, look it up. You’d be cheating yourself if you passed up an opportunity to learn something. If you are electronically inclined, you can do the puzzles right on your PC or tablet, or do a printout from there and consult Google or Wikipedia for the answers. You can even research the history of crossword puzzles on Wikipedia. If you like to keep such things print based and hand-done, keep an atlas and dictionary handy. Let your motto be “When in doubt, check it out.”

Even if you are pretty well read and well-rounded information-wise, you may not be familiar with the answers to such clues as “Gyllenhall of Brokeback Mountain” or a “New Mexico State athlete.” So if you can’t get them by filling in the answers you do know, consult your handy-dandy references. Finishing a crossword puzzle with no errors and no spaces left blank is like giving yourself a present.

Variety is the spice of life, they say, and it also keeps senior brains in tip-top shape. Research suggests that our brains become accustomed to the ways of the various types of puzzles we do. It is a good idea to switch from crosswords to acrostics to word searches, and on more mathematical to things like Sudoku. And, of course, switch back again. There are dozens of puzzle magazines in print: magazines that feature just one type of puzzle, and magazines that include many types of puzzles between their covers.

If you are connected to the internet, the puzzle world really opens out. Free puzzles can be found at sites like pennydellpuzzles.com, games.washingtonpost.com, and thejigsawpuzzles.com. For about $40 a year, about 11 cents a day, you can get a subscription to the on-line puzzles from The New York Times. Their selection includes crosswords that get more and more difficult as the week goes on, acrostics, variety puzzles, Sudoku, Set!, and KenKen, and their puzzle archive goes back for years.

Don’t just sit there contemplating your navel, contemplate a new puzzle.

HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY

My parents on their wedding day - 1939

I always remember my mother's birthday: the day after Christmas. I once blogged about it in a little post called The Feast of Stephen. Mom would have been 100 today.
I do know that we, her children, liked to make her birthday as special as we could, especially when we came to know that when she was younger, her birthday was often brushed aside. "Oh Dorothy, you just had Christmas yesterday, you don't need anything else." Maybe not, but a cake would have been nice.
One year when I was in college, my gifting funds were low. I had money in my budget to buy her two nice things, but I knew she wanted another in Will and Ariel Durant's series, The Story of Civilization. One book, over budget, what to do? I got the book for her. I wrapped half in pink paper, the other half in red. White ribbon. She was please, and I so was I.

Again - Happy Birthday Mom, if ever you are wherever you are.

SAINT NICHOLAS AROUND THE WORLD

Ah, yes - another double-duty piece written for the magazine and eminently bloggable. And what would I do without Google Images? I do love this one below - Santa and all the Arctic animals - even my favorite, the sea otter.

With the worldwide spread of languages and customs through exploration, trade, and missionary work, enhanced by today’s fast communications, a good part of the world acknowledges Christmas. Those in and from the European countries and the Americas observe it as a religious holiday. Elsewhere, it is often celebrated as a day of good will and gift giving. One of the modern, ubiquitous symbols of Christmas is Santa Claus, the evolved St. Nicholas.

Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, and the rest of the squad pull Santa Claus’ sleigh as he makes his rounds on Christmas Eve here in America. Contrary to NORAD and their popular Santa Tracker, noradsanta.org, available in many languages, or Google’s santatracker.google.com, in circling the world with presents for good boys and girls, Santa doesn’t always travel by sleigh. We have it on good authority that in Australia, because he couldn’t fit in a kangaroo’s pouch, Santa rides a camel. In Russia, he handles the reins of a troika, in Holland he rides a white horse, in Norway he might get around on snow shoes, and here in Sun City Carolina Lakes he’s been seen on a Segway.

Santa doesn’t always wear a plush, red suit and tasseled hat with white fur trim. In Mexico he might wear a big, red sombrero, in England he is often seen in green. Over his indoor clothes, in some countries he wears a long, hooded, usually-red robe. The gift-bringer in some countries isn’t always a jolly, saintly man. In Italy, the goodies are brought by La Bafana, the holiday witch dressed in black, brown, or grey peasant garb. Wee, gnome-like and likewise-dressed Julenissen or Jultomten do the honors in many Scandinavian homes. Santa is little known in Spain on Christmas – the Three Wise Men deliver gifts there on the day of the Epiphany.

In some European countries, especially the Low Countries of Holland and Belgium, and in Austria and Germany, he is dressed as the Fourth Century Greek Bishop he was. St. Nicholas, St Nicholas of Myra, patron saint of pawnbrokers, prostitutes, and sailors, among others (they all knew a good man when they saw one) was born during the Byzantine era in what is now Turkey. From his habit of giving secret gifts, it became the custom during the Middle Ages to give gifts to children on his feast day, December 6. In some northern European countries, St. Nicholas still comes, often in a big, festive parade, on his feast day. Gradually, though the centuries, the gift-giving moved its way on up to Christmas and the Epiphany.

Santa Claus in his various guises leaves gifts and goodies in wooden shoes, boots, in fancy stockings, or just plain, old socks. Any footwear will do. It may have started when children began to leave treats for Santa and the reindeer – things like a glass of eggnog and a few carrots. Today’s range of stocking-stuffers runs the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the inexpensive to Neiman-Marcus excess.

What will be in your stocking this year – candy or coal?

As the song says: "Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz."
a nice, shiny, red  AMG in my stocking!

St. Nicholas has become Saint Nick, Sinter Claus, Sinterklaas, Santa Claus, or just Santa. England calls him Father Christmas, France has Père Noël, and in Russia he’s Ded Moros or Grandfather Frost. His names are legion, and they all signify the spirit of love and giving. To answer most of your questions about Christmas worldwide, spend some time at whychristmas.com

THE NUTCRACKER

Which one of us hasn’t had the pleasure of going to a December performance of The Nutcracker? Were you dancing in it, or were you there to see your child or grandchild, or a neighbor’s child? Or were you just there to see one of the most beloved presentations in the western world?

My oldest granddaughter, Kate, as Clara 

December, Christmas time to be exact, is the month in which the ballet’s story takes place. December, 125 years ago in December 1892, to be exact, saw the first performance of the ballet at the Mariinski Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia. Evidently, Czar Alexander III loved it, but the critics hated it. What did they know?

A lot of creativity went into that first production. It was choreographed by the noted Marius Petipa, the “Father of Russian Ballet,” many of whose works are still staged today. It was adapted for the ballet by Alexandre Dumas Père, he of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, and was based on the story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by the prolific Prussian author, composer, and artist, E.T.A. Hoffman. The music, later made into the popular suite we often hear now, was composed by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

In a nutshell, the story takes place on Christmas Eve, and the heroine, Clara, dreams that the nutcracker she was given that evening has come to life and is battling the mice who are about to eat the gingerbread soldiers.

After the Nutcracker defeats the Mouse King, he comes to life as the Prince he is, and he and Clara travel through the falling snowflakes to his kingdom. There, in the Land of Sweets, the chocolate, the coffee, the tea, and the flowers, among several others, dance for them. The Sugar Plum Fairy and her consort end the night with their dance.  

From the opening night to this one, choreographers, including Georg Balanchine and Michael Baryshnikov, have brought their own versions to the ballet stage. There have been two movie of The Nutcracker ballet, and several other movie productions have included some of the music. There are dozens of recordings of the musical suite, and many of the eight individual pieces in it are included in various other collections, especially those of Christmas music. In 1940, all eight pieces were famously animated in Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

There will be a commemorative performance of The Nutcracker this December 18, at the Mariinski Theater. You can scout for tickets and read more about the ballet and the theater at mariinsky.ru/en. (The ‘en’ means the site is in English.) Don't you wish you could be there? I do.

 

THE ULTIMATE TRAVEL EXPERIENCE

Many of us have traveled extensively, some of us throughout our own vast country, others to more distant, foreign places. Every once in a while, we’ll see a piece on TV about somewhere we’ve been, and the enjoyment is ours to experience again. “Hey, we were there – right there!”  We’ll recall our rapt gazing up at Mt. Rushmore, or the Eiffel Tower, or the Taj Mahal. We’ll recall our transpacific tour by ship, a riverboat cruise down the Rhine, rafting on the Colorado, or a gondola ride in Venice. We recall wandering around a maze of streets trying to find the garage where we’d parked our car. When they say travel is broadening, they really mean it: it expands our horizons in so many ways.

It must be a wonderful experience for astronauts who’ve been there, to see the moon in videos, TV, maybe in the movies. The Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were riding around on the moon, the last human travelers there, forty-five years ago, in December 1972. Don’t you wish you’d been there? On the moon, it’s easy to remember where you parked.

THE EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK AT SEVENTY

Here's another piece I wrote for our community magazine. The December issue was packed, so we chose to save this article for January. Along with it will be printed another article called "Invaders." That article is about the foreign animals and plants that have been mistakenly introduced or deliberately dumped into the Everglades ecosystem, threatening the native species. I'll run that article next month. Meanwhile...

The grackle sings of his Everglades home.

Seventy years ago this month, in a ceremony led by Harry Truman, Florida’s Everglades National Park was dedicated. One of our largest national parks, it is one of the few parks established for its great bio-diversity, rather than its scenic wonders. That same year, 1947, journalist and environmentalist Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, recognizing that great and important bio-diversity, published her definitive work, The Everglades: River of Grass, from which the area got its nickname.

Having been interested and involved in the Everglades and its future since the 1920’s, and wanting to see it become a national park, Douglas wrote: “There are no other Everglades in the world… They are unique…in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida.”

The Everglades system is one of storage and supply. It begins in the slightly higher, northern part of the state as streams, rivers, and lakes interact and drain. The water flows south, through the limestone formations that make up much of the state, to Lake Okeechobee. Generally, from there on further south, the water flows on the surface.

In the post-WWII housing boom, Florida was recognized as having one of the best climates in the country. The vast, almost untouched Everglades, though largely inhospitable, were enticing to real estate and agricultural developers. Even before the postwar era, few questioned the draining of the swamps for reclamation of land for agriculture. Drainage canals were dug in south Florida as early as 1882. Eventually, in the later quarter of the last century, it became increasingly evident that the unchecked development was having a damaging effect on the ecological balance of the region: an alarming decline in the water quality, an alarming increase in flooding as well as drought, and declines in several commercial areas, especially commercial fishing. Remedial measures are now being taken to bring the area back as close as possible to its pristine state.

Everglades National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site and an International Biosphere Reserve, lies in the southernmost section of the state, at the end of the Everglades system. It is home to hundreds of types of animals, birds, and plants, and is the refuge of endangered species including four species of sea turtle, the beautiful Florida panther, the unlovely West Indian manatee, and the ominous American crocodile.

Spatterdock, another native 

There are several Visitor Centers within the park, and several access points by road and water. In various places throughout park visits can paddle, pedal, or hoof it – on guided tours or on their own. Camping facilities are available both in the “Frontcountry,” near Homestead, with RVs and tents, and in the “Backcountry.” Though some are available on foot, most of these backcountry sites can be reached only by water. (These are the sites where you might want to stay if you are on a days-long canoe or kayak trip.) There are boat concessions available for coastal and bay tours, and airboat tours, exciting and not to be missed, within the River of Grass.

Begin your research at nps.gov/ever/index. And if you go in the wetter, summer months, do not forget to pack the bug spray