st. lucy's day

Happy St. Lucy's Day. 

It's not quite the year's midnight - under the Julian calendar, December 13th was the shortest day - but candles and wreaths are welcome ways to gladden the dark.

Photo found at quiet time.

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In other places: a few things I love.

nothing is fair or good alone

Nathan Abels.

matches

I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something - forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.

Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety.

Matchbook from here.

light the yule log and kick back

Last year I had to work on Christmas Eve. My office was as still as tombs, and it was a long one.

If you happen to be stuck at work today, here are some things to help pass the time:

• something funny (I read this every year)
  
• something thought-provoking
• something melancholy (another annual seasonal read)
• my favorite discussion of Useful and Useless presents (also Uncles)
  
• Venn diagrams
  
• tetris
• the year in photographs
• a little bit of joyful holiday craziness (in case you need some more in your life): Rufus Wainwright and his mother cooking on Martha Stewart
  

And you can always watch the fire burn.

candleheads

Now, this is what I call a family Christmas card.

Via Square America.

burning river

When I was at school in Ireland, I only had one professor who knew anything about Cleveland. Whenever he introduced me, he would say, "This is Stephanie - she's from the city where the river burned."

The fire my professor was thinking of was in 1969, but the river burned many times before that. This is a photo from the worst fire, November 1952.

Photo by James Thomas. November 3, 1952. Via Cleveland Memory.