By Clare Moore “Clare, are you almost ready?” Mom said. My family and I were going to the church service on Christmas Eve. We go every year. I was so excited because we get to sing my favorite song, Silent Night, in church at the end of the service with the bright gorgeous lit candles. […]
By Susan Howe I didn’t know it until the year she passed away, but my Grandmother held the secret of Christmas. As a child, we would drive the 30 minutes west to her small spanish-style home on a small park in San Diego, past dairy land and open spaces unheard of today in over-developed Southern […]
By Charles Delaney The great window of the library’s Victorian-styled reading room overlooked the town center and served as the perfect backdrop for Mistletoe Memories. The Naugatuck Reader’s Theater holiday production was set to commence as a light snow began to glaze the peaceful Town Green across the street. The festively adorned audience of a […]
By Beatrice Hayes-Klein I grew up in a home without Christmas or religion. My father was raised a Methodist and my mother was a practicing Catholic early in their marriage. Frequent house moves and a life filled with other priorities kind of kept religion on the back burner in our home. It may not have […]
By Christina Vance It was small for an ornament, maybe a little more than 2 inches in length. Its ivory color made it blend with whatever the overall color-scheme was for the tree. It was always the last decoration put on the tree and my mother always made a production about giving it a place […]
He was a man — that’s all. A man like any other man. His story is one shared by many of the millions who fought in World War II. Fate intervened not once — but twice — to remove him from a train just before it left the station. In both cases the sudden change […]
By Brenna Hall Would you ever think that if you were in a war, trying to kill everyone that wasn’t on your side, that you would be friends with them for Christmas? That is how it was for some of the soldiers during World War I. At one point during World War I, in 1914, […]
By Bill Nelson The world’s first practical light bulb was invented by Thomas Edison in 1879, and it was to be only three years later that an associate of his, one Edward Johnson, electrically lit a Christmas tree for the first time. The tree was in the parlor of his New York home, located in […]
By Jeff Westover Clement Clarke Moore was one of New York’s wealthiest men. And clearly, one of it’s most highly educated. He was born in 1779 to Benjamin Moore, a patriot and and Episcopalian minister. His mother was Charity Clarke, a fiesty and ardent supporter of the American cause. He inherited from her side of […]
By Tomm Larson “Grandpa, why is there an orange in my Christmas stocking?” “Cause when I was a little boy. . .” “You were a little boy? That must have been a loooong time ago.” “It was, I was little way back in the thirties.” “What’s the thirties?” “That was a time called the Great […]
By Jeff Westover On August 22, 1741 George Frideric Handel sat down and began to compose music to Biblical texts compiled by his friend Charles Jennens. Handel was, by all accounts of the time, a typical creative eccentric. Known for varied mood swings, Handel was prone to excessive eating, a boisterous sense of humor and […]
