November, 2014 Issue: The Christmas Times<sup><small>TM</small></sup>


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	Bible Story of Christmas	More Stories of Christmas
	Christmas Music	Craft Resources
	About Nativities	Christmas Musings
	Christmas Poems	Christmas Memories
	About Christmas Trees	About Christmas Decorations
	Recipes	Activity Ideas
	Advent Resources	Other Resources
	Christmas Movies	Christmas Books

Written by Paul and Shelia Race for Family Christmas Online^TM

The Christmas Times^TM, the Official E-Mail Newsletter of Family Christmas Online^TM and Affiliated Sites

This newsletter is for people who like celebrating holidays, especially Christmas. It is produced in conjunction with the following web sites.

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In this Issue

Welcome to the November, 2014 issue of The Christmas Times^TM.

Yesterday, the Race family hosted friends and strangers alike in our back yard as we ran big Christmas-themed trains and played Christmas music in a setting with dozens of miniature lit trees. We were blessed to have great weather, right up until fifteen minutes before we were going to start shutting down. I'll have a report later.

Some folks feel like we're "cheating" by having a "Christmas-themed" activity before Thanksgiving, but if we waited much longer, we'd never have it at all - weather in Ohio being what it is. In fact, several days before our "Christmas Train Day" we had an unusually heavy snow, followed by a cold snap. Yes, it looks pretty when the trains run in snow, but hosting such an event in real snow is a whole lot more work than you'd think. I was NOT disappointed when the last snow drift melted the morning of the event.

In the meantime, we "jumpstarted" the holiday for the families that did attend. We hope this newsletter helps "jump start" the holiday for you as well.

By the way, for the folks who liked Shelia's table decorations last month, we'll add that Shelia and daughter Molly helped a family decorate a reception hall for a wedding this month using - believe it or not - our family's collection of antique typewriters and cameras. The bride loves antiques, as did a number of the guests, including one woman who photographed every table before the other guests arrived and a whole bunch of under-30s who'd never been that close to a real typewriter before.

Here's a vintage typewriter being used as a decoration on a wedding reception table. What WILL they think of next. Click for bigger photo.

Here's a vintage camera being used as a decoration on a wedding reception table. Click for bigger photo.

If anyone ever wants to decorate a wedding reception hall with model trains, Paul is SO ready. :-)

Back to our Christmas focus, please accept our wishes for a blessed and joyous 2014 holiday season. And especially enjoy any time you can spend with your family in the coming weeks.

Topics discussed in this update include:

Another Lost Treasure: "Stubby Pringle's Christmas" by Jack Shaefer
Make Your Giving Count - It is better to give than to receive, but it's way better to give wisely.
Holiday Recipes - including a great cranberry salad.
Thanksgiving, Then, and Then, and Now - The historical background of the historical background of this holiday.
Holiday Train Update - A note about this year's supply of holiday trains.
Momma Don't 'Low^TM Newsletter for Americana, Folk, and Roots-based Music from a sister site.

Another Lost Treasure: "Stubby Pringle's Christmas" by Jack Shaefer

Last month we brought you the story of six Bea Potter paintings that went unpublished for nearly a century, but make a nice Christmas story when you put them all together. This month we bring you another lost treasure - a Christmas story from a classic Western author, and a charming Hallmark movie that has never been released on video.

In 1963, the author of Shane contributed a rootin'-tootin' cowboy Christmas story to Boys' Life magazine. The next year, it was published in book format with pictures, then went out of print. A few years later Hallmark made it into a Christmas movie, that, frankly, outshines 90% of the Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies you can buy or watch on cable today. The text of Shaefer's story has been floating around the internet for several years, but the movie was unavailable period until somebody stumbled across an old 1/2" videotape bootleg in the storage room of a local television station. The video has since been transferred to digital, but of course, you can't transfer what isn't there. In its current iteration, it starts out a minute into the first scene, but you don't miss any critical information. The color comes in and out, but the cast's performances, including Beau Bridges', are stellar. At the moment, the story is on our site and the bootleg version of the movie is posted in its entirety on You-Tube. I don't know how long it will be before some lawyer files a cease-and-desist order and it's taken down again, so take a look soon.

To read this story (and the story of the story) from a classic Western author, please click on the following link:

http://familychristmasonline.com/stories_other/shaefer/stubby_pringles_christmas.htm

Make Your Giving Count

A seasonal flood of requests from scammers reminded me that folks still tend to fall for this stuff, and every year millions of dollars in donation that should have gone to help real people with real needs go instead to any con artist who can tell a good story or scan a heart-wrenching photo into their materials. It would be enough to make me cynical about giving to anybody, if I didn't know so many real people out there on the front lines helping other real people. How do you know the difference? Follow the money.

To learn how (and why), click the following link:

http://familychristmasonline.com/musings/giving/making_giving_count.htm

Holiday Recipies

By now, you've probably been to the store and planned everything out, but we thought we'd put in our .02 about holiday cooking as illustrated by the 1913 postcard to the right. Unlike recipe books that say things like "Add 2tbs fl. to 1/3C cold whole milk. Whisk. Add 2tbs pan drippings. Whisk and heat until boiling," we spell EVERYTHING out. In fact, we probably provide too much information. But if this is your first turkey, or you'd like to see if anyone else has a good idea you haven't thought of yet, you might enjoy our articles. I especially recommend my mother's cranberry salad recipe as a far superior alternative to what our children call "plop-out-of-the-can" cranberry-flavored sauce.

To see our article on "How to Roast a Turkey," please click the following link.

http://familychristmasonline.com/recipies/meats/turkey/talking_turkey.htm

To see our article "How to Make Reduced Fat Turkey Gravy," please click the following link:

http://familychristmasonline.com/recipies/meats/turkey/turkey_gravy.htm

To see our article "Henrietta's Cranberry Salad," please click the following link:

http://familychristmasonline.com/recipies/salads/cranberry_salad/cranberry_salad.htm

Thanksgiving Then, and Then, and Now

If you'd like to learn a few things about this national holiday that you don't know, and maybe unlearn some things that "everybody knows" that aren't actually true, you might enjoy reading the Thanksgiving-related articles on our FamilyChristmasOnline.com site. To see the articles, click the following link:

http://familychristmasonline.com/other_holidays/thanksgiving/thanksgiving.htm

Holiday Train Update

Don't panic this is our last announcement on this score until next October. We just want to encourage our readers to get their orders in early, so they're not disappointed. Our sister train sites' newsletter "Family Garden Trains Update" has an update on the availability of O, On30 and Large Scale trains for late November, 2014. Many new and old sets are still available at the moment, but several I posted just three weeks ago are unavailable today, and stocks of other sets are getting thin. If you're thinking about a train around your tree or town this year, please don't take too long to order the one you want.

To see our notes on train product availability for Christmas-themed trains and towns, click on the following link (you may need to scroll down):

http://familygardentrains.com/fgt_newsletter/14_11_newsletter_gr.htm#train_market

Momma Don't 'Low^TM Newsletter for Americana, Folk, and Roots-based Music

Paul has started a newsletter to support acoustic, home-made and roots-based music in general, as well as the readers of our music articles on various web pages. We are posting the link here because we know that a good number of our readers are also musicians and we want to give them a chance to sign up.

If you'd like to see this month's "Momma Don't 'Low" newsletter, click the following link. There are instructions near the top for subscribing.

http://creekdontrise.com/newsletter/mdl_14_11.htm

Keep in Touch

Each month, we get more interest in this newsletter, in our Christmas sites, and in the Christmas traditions, ideas, and memories we discuss. We welcome your questions and comments as indicators of what we should be working on next (also, we always try to answer reader questions quickly). In addition, if you have any photos, tips, or articles you'd like to share with your fellow Christmas enthusiasts, please let us know.

Best Wishes!

As always, our hope is that we can continue helping you and your family (as Dickens said of Scrooge):

Honor Christmas in your heart, and
"try to keep it all the year."

In the meantime, please keep in touch, and let us know what you'd like to see added or changed.

May God grant you joy and wonder every season of this year,

Paul and Shelia Race

http://FamilyChristmasOnline.com

http://CardboardChristmas.com

http://OldChristmasTreeLights.com

Click the following link to view our September, 2014 newsletter:

http://familychristmasonline.com/fco_newsletter/14_09_c_times.htm

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