Neanderpundit

When I was a kid, I was in the Cub Scouts. I never made it all the way to full boy scout, the local group disbanded before I could get that far. Anyway, our scoutmaster, (I’ll call him Jake) was a big lanky tough guy, the guy from whom I learned to kill cattle quickly and how to saddle a horse without it drawing a breath so the flank billet doesn’t loosen up on you. I idolized the guy, and spent half as much time with him as with my own father, for a couple of years.
I also spent a lot of time with Jake’s son, Rock, who was close to my age, and his daughter, Elisabeth, who was two years younger.

They lived on a piece of property that you could land a plane on, they had horses, some livestock, each year they dug up a fresh evergreen for a christmas tree and put it in a washtub in the living room. After Christmas, Jake would plant the tree in a hole dug in the front yard. They had fourteen of these blue spruces along the edge of their driveway, one for every Christmas they lived in that house.

Anyway, in about my fifteenth year, they moved on. Jake got a job with some packaging company in the south, and he packed up the whole family and left. We didn’t hear anything from them all summer, but that fall, the mom and the kids came by to visit just after thanksgiving. We went another several weeks without hearing from them, and then dad woke me up in the middle of the night.
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My Christmas wish? to be able to continue to rant and rave and converse with the likes of you. Y’all have made my year worthwhile in a lot of ways, and I hope I’ve made some of you grin.

Norad will redirect santa somewhere else.

It all starts with the NORAD radar system called the North Warning System. This powerful radar system has 47 installations strung across Canada’s North and Alaska. NORAD makes a point of checking the radar closely for indications of Santa Claus leaving the North Pole on Christmas Eve.