“Age is not important unless you’re a cheese.” -Helen Hayes

Here I am at the beginning of another ‘holiday’ season:  Halloween then Thanksgiving then Christmas then New Year’s then the Super Bowl!  This year the addition of a regular season college football game was a part of 2011′s holidays.  LSU beat Alabama to settle the question:  Who’s #1?  That LSU is #1 (at the expense of Bama) may be the highlight of my 2011 holiday season – unless, of course, the Saints make it to the Super Bowl again!   Back to the subject at hand – each year with the advent of the holiday season I begin to consider the topic of my annual Christmas letter.  Because it occured to me that I’m still filled with hope at the tender age of 74, that hope might be a good subject for my holiday message.  Then, of course, I began to think about hope in my daily life and how hope brightens everything.  So, I’ll try to put hope on paper in the coming weeks so that on December I can put it all in a one page letter to two hundred of my closest friends.

My home is buzzing with Thanksgiving plans.  Shay and Frank will be home this year and Christy and I will host Deb and Kathi, Dave and Megan.  A full table of eight is my ideal number for the meal because it will fill our table once again and I’ll get goosebumps when the youngest at the table gives thanks for another year of life as we know it.  Before Thanksgiving, though, I must go to Nevada for a week.  In winter I must carefully moniter wunderground.com for forecasts from here to the Moapa Valley.  While the Moapa Valley in November is pleasantly cool, there is no snow.  To get to the Moapa Valley, however, I must drive through some high mountain spots like Bluffdale, Nephi and Cedar City, which do have lots of snow.  Once at my cozy home in Nevada I’ll enjoy the “no snow” zone.

I spent October traveling to Boise then New Orleans.  I had a great time in both places and ate seafood every day at every meal for a week in New Orleans.  This month on the 12th we have a chili cook off for my support group and, of course, I’ll enter and am hopeful of winning.