I Received 5 Inches Of Snow Last Night - No Free Press - Other Stuff

[Henry]

Trudged out to the paper box, only to find I had the Weekend Messenger, but no Free Press - We had an accumulation of about 5 inches of snow with a very fine snow falling right now, that I doubt will amount to much.  Lots of traffic this morning, as I suspect most are headed out Christmas Shopping.  I should be hearing first hand as I saw my daughter go by with her 4WD truck about 8:15, headed for Burlington to bring a friend of hers Christmas Shopping.

Maryann has done a good 90% of our shopping on line and UPS & Fed X have been making practically daily deliveries.  We have found it much easier to do that in these past few years.  I had mentioned in another post that I had that TD BankNorth had Visa gift cards you could purchase with no fees.  Some people had told me that there was an activation fee, however, yesterday when I was in St. Albans, I purchased three and as long as you are a customer of theirs, there is no fee whatsoever.  Also the individual you give it to can get it registered free also, whether they are a customer or not, so in case it is lost or stolen, nobody else can use it.  I am not sure what the motive is, especially for Senior Citizens like us who don't even pay for our checks.  We must be more of a liability to them than an asset.

I will be bringing out the Christmas Gifts today and Maryann will sit at the kitchen table and bag them.  I say bag them as we no longer wrap them either, but use the gift bags.  We do buy some each year, but the kids usually save those they don't need to bring home and pack them neatly in one of the larger bags, so we have quite a few down cellar that can be reused in case of a necessity.  I believe this is called being "Thrifty", which reminds me, when my mother-in-law was alive, she always very carefully unwrapped her gifts and folded the paper up neatly, so she could reuse the paper, while keeping an eye around the room for other nice pieces of wrapping paper to make sure none was crunched up and thrown in the trash.

Haven't sent out my Christmas Cards yet, hopefully I will get them written and out by Monday - Christmas seemed to creep up so fast this year.

[Dick Brown]

Henry    In the last part of your post, you recalled how Kay Hoben used to save the paper that the gifts were wrapped in. i never hear her name without recalling that as their tenants, she and Adolph looked after Nancy & I as if we were their kids, and how she admonished Adolph when she found out that he had been teaching our Jeff how to spit  !!! My thought was that he really improved Jeff's ability for delivering long-range missiles !!!!