The twelve days of Christmas

Not many people these days know that the twelve days of Christmas, from the song of the same name, *begin *on Christmas day and go until Epiphany on January 6. Of course, I considered myself one of the enlightened few, always keeping my holiday lights on in the evenings days after others had already removed them from the house. So when I explained this to my daughter, she naturally asked me, "What's Epiphany, Dad?" To which I said, of course, "Um... I'm not really sure. I'll have to look it up." Leave it to a 5-year-old to expose your long undiscovered gaps in knowledge. Oh, and I'm not going to try to explain it here. It's really quite complicated, and Wikipedia does a better job than I could.

But this post is really about something else. Namely, why many of you on our Christmas card list will be receiving yours even later than usual this year. I had intended to mail them this morning. But after the two-year-old daughter woke up at 3 AM with repeated trips to the bathroom, laundry room, and back (I'll spare you the details, but this went on for hours and eventually she slept intermittently on the bathroom floor with her mom), the trip to the post office was postponed. Later, about 1:30 pm actually, I found out that a) the local snail mail office closed at noon, and b) the stamp machine doesn't dispense 1 or 2-cent stamps, which I needed since there were already stamps from 2005 on most of the cards...

But there is still time for you to receive your requisite holiday greeting from us within the 12-day window. Merry Christmas!