When I was a child, both my grandfathers filled me with wondrous stories of my Scottish ancestors. While at bedtime mum was spinning faerytales and 𝘉𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘎𝘰𝘢𝘵𝘴 𝘎𝘳𝘶𝘧𝘧, my grandfathers used my mind as a repository for history that should not be lost. Little did I comprehend they were cultivating my growing imagination, feeding my fascination with the past, and hoping to create the next historian in the family.
It has been said over and over that you can never go home again, but whoever wrote that never went to Campbellsville.
In the mid 1980s, I was the associate director of the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw, a job furnished by Indiana University and the Polish government, the first of which sent me there in exchange for Warsaw sending to IU Bloomington an associate director of Polish Studies.
Perhaps he was slumming a bit when he went to the Mensa meeting, but he was between wives as they say, and thus he had nothing better to do with his Saturday evenings than had they.
“What would you do if this were your family?”
So many wonderful things are associated with Christmas that writers can take advantage of. Holidays, phobias, strange traditions, town names, Santa’s darker side, and more can be found in these articles written especially for Christmas.
