Christmas Day Ricky Ginsburg - Christmas, any year you'd like Nearly eight thousand miles south of the northern tip of the globe, yet only a few milliseconds flight by sleigh (nine deer-power, greased rails), on an island not much larger than your neighborhood, a content and well-fed deliveryman sat on the trunk of a fallen palm tree and peeled a banana. At the other end of an invisible eight thousand mile-long-string, a black woman with perfectly straightened hair and considerable girth lay naked on a bed of fresh goose feathers and straw, waiting for the driver of said sleigh, just as she'd done for centuries. Only this year, he wasn't coming home. Click to read the rest...

As Dishesdone used to say "Happy Everything to Everyone, and a Merry Always!" Merry Christmas to everyone here, and I'm wishing you a healthy and happy New Year. Annie

Merry Christmas to you, Islay. Dcarch, enjoy the weather, you know you'll have to come back sometime, LOL. Here it's 11F, but the winds are down to 15 MPH, so not all that bad. If it gets up to 20F, the salt they put on the roads will be able to melt the ice, and then driving won't be quite as treacherous. All in all, my part of the world got a storm, but not quite as bad as the weather forecasters were predicting. Annie

That’s a luscious pointsettia! Yes, it is a process to coerce one of these plants to bloom again and not worth it for most. I see that your plant has developed a few small green leaves as has tried to grow past the old brachts. If you had fertilized, there would likely be more new foliage and some defoliation of the red brachts. You can see that chlorophyll is starting to develop on several of the brachts. Please let us know how your plants develop over the upcoming weeks/months. I predict, as the days begin to seriously shorten, that these plants will begin to change. Your indoor lighting may or may not supercede the plant’s natural daylength response. I had the fun experience of growing, with my fellow horticulture students, a couple of big greenhouses filled with poinsettias from small rooted cuttings delivered directly from the producer and breeder, Ecke. It was a long, careful process to grow the plants to commercial quality, and fill up the greenhouses with colorful plants. After that, we started on the florist mums!