FSogol

FSogol's Journal

December 6, 2017

FSogol's Advent Calendar Day 6: Santa's Home, Workshop, and Mailbox

Santa's home is located in 101 Saint Nicholas Drive, North Pole, Alaska which is east of Fairbanks at milepost 14 on the Richardson Hwy.

In 1953 Davis, Alaska, changed its name to North Pole and adopted the slogan, "Where the Spirit of Christmas Lives Year 'Round." The town hoped to lure a toy factory that could then label its products, "Made at the North Pole."

Nellie and Con Miller, the North Pole's original Mrs. and Mr. Claus.

That didn't happen, but it did attract Con Miller, who would sometimes dress as Santa when he bartered for furs in surrounding villages. As he built his trading post, Miller was recognized by one of the neighborhood kids who yelled, "Hey, Santa! Are you building a new house?" Miller liked the idea and Santa Claus House was born. Con became North Pole's mayor, his wife Nellie was postmaster and marriage commissioner (She married thousands of couples in Santa Claus House). Together the Millers were known as Mr. and Mrs. Claus. When their daughter was born, they named her Merry Christmas Miller.
Con and Nellie are now gone, but their family still runs Santa Claus House

Also outside stands the World's Largest Santa, 42 feet tall with his boots anchored in a base of eight-foot-thick cement. He was built in 1968 by Wes Stanley of Stanley Plastics in Enumclaw, Washington; served as a seasonal display at the Westlake Mall in Seattle; then assumed similar duties outside the old Federal Building in Anchorage. Con Miller bought Santa for $4,500 and stood him permanently outside Santa Claus House with his new cement overshoes in 1984. "We have to be careful not to sweep snow off Santa on a 50-below day when the fiberglass is brittle," said Paul. "One year his arm fell off."

https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11281

Santa's Workshop is located in Wilmington, New York

A hamlet full of permanent Christmas spirit holds one of the earliest theme parks in the United States. Santa’s Workshop opened its doors in 1949, and it’s been spreading Christmas cheer for six months of the year ever since. From June through December, visitors can expect to find a bustling group of classic North Pole characters—think elves, reindeer, and of course Santa himself—readying themselves for the holiday season.

Little has changed about the park since it first opened in the 1940s, giving it a retro feel. It lacks the high-tech bells and whistles of newer theme parks, giving it a particular vintage charm.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/santas-workshop

Santa’s Mailbox is located in Nuuk, Greenland.
Thousands of letters to Santa get delivered to this mailbox in Greenland.

Every winter, thousands of letters addressed to Santa are routed to one mailbox in Nuuk, Greenland, where they are opened and read by a handful of volunteers from the small town of 17,000. When possible, the volunteers use Google Translate to deliver a handwritten response to the children (be they naughty or nice) in their native language.

In addition to letters, Santa’s mailbox also receives a handy amount of pacifiers in the mail. (Apparently, many parents ween their kids off of their pacifiers by having them mailed to St. Nick.)

The huge mailbox is located outside the Nuuk tourism office and is one of the major attractions in the city. It is emptied on December 24th each year, ready to receive a fresh batch of correspondence next winter.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/santa-mailbox

December 5, 2017

Architects to Congress: You're making a terrible mistake

House and Senate gut historic building credits and penalize architecture firms.

December 3, 2017 - The American Institute of Architects (AIA) will lobby aggressively in coming days against significant inequities in both the House and Senate versions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, just as the legislation heads into conference.

The House legislation abolishes the Historic Tax Credit (HTC), vital to the revitalization of America’s city centers and widely hailed as an economic engine since the Reagan Administration put them into place more than three decades ago. The Senate bill eliminates the current 10 percent credit for pre-1936 structures, and significantly dilutes the current 20 percent credit for certified historic structures by spreading it over a five-year period.

The Senate's tax reform bill allows small businesses that are organized as “pass through” companies (i.e. partnerships, sole proprietorships and S-Corporations) to reduce income through a 23 percent deduction. But, like the House-passed bill, the Senate bill totally excludes certain professional services companies - including all but the smallest architecture firms - from tax relief.

and

"Unfortunately, both bills for some reason continue to exclude architects and other small business service professions by name from lower tax rates. There's no public policy reason to do this. Design and construction firms do much more than provide a service; they produce a major component of the nation's gross domestic product and are a major catalyst for job growth.

Whole Building Design & Construction article at:
https://www.bdcnetwork.com/architects-congress-%E2%80%98youre-making-terrible-mistake%E2%80%99?eid=240347864&bid=1942623

December 5, 2017

Why Youll Probably Pay More for Your Christmas Tree This Year

Those looking for the perfect Christmas tree this year may find it hard to come by, or at least about 10 percent more expensive than last year. Blame the Great Recession.

Tree sellers warn that market forces tied to the financial crisis, and amplified by the recovery, are driving up the price of trees and, in some parts of the country, making them scarce.

For anyone who might forget, many people in the United States were not feeling particularly festive in 2008. They bought fewer items as the country slid into its deepest downturn since the Depression. Growers responded by cutting down fewer Christmas trees to sell. That left less space to plant replacements and, ultimately, a smaller-than-usual batch of seedlings.

“We’re not going to be short — everybody looking for a real tree will be able to get one,” said Doug Hundley, a spokesman for the National Christmas Tree Association, a trade group. “But it is a tight market, and prices will rise.”

Whole article at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/business/christmas-tree-shortage-recession.html?_r=0

Bottom line, Bush crashed the economy and too many people got out of the tree business in 2008.

I sought this out since the stores near my house (No. VA) had less trees than normal and were priced about $20 more per tree.
My SIL in West Palm Beach said that trees were selling for $150 and the Fire Department that sells them to my parents in the Shenandoah Valley didn't get any trees this year. Are trees scare where you live?

December 5, 2017

Finally got all my Christmas decorations up!

Posted this last year too, apologies for the repeat, but I have to laugh every time I see this.

December 5, 2017

FSogol's Advent Calendar Day 5: History of the Kissing Ball

Went to the the Frontier Culture museum's open house right after Thanksgiving and they were busy putting up pre-colonial and colonial decorations.

In the late 1700s and 1800s, rural people in Europe would not have permission to cut trees on the landowner's property and would decorate an evergreen branch at Christmas time. More common and following them to the new world was the kissing ball.

They would wrap English ivy into a tight ball and wrap more and more until it was just larger than a softball. They would add mistletoe (a parasitic vine they would pull down from the trees and hang it over a doorway. Any male and female standing under the ball were required to kiss and then they would pull one leaf off of the ball.

Hanging a kissing ball in a doorway is much like placing a mistletoe above an entryway. The difference is that the kissing ball is made up of interlocking evergreen branches. Often times, kissing balls support small figurines of the holy family. Hanging a mistletoe above a doorway symbolizes fertility and good fortune.

At one point, the kissing ball almost disappeared into obscurity thanks to the Puritans and their beliefs. However, the Victorians brought back the tradition and gave it the name of holiday kissing ball. The Victorians started the tradition of adding other foliage and herbs to these decorative kissing balls. The most common herbs were rosemary and lavender. These herbs were not only used for their beauty but also for their symbols of devotion and loyalty, which are two of the true meanings of the kissing ball.

PS: If you ever find yourself in the Shenandoah Valley, I highly recommend visiting the Frontier Culture Museum. Synopsis:

To tell the story of early immigrants and their American descendants, the Museum has moved or reproduced examples of traditional rural buildings from England, Germany, Ireland, West Africa, and America.

The Museum engages the public at these exhibits with a combination of interpretive signage and living history demonstrations. The outdoor exhibits are located in two separate areas: the Old World and America.

The Old World exhibits show rural life and culture in four homelands of early migrants to the American colonies.

The American exhibits show the life these colonists and their descendants created in the colonial back-country, how this life changed over more than a century, and how life in the United States today is shaped by its frontier past.

http://www.frontiermuseum.org/

December 4, 2017

Does your Company hold an annual Holiday party?

Mine holds a nice one each year. We are a small engineering company. We invite spouses, significant others, some favorite consultants, and retired partners.

December 4, 2017

FSogol's Advent Calendar Day 4: A Brief History of Gingerbread

According to sugarcraft scholar Steven Stellingwerf, gingerbread may have been introduced to Western Europe by 11th-century crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. Its precise origin is murky, although it is clear that ginger itself originates in Asia.

Gingerbread was a favorite treat at festivals and fairs in medieval Europe—often shaped and decorated to look like flowers, birds, animals or even armor—and several cities in France and England hosted regular “gingerbread fairs” for centuries. Ladies often gave their favorite knights a piece of gingerbread for good luck in a tournament, or superstitiously ate a “gingerbread husband” to improve their chances of landing the real thing.

By 1598, it was popular enough to merit a mention in a Shakespeare play (“An I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy ginger-bread...”). Some even considered it medicine: 16th-century writer John Baret described gingerbread as “A Kinde of cake or paste made to comfort the stomacke.”

Stellingwerf notes that the meaning of the word “gingerbread” has been reshaped over the centuries. In medieval England, it referred to any kind of preserved ginger (borrowing from the Old French term gingebras, which in turn came from the spice’s Latin name, zingebar.) The term became associated with ginger-flavored cakes sometime in the 15th century.

Whole article at:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-brief-history-of-gingerbread-50050265/

December 3, 2017

FSogol's Advent Calendar Day 3: The origin of writing letters to Santa

"My pals say there is no Santa but I just have to believe in him,” writes 12-year-old Wilson Castile Jr., writing to the jolly fellow in 1939. Twelve might seem a bit old to believe in the portly resident of the North Pole. But Wilson, writing from his home in Annapolis, Missouri, seems worthy of extra sympathy. His explains in the letter that his father, a deputy sheriff, was shot and killed by gangsters and his new stepdad “is so mean he never buys me anything.”

Such sad or funny stories are not unusual when reading through Santa letters, going back to the 19th century. Notes sent to Santa are an unlikely lens through which to understand the past, offering a peek into the worries, desires and quirks of the times in which they were written. But as interesting as the children’s notes themselves are the changing ways adults have sought to answer them and their motivations for doing so.

Early versions of Santa Claus tended to depict him as a disciplinarian. The first image of St. Nicholas in the United States, commissioned by the New-York Historical Society in 1810, showed him in ecclesiastical garb with a switch in hand next to a crying child, while the earliest known Santa picture-book shows him leaving a birch rod in a naughty child’s stocking, which he “Directs a Parent’s hand to use / When virtue’s path his sons refuse.”

The earliest Santa letters are similarly didactic, usually coming from St. Nicholas, rather than written to him. The minister Theodore Ledyard Cuyler recalled receiving “an autograph letter from Santa Claus, full of good counsels” during his childhood in 1820s western New York. In the 1850s, Fanny Longfellow (wife of the poet Henry Wadsworth) wrote her three children letters each Christmas that commented on their behavior over the previous year and how they could improve it.

Entire article at: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/brief-history-sending-letter-santa-180957441/#0RpYi4iyVlMQADGD.99

Includes the story of John Gluck who launched a scam in 1913 to answer kid's Santa letters. He ran the grift, raising Trump like donations for 15 years before being exposed, after which the Postal Dept (Now the USPS) took control of Santa's letters.

December 2, 2017

FSogol's Advent Calendar Day 2: Deleted scene from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

The original "lost" "Peppermint Mine Scene," which aired on NBC in 1964 and has not aired since. This scene, along with a few others, was removed from the television version to make time for the Misfit Toy's rescue scene, which was later filmed and added into the 1965 re-broadcast because of viewer complaints.

December 1, 2017

FSogol's Advent Calendar Day 1: The Scientific Reason Why Reindeer Have Red Noses

Put me in the group that loves Christmas. While not being particularly religious (I did have a Lutheran upbringing), I've always enjoyed this time of year. To count down, I'll post a daily post here in the lounge with something, usually offbeat about Christmas.

From Smithsonian Magazine:

In 1939, illustrator and children’s book author Robert May created Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The character was an instant hit—2.5 million copies of May’s booklet were circulated within a year—and in the coming decades, Rudolph’s song and stop-motion TV special cemented him in the canon of cherished Christmas lore.

Of course, the story was rooted in myth. But there’s actually more truth to it than most of us realize. A fraction of reindeer—the species of deer scientifically known as Rangifer tarandus, native to Arctic regions in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Russia and Scandinavia—actually do have noses colored with a distinctive red hue.

Now, just in time for Christmas, a group of researchers from the Netherlands and Norway have systematically looked into the reason for this unusual coloration for the first time. Their study, published yesterday in the online medical journal BMJ, indicates that the color is due to an extremely dense array of blood vessels, packed into the nose in order to supply blood and regulate body temperature in extreme environments.

“These results highlight the intrinsic physiological properties of Rudolph’s legendary luminous red nose,” write the study’s authors. “ help to protect it from freezing during sleigh rides and to regulate the temperature of the reindeer’s brain, factors essential for flying reindeer pulling Santa Claus’s sleigh under extreme temperatures.”

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Gender: Male
Hometown: Northern VA
Member since: Fri Oct 29, 2004, 10:34 AM
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