One thing about Minnesota's December weather, it was easy to remember that Christmas was just around the corner. Here in Missouri, I find it a little difficult to align the beautiful spring-like weather with the spirit of the Christmas holidays. A couple of things remind me, however. Yesterday, we picked up daughter Jessica, home from Afghanistan. And a Christmas card from my graduate school friend Bill Hall, with whom I've been exchanging cards for 45 years now. I received his fancy Tiffany cards yesterday.

Ginny and I are now in our 60s, and the sameness of Christmas holidays is somehow consoling, reassuring. But, then, there are the differences. Take the tree, for instance. When we lived in Kew Gardens, N.Y., we used to wait until Christmas Eve, then wander the city streets until we found a lot in which a lone, homely tree was leaning up against a wire fence. We paid $5 for it, then hauled it home to our apartment, satisfied that we had saved a lonely tree from certain annihilation. When we lived in Minnesota, we paid $5 to a local nurseryman, who loaned us a saw with which to saw down a Norway spruce, or whatever, and that tree, with careful nurturing, lasted well past New Year's Day. These days, however, a small tree, little taller than five feet, costs something exorbitant, like $20, and it's been drying up for a month.

When we first moved from Minnesota, where we each season cut down a live tree for $5, and left it standing in the apartment for a couple of months after Christmas, Forster Day and I, both of us teachers at Cottey, thought we would buy tiny live trees from a nursery in Butler, plant them in our front yards, nourish their growth by a couple of feet, then for Christmas decorate them with electric lights and aluminum. Each would be a family tradition. It seemed like a swell plan, and, in fact, ours, for one, shot up like a weed.

Unfortunately, the Nevada utility company, last year, worried by the tree's height, instead of "trimming" its branches, "lopped" off the top half of the tree, leaving it looking like a grotesque parody of its former self. Thanks, guys! Well, so what? Ginny and I are both in our 60s, and we'd be satisfied with a tree made from green construction paper taped to a window. Many years ago, however, daughter Jessica must have overheard the two of us muttering something about a fake, mechanical tree, because she let it be known that if we ever opted for a fake tree, we should let her know well in advance, and she‚d set out for a place foreign or domestic where they still honor the idea of a full-size Christmas tree -- like Minnesota, say. A full-size Christmas tree fully decorated, with, for example, Ginny's family glass ornament from 19th-century Germany sends chills up and down my spine. I think about the two, rambunctious full-sized black kittens who already overturn furniture in their morning-to-night tumbles with each other. What will happen to the tree when they start to climb it together … Maybe I'd better phone the Nevada fire department well in advance.

When I was a child growing up in Larchmont, in Westchester County, New York, my family and the neighboring Bellamy family always walked around the Normanday Lane circle singing Christmas carols from little booklets we saved from season to season. When we moved to Nevada, Mo., one of the first things I did, as soon as I knew what my Cottey obligations would be, was to join Forster Day's Methodist choir. I enjoyed it immensely, and found friends who have remained in touch for 31 years now. But with only one leg, now, I've found it difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate the stairs up to and down from the choir loft, and had to drop out of the choir, including the Christmas concert, which one year was the Handel "Messiah," another the Faure "Requiem." It's one thing to listen to the great Christmas carols; it's quite another to sing them in a group under a good director.

For me, at least, that part of the Christmas season that culminates in New Year's Day is always a time of looking back and counting my blessings. This year, Ginny and I took cruises, first to New Orleans, where Ginny, this second trip to the place, learned to appreciate the City and its surroundings, before the devastation that was visited upon the poor place a month or two later. Then we visited Oregon and the route of the Lewis and Clark voyage. During that trip, we had a chance to visit our friend and my former colleague Marjorie Goss, who is looking wonderfully healthy and happy in her retirement.

An abiding blessing is my family, wife Ginny, who willingly puts up with me, and daughter Jessica, of whom I am so proud. She's in the process of seeing all the locations in the world and, through her work for the UN and other organizations, making the world a little better place. And, finally, I now enjoy driving along Austin, past Cottey during the day. Earlier this academic year, I saw nary a student crossing the street going to and from the dorms and academic building. But now I see several, and that‚s a load off my mind, I can tell you. I want to see Cottey thrive.

Merry Christmas!