"And so this is Christmas..."

And so it begins...another holiday season. Creeping upon us like a sack carrying, soot covered figure in the middle of the night, it seems to catch us while we are sleeping. There is so much about the Christmas season that is artificial, cliche and overtly commercialized, but there is also so much that is personally original and genuinely real.

Christmas is about memories, either real or imagined, memories that often times define us as human beings. As a child, Christmas was a time of light in the darkness to me, it was the quiet times I remember the most.

Christmas is also about traditions, a link to where we come from. From the foods we eat to when we opened our presents. Oddly enough, my mother always made that fine German staple of lasagna every Christmas Eve. She wasn't a woman stuck on ethnic tradition I suppose, rather she made something we all liked instead of the traditional German potato salad and carp. So lasagna became our traditional Christmas Eve meal! "Buon Natale!!!!"

Every year we strive to make this "The Best Christmas Ever!!"...a Christmas to end all Christmases. But why? Maybe it's the desire to recreate an ideal that we've been grooming in our minds for years, trying to bring back a bit of our childhood, the reasons are many.

"And so this is Christmas...as John Lennon once wrote, ...and what have we done?" "Another year over, and a new one just begun." The message is simple and so should be the holiday, I myself hope to follow this example...for once. "And so this is Christmas, I hope you have fun. The near and the dear one, the old and the young."

Merry Christmas!!!!