Click images for desktop size: "Louisville Kentucky" This is the one time of the year when you're allowed to be sappy.
Even the hard guys are allowed to simper in their boiler makers and remember mom and the smell of nutmeg and cinnamon wafting from the kitchen, even if, especially if the kitchen never existed.
The living dead girls have to attitude twice as hard to prove themselves.
Remember Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas Eve. He won his biggest battle by risking serenity to win freedom cause he knew what we all know: You can be broke, abused and downhearted and Christmas isn't a cure for that, but its the time when miracles might happen. Might happen is enough.
My last story from Christmas past,
One summer I decided to work as a cowboy at a big ranch in Northern Montana, by the Blue Berry Mountains. Only because I always wanted to be a cowboy and just imagining being something was never enough for me.
They invited me back to have Christmas with them. I went.
The snow had drifted about 12 feet in spots. You drove through tunnels of snow. It was spectral. It was beautiful.
Christmas Eve I went with them to a Mennonite service. It was austere and moving in its way.
When we got back to the ranch I decided to take a ride. Everyone seemed to understand that. There was plenty of moonlight and the stars seemed close enough to the ground that you'd have to swat them away from your head like pesky flies.
The horse, a plug nosed roan plowed happily through the snow. It wanted the exercise.

Click images for desktop size: "Christmas Card - 2006" We were in a paddock about 2 miles from the ranch house, admiring the endless sky, the hard line between heaven and earth and the silvery TV like glimmer of the snow, when I heard a calf bawling.
It was trapped in a gully filled with snow. The mother was bawling back at it but she wasn't quite foolish enough to go in after it.
I got off the horse with a rope, wondering why the two of them were this far from where the cowboys had spread the hay. I dropped a rope on the calf and it thrashed about and managed to pull me into the little gully along with it.
It felt like I was going to drown in snow.
I struggled a little. Then relaxed humming Silent Night, I started to swim the snow until I got to a purchase and managed to pull myself to firmer snow . . .
I was sweating which meant I was going to get really cold soon. I crawled up the little slick snow hill and trailed the rope to its length. I got the horse over and we managed to pull the calf free.
When I was slipping the rope off its neck the mother cow tried to gore me . . . Last I saw of them was their tails swishing as they jogged away into the darkness.
I got back to the ranch house. The sweat had started to freeze up on me. The Ranch mom had waited up for me, keeping a hot cup of cocoa brewing.
I put the horse in the corral, tended to it, and was relieved and grateful for the warmth inside the house.
I drank the cocoa while she asked me what had happened.
I told her I dug a calf out of a gully, with no more elaboration.
"Silly beasts. Don't let that keep you from having a Merry Christmas."
The next day they gave me an expensive Black Stetson hat.
It was a good Christmas.
So I wish the same to all of you, my friends, the curious, the strangers:
Merry Christmas.