Richard Crowson Commentary

Barreling relentlessly onward like some refrigerator-sized linebacker, whether we’re ready for it or not, determined to sack us many yards behind the line of scrimmage, comes Christmas.

We still send out Christmas cards the old-fashioned, analog, low-tech, snail-mail way at my house. And we have an old, well-worn address book that gets hauled out each year for the chore of addressing the envelopes. Sometimes we talk about going to a computerized list of friends and relatives – one that would enable us to print out mailing labels. But I just can’t do it.

During the dust bowl, I know from watching Ken Burns’ recent engaging PBS documentary, they had Black Sunday. It was the day of a devastating dust storm that blackened the sky. 300 million tons of topsoil blew away in that single event.

We’ve been inundated for so many months with political exclamation points. How great is it now to be able to relax a bit and let nature remind us that there is more to life than Republican red and Democratic blue.

There’s a memorable Halloween night scene in the book To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The story’s protagonist, 6-year old Scout is walking home after dark from a Halloween school program. Scout is still wearing her clumsy chicken wire and paper costume from the program in which children represent different agricultural products: she’s dressed as a cured ham.