|
The best way to predict
the future is to create it.
~ Peter F. Drucker
"Fear defeats more
people than any other one thing in the world."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) American author, poet and philosopher
" If we teach today's
students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow "
~~John Dewey
Winter Teaching Theme: http://teachers.teach-nology.com/themes/holidays/winter/
Over 40 worksheets examining this seasons. Includes vocabulary builders,
book marks, coloring sheets, and songs.
Billy Bear's Winter Activities: http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/winter/fun.htm
Snowglobe: http://www.kidsdomain.com/craft/snglobe.html
Kids Snow Activity Page: http://www.teelfamily.com
Winter Holiday Lesson Plans: http://www.teachervision.com/lesson-plans/lesson-3401.html
Celebrate Winter: http://familycrafts.about.com/library/weekly/aa010801a.htm
Jack Frost Treasure Hunt: http://www.wb-jackfrost.com/cmp/jackfrost8.html
Literacy Projects With Snow Themes: http://expage.com/page/alphabetacrossamericaletter19S6
Snowman: http://home.att.net/~critterp/craftsnowman.html
Snowman Craft Patterns: http://www.freecraftz.com/snowman.html
A Season of Stories: http://www.whitehouse.gov/holiday/#
People, and Barney the dog(!), at the White House and in the cabinet tell
holiday stories.
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens@Web English Teacher: http://www.webenglishteacher.com/dickens.html
A Christmas Carol Study Guide: http://www.data.unt.edu/Carol_Study_Guide/index.html
December is one of the most eventful months of the year
when it comes to holidays. Education World offers information about 10
sites on the Web for teaching kids about celebrations like Kwanzaa, Ramadan,
and Hanukkah. http://www.educationworld.com/a_sites/sites067.shtml
Hershey's Kitchen: Holiday Recipes: http://hersheykitchens.hersheys.com/holiday_recipes/
Choose a holiday (Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza) from the
vertical menu on the right-hand side. The site also offers a personalized
online recipe box to store your favorite Hershey
recipe (free registration required) and a free email newsletter which
includes a Kids in the Kitchen section.
Holiday Celebrations: http://www.ncsu.edu/midlink/dec00/holidays.htm
KIDPROJ's Multi-Cultural Calendar: http://www.kidlink.org/KIDPROJ/MCC/
Holidays on the Net: http://www.holidays.net/
Resources for Winter Holidays: http://www.waterborolibrary.org/christm.htm
Waterboro Library's annotated guide to resources for Christmas,
Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and the solstice.
Does December Spell "Dilemma" in Your School?: http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr042.shtml
Ramadan
During Ramadan Muslims abstain from food, drink, smoking and other sensual
pleasures from dawn to sunset as a way of learning discipline, self restraint
and generosity. Fasting is one of the five main tenets, called pillars,
of Islam. Each evening of Ramadon, the daily fast is broken by drinking
a beverage adn eating an odd numbe of dates. They then eat a small meal,
called iftar, which can include special pastries, such as katayif, or
fried pancakes filled with cheese or nuts. Children, the elderly, and
pregnant women are among those who are exempt from fasting. It was during
Ramadan that Muslims believe the first revelations of the Koran were revealed
to Mohammed. The end of Ramadan is marked by one of Islam's major festivals,
called Eid al-Fitr.
Chanukah
The eight day Jewish festival of lights commemorates the victory of the
Maccabees, Jewish warriors who overthrew their oppressors in about 165
B.C. When they won the battle, the victors also reclaimed their Temple
in Jerusalem. But, as the story goes, there was problem -- the Temple
lamp only had enough oil to burn for one day. Miraculously, the lap burned
for the eight days of celebration and rededication. Each night of Hanukkah,
a candle is lit on a special candelabrum, or menorah, with nine candles
-- one for each night of the holiday and a servant candle, called the
shamash, to light the others. Latkes and other foods cooked in oil are
eaten, gifts exchanged, dreidels (tops) are spun, songs are sung and the
story is recounted. The Jewish calendar is based on a lunar calendar,
which means holidays shift in relation to the Greogoran calendar.
Hannukkah Food Traditions
Hanukkah Donuts: http://food4.epicurious.com/db/recipes/recipesH/3/40003.html
"The young State of Israel has created many of its own customs. One
is serving Hanukkah sufganiyot (jelly doughnuts), which are fried in oil
to symbolize the miracle of the oil that lasted eight days instead of
one." This holiday tradition reflects Israel's melding of East and
West. The fritter is of Sephardic origin. But the jelly filling and sugar
coating come from European immigrants who ate apricot-filled glazed doughnuts
on Hanukkah. This sufganiyot recipe from Epicurious divides the work into
adult and child steps.
Latkes,or potato pancakes are also favorites. Cheese also is eaten to
commemorate the ancient victory of Judith, who is said to have fed wine
and cheese to the Assyrian general Holofernes until he fell down drunk.
She cut off his head, the Assrians fled and the Jews were victorious,
according to tradition.
Chanukah Concentration: http://www.chanukah99.com/lights/games/concentration/
Chanukah Matching Game: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/chanukah/games/con1.html
Chanukah Puzzle: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/chanukah/games/puz1.html
Dreidel Game: http://www.cyberkids.com/fg/ho/hannukah/dreidel/index.html
Hanukkah House: http://www.zigzagworld.com/draw/
Hanukkah Traditions: http://www2.priscilla.com/priscilla/hanukkah/home1.html
Chanukah Clip Art: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/chanukah/clip.html
Chanukah Crafts: http://www.kidsdomain.com/craft/_chan.html
Chanukah Mazes: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/chanukah/maze.html
Hanukkah Celebrations: http://www.theholidayspot.com/hanukkah/index.htm
Hanukkah Central: http://rats2u.com/calendar_gh/calendar_hanukkah.htm
Hanukkah Music and Songs: http://www.preschooleducation.com/shanukkah.shtml
Menorah Download: http://www.fortunecity.com/millenium/firemansam/16/
Chanukah 2000: http://www.chanukah2000.com/
Dreidel Game: http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/hanukkah/dreidel2.htm
Make a Dreidel: http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/hanukkah/pattern.htm
Dreidel Shape Book: http://abcteach.com/Shape%20books/Holidays/dreidel.htm
Hanukkah Theme: http://www.childfun.com/themes/han.shtml
Black Dog's Chanukah Celebration: http://blackdog.net/holiday/chanukah/
Chanukah: http://www.bonus.com/bonus/card/chanukah.html
Comparing Holidays: http://abcteach.com/MonthtoMonth/Holidays/hancompare.htm
Hanukkah Greetings: http://www.billybear4kids.com/postcard5/hanukkah/card.htm
Hanukah Screensaver: http://www.billybear4kids.com/screen/hanukkah.htm
Hanukkah Wallpaper: http://www.billybear4kids.com/desktop/hanukkah/wallpapr.htm
Star of David Window Ornament: http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/hanukkah/craft/star.htm
Hanukkah section: http://www.lil-fingers.com/jump/hanukkah.shtml
Dreidel spin game, coloring pages, coloring cards links and storybook.
Kwanzaa
This African-American holiday was created in 1966 by Maulana Karenga,
a professor at California Sate University Long Beach, as "a cultural
message which speaks to the best of what it means to be African and human
in the fullest sense." Kwanzaa is a blend of culture, heritage and
faith. Lasting for seven days, beginning the day after Christmas, a candle
is lit each night to symbolize one of seven principles: unity, self-determination,
collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity
and faith. It's a joyous time, which includes gift-giving and home decorations.
The colors of Kwanzaa are black, red and green. There is great feast on
December 31 called Kamana. Food includes West African benne cakes, which
are sprinkled with sesame seeds for good luck.
Kwanzaa Resources for Teachers: http://www.teacherplanet.com/resource/kwanzaa.php
Kwanzaa section: http://www.lil-fingers.com/jump/kwanzaa.shtml
Matching game, coloring pages, links and storybook
The Official Kwanzaa Website: http://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org/
"All about the holiday, its origins, its symbols, and its significance."
December 1
Worlds AIDS Day
-1589: Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene was registered
for publication. The poem tells a long, complex story full of knights,
princesses, castles, dragons, and enchanted bowers. Spenser had planned
to divide the poem into 12 books, with each book featuring a different
knight. Each knight would represent a different virtue, such as holiness
or chastity, and King Arthur would appear in each book, representing the
complete man. Spenser said the purpose of the poem was "to fashion
a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." But
he only finished the first six books. Still, it's one of the longest poems
in the English language. Spenser started writing the poem around 1580.
About five years later, he took a position in the royal government that
sent him to Ireland, where he supervised English colonization. His job
was demanding, but he found inspiration in the Irish countryside and worked
on The Faerie Queene as often as he could, in his spare time. By
1589, he had finished the first three books. Sir Walter Raleigh visited
him in Ireland, read the poem, and liked it so much that he persuaded
Spenser to come back to England to get it published. The Faerie Queene
was a big hit in England, partly because it was full of praise for Queen
Elizabeth and Protestantism. John Milton liked the poem because of its
moral lessons. Two hundred years later, English Romantic poets like John
Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge admired The Faerie Queene for
its beautiful, intricate rhyming patterns and its rich story. Today, it's
considered one of the greatest poems ever written in English.
-1860: The first installment of Charles Dickens'
Great Expectations appeared in the magazine All the Year Round.
Dickens had founded All the Year Round the previous year, and whenever
he published one of his novels in the magazine it sold very well. But
in the fall of 1860, he was serializing a novel called A Day's Ride,
by Charles Lever, and sales of the magazine were dropping. Dickens had
just gotten the idea for a long story about a young boy who meets an escaped
convict and grows up to find out that the convict has been his secret
benefactor. He was going to publish it in monthly installments in a different
magazine, but he decided to write shorter chapters and publish it in All
the Year Round to try to boost sales. Dickens was getting old, and
while he wrote Great Expectations he suffered from facial neuralgia,
asthma, pain in his side, and insomnia. He had recently separated from
his wife and was having an affair with a twenty-year-old actress. But
he wrote obsessively, every day, to meet the weekly deadlines and revive
the sales of his magazine. His plan worked: a few chapters of Great
Expectations were published weekly from December 1, 1860 through August
3, 1861, and about a hundred thousand copies of his magazine were sold
each week. It has remained one of Dickens' most popular novels.
-1877: Popular novelist Rex Beach was born in Atwood, Michigan. He was
living in Chicago and studying law when he heard about the Gold Rush in
Alaska. He quit school and went off to the Klondike to search for gold.
He looked for five years, but didn't find any. Back in Chicago, he found
a job selling bricks and cement. One day, a friend of his from Alaska
told him that he'd just sold a story about the Gold Rush for ten dollars.
Beach later recalled, "There was an empty desk where we were standing.
I snagged a chair and wrote." His adventure novels were bestsellers
in the early 1900s, including The Spoilers (1906) and The Barrier
(1908). Beach was one of the first writers to sell the rights of many
of his novels to Hollywood and make big profits from the movie adaptations.
-1886: American detective novelist Rex Stout was born in Noblesville,
Indiana. He wrote over 70 novels, and 46 of them featured Nero Wolfe,
an eccentric detective who weighs almost 300 pounds. Wolfe drinks liters
of beer each day, grows orchids, and wears yellow silk pajamas. He solves
mysteries with the help of his sidekick Archie Goodwin, who does most
of the legwork for Wolfe because Wolfe doesn't like to leave his house.
Stout wrote articles and stories for magazines for almost thirty years
before he wrote his first Nero Wolfe novel at the age of 48. It was called
Fer-de-Lance, and it was published in the Saturday Evening Post
in 1934. It was a huge success, and Stout went on to write another Wolfe
novel almost every year.
-1935: Film director, actor, writer Woody Allen was born Allan Stewart
Konigsberg in New York City. He is known for his neurotic persona both
on-screen and off. Allen has received many awards for his film work, and
been nominated for 20 Academy Awards, winning three. He won nine Golden
Globes, one for the critically acclaimed "The Purple Rose of Cairo."
December 2
-1981: Britney Spears, pop singer and performer, was born in Kentwood,
LA. Spears appeared on Disney's Mickey Mouse Club in the 1993 and 1994
seasons. When her first album was released in January 1999, it went straight
to the top of the charts, becoming the first album of the year to debut
at No. 1. Spears' second album, released in May 2000, sold 1.3 million
copies in its first week. It became the top-selling debut by a solo female
artist ever. It earned Spears two more Grammy nominations. Spears is dating
fellow Mickey Mouse Club
alumni Justin Timberlake of the boy band 'N Sync.
December 3
-1857: Novelist Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Ukraine, in a region
that had once been part of Poland. His father was a poet and translator
of English and French literature. Joseph and his father read books written
in both Polish and French. By the time he was 12 years old, both of his
parents had died of tuberculosis. He went to Switzerland to live with
his uncle, but after a few years he decided he wanted to go off and see
the world. He joined the French merchant marine, and began a long career
as a sailor. He sailed to Australia, Borneo, Malaysia, South America,
the South Pacific, and Africa. He joined the British merchant navy, and
in 1886 became a citizen of Great Britain. In the fall of 1889, Conrad
settled in London for a few months. One morning, after he finished his
breakfast, he told his maid to clear away all the dishes immediately.
Normally, he would sit by the window and read from a book by Dickens or
Hugo or Shakespeare. But on this morning he felt unusually calm and perceptive.
He began to write his first novel, Almayer's Folly, which would
be published six years later. It's about a man from the Netherlands who
trades on the jungle rivers of Borneo. Conrad went on to write many more
novels, including Lord Jim (1900), The Secret Agent (1907),
and Nostromo (1904). But he's most famous for Heart of Darkness
(1902), about a man's journey down a river into the middle of Africa.
-1947: Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire
premiered in New York City. Williams spent months writing and revising
the play, and he had three different working titles for it: The Moth,
Blanche's Chair on the Moon, and The Poker Night. Then he moved to an
apartment in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where he could hear two
streetcars rattling by, one named Desire and one named Cemeteries. He
changed the setting of his play to New Orleans, and he changed the title
to A Streetcar Named Desire. The play is about a southern belle
named Blanche DuBois who comes to live with her sister Stella and Stella's
working class husband Stanley. Stanley thinks Blanche is trying to swindle
the couple, and his anger and physical aggression eventually drive her
to insanity.
-1965: Katerina Witt, figure skater, was born in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Germany.
The East German champion in 1982, she won the first of six successive
European titles in 1983, was world champion in 1984-85 and 1987-88, and
Olympic champion in 1984 and 1988.
December 4
-1795: Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle was born in the village of Ecclefechan,
Scotland. He studied German literature at school, and after graduating
he found work teaching and writing articles for magazines. But he was
depressed-he suffered from dyspepsia, and worried about finding a wife
and about pleasing his parents. He wanted to write something but abandoned
all of his projects almost as soon as he started them. He wrote to a friend,
"I must do something-or die, whichever I like better." Finally,
he came up with the idea for a book that combined autobiography and philosophy,
and he began working on what would become his big breakthrough, Sartor
Resartus (1833-1834). Carlyle started writing a history of the French
Revolution at the beginning of the 1830s, and finished it in 1835. He
lent the manuscript to his friend, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, but
Mill's housekeeper mistook the pile of paper for waste and threw it in
the fire. Mill was furious with his housekeeper and offered Carlyle two
hundred pounds in compensation. Carlyle said that he felt like a man who
"has nearly killed himself accomplishing zero." But he went
right back to work and rewrote the entire book in less than two years.
The French Revolution was published in 1837, and it was a great
success. Carlyle was interested in the great, towering
figures of history, like Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, and Shakespeare. He
wrote a book called On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
(1841), in which he says, "No sadder proof can be given by a man
of his own littleness than disbelief in great men." Some people in
the first half of the twentieth century saw the book as a rejection of
democracy, and Carlyle has become less popular than he once was.
-1835: English novelist Samuel Butler was born in
Nottinghamshire, England. He came from a family of clerics, and his father
assumed Samuel would also become a minister. He went to a parish in London,
and it was there that he realized that people who had been baptized were
not necessarily morally superior to people who hadn't been baptized. He
started questioning Christianity in letters to his father, and eventually
lost all faith in religion. He left the parish and sailed off to New Zealand
to become a sheep farmer. He made a decent living, and began to read widely.
In 1872, he published a satire called Erewhon, which both supported
and challenged Darwin's ideas about evolution. Readers loved it, but it
was the only book Butler wrote that had any success until his death in
1902. After he died, an incomplete novel that Butler had begun thirty
years earlier, The Way of All Flesh, was found in his desk drawer.
When it was published in 1903, it sold more copies than any of his works
did when he was alive. Critics called it a masterpiece. His notebooks
and memoirs were published, and he suddenly became known as a great Victorian
writer.
-1861: Actress/singer Lillian Russell was born.
-1892: Spanish dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco was born.
-1893: English writer Herbert Read was born in Yorkshire, England. He
wrote over sixty books of poetry, art criticism, and essays. He was especially
well known for arguing that art should play a greater role in the public's
education, in such books as Education Through Art (1974).
-1921: Actress Deanna Durbin was born.
-1937: Actors Max Baer Jr. was born.
-1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered liquidation of the Works
Progress Administration, created during the Depression to provide work
for the unemployed.
-1949: Jeff Bridges was born.
-1951: Actresses Patricia Wettig was born.
-1964: Marisa Tomei was born.
-1971: India joined East Pakistan in its war for independence from West
Pakistan. East Pakistan became the republic of Bangladesh.
-1973: Model Tyra Banks was born.
-1985: National security adviser Robert McFarlane resigned. President
Reagan named Vice Adm. John Poindexter to succeed him.
-1991: Former Lincoln Savings & Loan Association chairman Charles
Keating was convicted on 17 counts of securities fraud. American Terry
Anderson was freed by his pro-Iranian captors after 6 years. He was the
last U.S. hostage held in the Middle East.
-1992: President Bush ordered U.S. troops into Somalia.
-1995: Officials of the United Auto Workers union called an end to a largely
unsuccessful 17-month-long strike against Caterpiller in Peoria, Ill.
-1996: Jonathan Schmitz was sentenced in the slaying of Scott Amedure,
who had confessed to having a crush on Schmitz during the taping of "The
Jenny Jones Show." The segment never aired.
-1997: Top health officials in Europe voted to ban most forms of advertising
of tobacco beginning in four to five years.
-1998: The space shuttle Endeavour blasted off, carrying into orbit a
U.S. component of the International Space Station.
December 5
-1782: Martin Van Buren, once governor of New York and the eighth president
of the United States, was born.
-1830: English poet Christina Rossetti was born in London to Italian parents.
She grew up in a family that loved literature. She and her sister and
two brothers wrote sonnets together as children, and all four of them
grew up to be writers. One brother, the poet and painter Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, helped Christina get her first poems published in a London magazine.
Christina was home-schooled and lived with her mother
her entire life. She was a deeply devout Protestant. She gave up chess
because she was worried that she enjoyed winning too much. She broke off
an engagement to the artist James Collison in 1848, after he joined the
Catholic Church. Later, she fell in love with a man named Charles Cayley
but wouldn't marry him because he wasn't religious enough. She stayed
at home and read religious texts, and occasionally, in bursts of inspiration,
wrote the poetry for which she is known. She's best known for her poem
"Goblin Market" (1862), a dark fairy tale in which a girl is
attacked by a pack of goblins after refusing to buy their fruit.
-1892: Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker
premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia.
-1901: Walt Disney, animator, producer, creator of Mickey Mouse and Disney
theme parks, was born in Chicago, IL. He dropped out of high school at
age 17 to serve in World War I. After serving briefly as an ambulance
driver, Disney returned in 1919 to Kansas City for an apprenticeship as
a commercial illustrator and later for advertising cartoons. By 1922,
he had set up his own shop with Ub Iwerks, whose drawing ability and inventiveness
were factors in Disney's eventual success. His first success came with
the creation of Mickey Mouse in
"Steamboat Willie," the first fully synchronized sound cartoon,
featuring Disney's voice as the character called "Mortimer Mouse."
Disney's wife, Lillian, suggested that "Mickey" sounded better.
-1933: The 21st Amendment revoking the 18th (Prohibition) Amendment was
ratified in the United States.
-1934: American writer Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California.
In 1968, Didion's first collection of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem,
was published, and it was a big success. It includes essays about Joan
Baez, Vegas brides, John Wayne, and the hippies in the Haight-Ashbury
area of San Francisco. She's gone on to write five novels, including A
Book of Common Prayer (1977) and Democracy (1984), as well
as several more nonfiction books. Where I Was From (2003) is a
history of California that's full of family portraits and personal anecdotes.
-1936: Novelist James Lee Burke was born in Houston, Texas. He's best
known for his series of detective novels featuring Dave Robicheaux, an
ex-New Orleans policeman, Vietnam veteran, and recovering alcoholic. Burke
started writing stories when he was in fourth grade, published his first
story when he was 19, and wrote his first novel when he was 23. Half
of Paradise (1965) was published just after he finished graduate school,
and it got great reviews. Burke wrote a few more novels, but none of them
sold well. He fell into depression and alcoholism. He had finished a book
called The Lost Get-Back Boogie, but he couldn't find anyone to
publish it. He collected ninety-three rejection slips for the book over
a period of ten years. He worked as a newspaper reporter, a land surveyor,
a social worker, a forest ranger, a teacher, and a truck driver. Finally,
in 1985, The Lost Get-Back Boogie was published by Louisiana State
University Press. The novel is about a released prisoner who goes to live
on a Montana ranch with the family of one of his friends from prison.
It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Burke's novels have been doing
well ever since.
-1939: Writer John Berendt was born in Syracuse,
New York. He was an editor at Esquire magazine when he took a trip
to Savannah, Georgia on a whim. He fell in love with the place, and decided
he wanted to write a book about it. He didn't begin working on it for
three years, and then he started doing intense research and interviewing
as many people in Savannah as he could. It took him seven years to finish
the book. In 1994, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was
published, and it became a huge bestseller. It follows the murder case
of an antiques dealer, but it's also full of portraits of miscellaneous
Savannah residents. It's a nonfiction book that reads like a novel. In
1998 it broke the record for consecutive weeks on the New York Times
nonfiction bestseller list. Tourism in Savannah increased by almost 50
percent.
-1955: Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the Montgomery bus boycott to
protest racial segregation.
December 6
-1803: Novelist Susannah Moodie was born Susannah Strickland in Suffolk,
England. As a young woman, she married an adventurous man who had traveled
around Africa, and the two of them sailed off to live in the backwoods
of Canada, which at the time was still wild country. She's best known
for her novels about pioneer life, including Roughing it in the Bush
(1852) and Life in the Clearings (1853). She's a very important
literary figure in Canada, and the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood once
wrote a book of poems about her called The Journals of Susanna Moodie
(1972).
-1886: Poet (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
He was a struggling poet, working as a writer of definitions for the Standard
Dictionary, when he got a chance to hike through the Great Smoky Mountains
of North Carolina. When he got home, he wrote a poem, trying to express
the beauty of what he saw in the forest. He called the poem "Trees."
It begins, "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree"
and ends with the lines, "Poems are made by fools like me, / But
only God can make a tree."
-1892: English essayist Sir Osbert Sitwell was born in London. He wrote
many books of poetry and fiction, but he's best known as the author of
autobiographical essays about the years before the collapse of the British
Empire. His essays are collected in books such as Left Hand, Right
Hand! (1945), Laughter in the Next Room (1948), and Noble
Essences (1950).
-1893: Novelist and short story writer Sylvia Townsend Warner was born
in Middlesex, England. As a child, Warner loved listening to her mother's
stories about growing up in India. She said, "[My mother's memory
was] this astonishing storehouse, full of scents and terrors, flowers,
tempests, monkeys, beggars winding worms out of their feet." When
she became a writer, Warner tried to write fiction that would reproduce
the feeling she got from her mother's stories, of something fantastic
emerging from something ordinary. Her first novel,
Lolly Willowes (1926), was about a woman who makes a deal with
the Devil and becomes a witch in order to get away from her restrictive
family. The novel became the first ever Book of the Month Club Selection,
and it was a bestseller in the United States. She went on to write many
more books that combined realism and fantasy before it was a popular thing
to do. She wrote The Cat's Cradle Book (1940), about a woman who
believes that cats crawl into the beds of children at night to tell them
fairytales, and The Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), about a magical world
where women are the rulers.
-1896: Lyricist Ira Gershwin was born Israel Gershvin on the East Side
of New York City. He's considered one of the great lyricists of the twentieth
century, best known for writing the lyrics to songs like "I've Got
Rhythm" (1930) and "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" (1937).
But he always felt overshadowed by the talent of his younger brother,
the composer George Gershwin.
-1942: Austrian avant-garde playwright and novelist
Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria. He's one of the most influential
and controversial writers in the German language. When he first started
writing plays, he said, "[I] couldn't stand the pretense of reality
[in theater] . . . as if the actors were under a glass bell." He
wanted to destroy the illusion. In his first play, Offending the Audience
(1966), four actors come on stage to say that there is not going to be
a play, and then yell insults at the audience. The play was a surprising
success in Germany, but when it traveled abroad, many audiences yelled
insults back at the actors. He went on to write other experimental plays
like My Foot My Tutor (1969) in which two characters interact for
ten scenes without ever speaking. He has also written many novels, including
The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972) and Nonsense
and Happiness (1976). He wrote the screenplay for the movie Wings
of Desire (1987), about an angel who falls in love with a mortal woman.
His most recent novel to be translated into English is On a Dark Night
I Left My Silent House (2000).
December 7
-1598: Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini was born.
-1761: Waxworks museum founder Marie Tussaud was born.
-1787: Delaware became the first state to ratify the U.S.Constitution.
-1810: German physiologist Theodor Schwann, co-originator of the cell
theory and the first to use the term, was born.
-1873: Novelist Willa Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia.
Her family moved west when she was a little girl to get away from a tuberculosis
epidemic. The disease had killed all of her father's brothers. Congress
had recently passed the Homestead Act, and thousands of people were moving
west to take advantage of the free government land. She always remembered
the journey out to the plains, sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker
wagon, holding on to the side to steady herself. Her family settled in
Red Cloud, Nebraska, and most of her fictional Nebraska towns are based
on it. She fell in love with the Nebraska landscape. She wrote, "Elsewhere
the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth is the floor of the
sky." Cather idolized the immigrant women of Nebraska, who worked
alongside men in the fields. As a teenager, she cut her hair short and
wore boys' clothes, calling herself William Cather. She traveled around
the town with the local doctors, telling everyone she was going to be
a surgeon, and she did experiments on frogs in her spare time. But when
she went off to college, she got involved in journalism and eventually
moved to New York City to edit McClure's magazine. She became an
extremely successful magazine editor at a time when men ran almost all
magazines and newspapers in New York, but the job kept her from writing
anything but short fiction. After living in New York for fifteen years,
she quit her job and took a trip back home to Nebraska. Standing on the
edge of a wheat field, she watched the first harvest that she had seen
since her childhood. When she got back to the East, she began her first
great novel, O Pioneers! (1913). Cather went on to write many more
novels about the westward expansion of the United States, including My
Antonia (1918), The Professor's House (1925) and Death Comes
for the Archbishop (1927).
-1879: Composer Rudolph Friml ("Indian Love Call") was born.
-1888: Novelist and essayist Joyce Cary was born in Londonderry, Northern
Ireland. He started out wanting to be a painter, and went to art school,
but nobody liked his paintings. He moved to Paris and tried to write a
novel about the bohemian scene there, but he never finished it. Hoping
to find better novel material, he volunteered for the British Red Cross
in the Balkan War against Turkey. He nearly died twice and never wrote
any fiction about the experience. After that he went to Africa, and almost
died a half a dozen more times. In 1918, he was shot in the head, but
survived. He said, "A special luck follows me everywhere. . . . I
shall not die a violent death. My insurance money will be wasted."
In Africa, he started writing several novels, all of which he burned in
frustration. Finally, he published a few stories about African colonial
life in the Saturday Evening Post, and made enough money to write
for a living. He's best known for his novel The Horse's Mouth (1944),
which is narrated by a cranky, frustrated old painter named Gulley Jimson.
-1915: Actor Eli Wallach was born.
-1923: Actor Ted Knight was born.
-1928: Linguist Noam Chomsky was born.
-1931: President Hoover refused to see a group of "hunger marchers"
at the White House.
-1932: Actress Ellen Burstyn was born.
-1941: Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. The attack came after the
United States had frozen Japanese assets and declared an embargo on shipments
of petroleum and other war materials to Japan. On the morning of December
7, soldiers at Pearl Harbor were learning how to use a new device called
radar, and they detected a large number of planes heading toward them.
They telephoned an officer to ask him what to do. The officer said they
must be American B-17s on their way to the base, and he told the soldiers
not to worry about it. A sailor named James Jones, who would go on to
write the novel From Here to Eternity (1951), was in the mess hall
that morning. Because it was Sunday, there was a bonus ration of milk
to go along with breakfast. Jones said, "It was not till the first
low-flying fighter came . . . whammering overhead with his [machine guns]
going that we ran outside, still clutching our half-pints of milk to keep
them from being stolen." The Japanese planes dropped bombs and torpedoes,
and ships started capsizing and sinking. Men jumped and fell from the
boats into the water, which was covered with burning oil. Most of the
damage occurred in the first thirty minutes. The U.S.S. Oklahoma
capsized, and the California, Nevada, and West Virginia
sank in shallow water. The U.S.S. Arizona was completely destroyed,
killing more than 1,500 soldiers aboard. When nurses arrived for morning
duty they found hundreds of injured men all over the base. The nurses
ran around, administering morphine, and to prevent overdoses they wrote
the letter M on each treated man's forehead. There
were ultimately 2,390 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor and 1,178 wounded.
Two days after the attack, the Navy passed out postcards to the survivors
and told them to write to their families, but not to describe what had
happened. A man named George Smith said, "My mother didn't get that
postcard until February. . . . When the mailman got [my] card at the post
office, he closed down and ran all the way to my house . . . woke up my
[parents] and told them, 'Your son's OK.' I would not see my mother for
two and a half years." Franklin D. Roosevelt
called December 7, "a date which will live in infamy," and he
used the event as the grounds for leading the United States into World
War II.
The Pearl Harbor Naval Station on the Hawaiian island of Oahu is the hub
of United States Pacific naval power. Most of the Navy's major commands
have headquarters there. Yet even after sixty-five years, its name is
still synonymous with the surprise Japanese attack of "December 7,
1941 — a date which will live in infamy." The United States
suffered 3,700 casualties, along with damage to twenty-one ships and 300
planes.
Eyewitness to History: Attack at Pearl Harbor: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/pearl.htm
"The surprise was complete. The attacking planes came in two waves;
the first hit its target at 7:53 AM, the second at 8:55. By 9:55 it was
all over. By 1:00 PM the carriers that launched the planes from 274 miles
off the coast of Oahu were heading back to Japan." This single page
description of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor includes quotes from
eyewitnesses and some amazing photographs. Links to related pages (The
Japanese View and The White House Reacts) are in the right-column, below
the ad.
The Legacy of Pearl Harbor: http://click.nationalgeographic.tep1.com/maaaeJQaaQJa8abpgXWb/
Read firsthand accounts of what it was like at Pearl Harbor during the
Japanese attack and consider why Japan might have wanted to expand its
territory in the early 1940s.
MSNBC Interactive: Pearl Harbor: http://www.msnbc.com/modules/pearlharbor/experience/
This interactive movie from MSNBC starts as soon as the page loads, so
have your speakers turned on. At first glance, this looks like a regular
"old-fashioned" video, but there are interactive activities
to explore in between each chapter. Start by examining four clues to the
impending Japanese air strike that were mostly ignored, and then move
through the chapters using the Next button, or the direct navigation menu
at the bottom of the player. The site includes first-person narratives.
National Geographic: Remembering Pearl Harbor: http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/
The National Geographic Pearl Harbor site has many excellent features.
One of them is "Beyond the Movie" which takes a look behind
the scenes of the 2001 "Pearl Harbor" movie from Touchstone,
and at characters such as Dorie Miller, the real-life cook played by Cuba
Gooding. "The Attack Map" is a multimedia map and time line
created with photos, narratives, and footage that "bring the attack
on Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawaii, to life – moment by moment, target
by target."
Pearl Harbor: http://click.nationalgeographic.tep1.com/maaaeJQaaQJa4abpgXWb/
Firsthand accounts and a groundbreaking multimedia map bring the attack
on Pearl Harbor to life--moment by moment, target by target.
-1942: Rock/folksinger Harry Chapin was born.
-1947: Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Bench was born.
-1956: Former basketball player-turned-coach Larry Bird was born.
-1958: "Tonight Show" announcer Edd Hall was born.
-1966: Actor C. Thomas Howell was born.
-1972: Apollo 17 was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on the last manned
mission to the moon.
-1986: The speaker of Iran's Parliament said his country would help free
more American hostages in Lebanon in exchange for more U.S. arms.
-1987: Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Washington, D.C., the first Soviet
leader to officially visit the United States since 1973.
-1988: As many as 60,000 people were killed when a powerful earthquake
rocked the Soviet republic of Armenia.
-1991: On the 50th anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, President
Bush called for an end to recriminations and sought the healing of old
wounds.
-1992: The destruction of a 16th century mosque by militant Hindus touched
off five days of violence across India that left more than 1,100 people
dead.
-1993: A gunman opened fire on a crowded Long Island, N.Y., commuter train,
killing several persons. Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary revealed the United
States had conducted 204 underground nuclear tests from 1963 to 1990 without
informing the public. Astronauts aboard the shuttle Endeavour fixed the
orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
-1995: A two-week-old strike by hundreds of thousands of French public-sector
workers protesting planned cuts in welfare spending had spread to cities
throughout France.
-1997: Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, actress Lauren Bacall and actor Charlton
Heston were among those receiving awards from the John F. Kennedy Center
for the Performing Arts in
Washington, D.C.
December 8
Bodhi Day: The buddha is said to have reached enlightenment under a bodhi
tree. He sat there for days, and as he did, he came to realize what would
later become the founding principles of Buddhism. The anniversary of his
attaining Buddhhood is called Bodhi Day and is celebrated by some (though
not all) traditions of Buddhism on December 8.
-65 B.C.: The Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace
was born in Apulia, Italy. He's best known today for his Odes,
poems about ordinary events like drinking wine or saying goodbye to a
friend.
-1765: Eli Whitney, the American inventor of the cotton gin, was born.
-1894: American writer James Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio. He's
known as the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain. In 1927, Thurber
met the writer E.B. White, who introduced him to Harold Ross, the editor
of a new magazine called The New Yorker. Ross hired Thurber as
an editor, and Thurber went on to write articles and draw cartoons for
The New Yorker for years. He wrote almost constantly-at parties,
at the dinner table, in bed. Between 1930 and 1961, Thurber published
almost thirty books. He's one of the few major American authors who wrote
almost exclusively short pieces. His best-known stories are "The
Catbird Seat" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," about
a man who fantasizes compulsively. Thurber often
claimed he didn't care much about politics. He said that when Harding
and Cox, who were both from Ohio, ran for president in 1920, he couldn't
decide who to vote for. So he flipped a coin, didn't bother to see how
it landed, and left without voting. He made fun of leftist intellectuals
in the 1930s, but in the '40s and '50s, he became an outspoken critic
of McCarthyism, after it began threatening writers' freedom. He said,
"The end of American comedy is in sight and the theater's gone to
hell. . . . Who can write where everybody's scared? . . . I'm not letting
any Congressman scare me to death." He wrote diatribes against the
House Un-American Activities Committee and spoke out against it in newspapers
and magazines.
-1913: American poet, essayist, and fiction writer
Delmore Schwartz was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He went
to college at New York University. The summer after his junior year, he
moved from his mother's apartment to a shabby apartment in Greenwich Village.
He was determined to become a writer, and locked himself in his room for
twelve hours a day, writing stories and poems. By the time the summer
was over, he had finished his first great work, a short story called "In
Dreams Begin Responsibilities." It was published in 1937 in the left-wing
journal The Partisan Review, and a year later Schwartz came out
with a book of short stories with the same name. It was a big success,
and people like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Vladimir Nabokov
loved it. Schwartz was 25 years old and already a big-name writer. He
wrote poetry, essays and stories, and was known as one of the best writers
of his generation. He published the poetry collections Shenandoah
(1941) and Genesis: Book I (1943), and the short story collection
The World is a Wedding (1948). But when he quit his job teaching
at Harvard in 1948, he was almost penniless. He married a writer named
Elizabeth Pollet, and they went off to live in an old farmhouse in rural
New Jersey. He wrote furiously, held several jobs, and got hooked on alcohol
and amphetamines. His wife left him and he moved back to New York City,
where he continued to drink heavily and write poetry and criticism. He
wrote in a letter, "The years pass and the years pass and the years
pass, & still I see only as in a glass darkly and vaguely." He
died in 1966 at the age of 52.
-1949: American novelist Mary Gordon was born in Far Rockaway, Long Island,
New York. She's the author of the novels The Company of Women (1981),
The Other Side (1989), and Men and Angels (1985), among
others. She grew up in a family that was devoutly Catholic. Her father
had converted from Judaism and founded several right-wing Catholic magazines.
Mary later said Catholic mass was "an excellent training ground for
an aspiring novelist," because it was full of beautiful rituals and
evocative language. As a child, she wanted to become a nun. But she fell
in love with literature and went to college at Barnard at a time when
civil rights activism and Vietnam War protests were at their height. She
left the Catholic Church, joined the women's movement, and wrote poetry
and fiction. After college, Gordon moved to London, where she researched
Virginia Woolf and worked on her first novel. One day, she was feeling
lonely and saw the novelist Margaret Drabble on TV. Gordon wrote her a
letter describing her day, and Drabble called Gordon up and invited her
to dinner. Drabble read the manuscript of Gordon's first novel and introduced
her to an agent who helped find a publisher for Final Payments
in 1978. It's about a Catholic woman who lives at home until she's 30
years old, taking care of her ailing father. After his death, she goes
out into the world on her own for the first time, but she's weighed down
by feelings of guilt and self-torment. Final Payments sold over
a million copies, and critics compared Gordon to Jane Austen and Flannery
O'Connor. Almost overnight, Gordon went from making $11,000 a year teaching
community college to being featured in People magazine. She
lives in Manhattan with her husband, and says she never wants to leave.
-1980: Rock star John Lennon of the Beatles was
shot and killed in New York City.
December 9
-1608: John Milton, poet and controversialist was born in London, England.
He married a woman named Mary Powell in 1642, but she quickly grew tired
of him and left him almost immediately after their honeymoon. Milton was
furious, but it was against the law to get a divorce on the grounds of
incompatibility. The next year, he wrote The Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce (1643), in which he argued that couples should be able
to divorce if the marriage turns out to be unhappy. He tried to prove
that marriage was created to remedy the loneliness of men, and that if
a wife failed to perform this function, her husband should have the right
to divorce her. He also said that those who had lived freely in their
youth were more likely to find happiness in marriage than those who were
chaste and inexperienced. Milton addressed his tract to the British Parliament,
but it didn't go over well. He remained married to Powell until her death
in 1652. Milton wrote Areopagitica in 1644 to make the case against
the government's censorship of books and pamphlets. It's one of the first
great arguments in favor of freedom of the press. He argued that no one
group should control the number of available opinions from which an individual
can choose. After the Civil War ended and Charles
II was restored to the throne, Milton devoted himself to the writing of
Paradise Lost. The epic poem tells the story of Satan's rebellion
against God, his expulsion from Heaven, and his temptation of Adam and
Eve.
-1848: Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia. When he was
13 years old, Harris saw an advertisement for a printer's assistant at
a newspaper published at a local plantation. He applied, and got the job.
While he was working for the newspaper, he met some of the slaves on the
plantation. He loved listening to the stories they told about Brer Rabbit
and Brer Fox and other animals in the Briar Patch. When the Civil War
began, Chandler left the plantation to work for newspapers in cities all
across the South. He was working for the Atlanta Constitution when he
began to publish the tales he had heard years earlier, under the title
Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1880), the first of many Uncle
Remus collections. He wrote the tales in a southern, African-American
dialect that he claimed was an exact reproduction of the speech he heard
as a young man.
-1905: Screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo was born in Montrose, Colorado.
He's best known as a screenwriter, but his 1939 novel Johnny Got His
Gun won the National Book Award. It's about the thoughts of a soldier
who has lost his arms, legs, face, sight, and hearing. The soldier decides
to become an educational exhibit about the horrors of war. He thinks people
who come to see him "would learn all there was to know about war.
That would be a great thing, to concentrate war in one stump of a body
and to show it to people so they could see the difference between a war
that's in newspaper headlines and liberty loan drives and a war that is
fought out lonesomely in the mud somewhere, a war between a man and a
high explosive shell." Trumbo joined the Communist
party in 1943. He said the meetings were "dull beyond description,
about as revolutionary in purpose as Wednesday-evening testimonial services
in the Christian Science Church." But he was blacklisted by the film
industry and tried by the House Un-American Activities Committee as one
of the "Hollywood Ten," a group of writers and actors who refused
to speak about their alleged Communist friends and activities. He spent
a year in jail and then moved to Mexico, where he continued to write scripts
under different pseudonyms. In 1956, he won an Academy Award for Best
Screenplay for The Brave One, which he wrote under the name Robert
Rich. Three years later, his name was removed from the blacklist, and
he wrote the screenplay for Exodus (1960).
-1898: Emmett Kelly, clown, was born in Sedan, Kansas.
He was over 40 when his sad-faced hobo in oversized rags, "Weary
Willie," found a home under the Ringling Brothers big top (1942 to
1955) and made Kelly the most celebrated American clown of his era.
-1992: U.S. troops arrived in Somalia to calm the unrest and provide famine
relief.
December 10
-1787: Francis Gallaudet, founder of the first free school for the deaf,
was born.
-1830: American poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts.
She grew up in a wealthy, religious family, and rarely left Amherst. She
went to college at Mount Holyoke and then went back to her parents' house,
where she spent the rest of her life. Dickinson dressed completely in
white, refused most visitors, and rarely left the house. During the last
years of her life, she mourned the deaths of her father, her mother, her
nephew, and some of her closest acquaintances. She became known as the
"Belle of Amherst," the "New England Mystic," and
the "Woman in White." But
even though she didn't go out much, she wrote hundreds of letters. Dickinson
wrote over 1,700 poems, but only seven of them were published in her lifetime.
In 1862, Dickinson wrote 366 poems, or about one per day. She wrote on
scraps of paper and old grocery lists, but she compiled her poetry and
tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. Her sister found the poems after
Emily's death, but they were heavily edited and weren't published until
1890. For a while, Dickinson was considered an interesting minor poet.
In 1955, a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the
original punctuation intact. She's now considered one of the greatest
American poets ever.-1851: Melvil Dewey, librarian
and cataloguer, was born in Adams Center, N.Y. He studied at Amherst College
(A.B. 1874) and his experience as a student working in the college library
led him to propose his decimal-based system of classifying books. He also
founded the first professional school of library services in 1887. In
1893 he and his wife, Emily, created the Lake Placid Club, which pioneered
recreational winter sports.
-1869: The Territory of Wyoming granted women the right to vote.
-1891: Poet Nelly Sachs was born in Berlin. She accepted the Nobel Prize
for Literature on her birthday in 1966. Sachs grew
up in a Jewish family in Berlin during the time that Hitler was rising
to power. In 1940, she learned that she was going to be put in a forced
labor camp. She had been exchanging letters with the Swedish novelist
Selma Lagerlof for years. She got Lagerlof to intercede with the Swedish
royal family in her behalf, and Sachs was able to escape to Sweden with
her mother. Other members of her family were killed in concentration camps.
Sachs became fluent in Swedish and supported herself and her mother by
translating Swedish poetry into German. The first collection of her own
poetry wasn't published until 1947, when she was almost fifty years old.
Her collected poems were published in 1961 under the title Journey
to the Beyond.
-1901: The Nobel prizes were first awarded in Oslo,
Norway, and Stockholm, Sweden.
-1911: TV newscaster Chet Huntley was born.
-1914: Actress Dorothy Lamour was born.
-1923: Actor Harold Gould was born.
-1925: Poet Carolyn Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington. She's the author
of eight collections of poetry, including Yin: New Poems, which
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. She's also written essays and criticism,
and translated Chinese and Japanese poetry into English.
-1927: The Grand Ole Opry made its first radio broadcast from Nashville.
-1936: Britain's King Edward VIII abdicated to marry American divorcee
Wallis Warfield Simpson. His brother succeeded to the throne as King George
VI.
-1941: Japanese troops landed on northern Luzon in the Philippines in
the early days of World War II.
-1950: Ralph J Bunche becomes the first black person awarded a Nobel Peace
Prize. William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
-1952: Actress Susan Dey was born.
-1960: Actor Kenneth Branaugh was born.
-1984: The National Science Foundation reported the discovery of the first
planet outside our solar system, orbiting a star 21 million light years
from Earth.
-1990: The communists won a major victory in the first post-war multi-party
elections in the Yugoslavian republics of Serbia and Montenegro.
-1991: TV commentator Patrick Buchanan announced a bid to challenge President
Bush for the Republican presidential nomination. The U.S. Supreme Court
struck down a New York
law that allowed a criminal's profits for selling his story to be seized
and given to his victims.
-1997: The Swiss high court ruled that $100 million of the money that
had been salted away in banks by former dictator Ferdinand Marcos would
be returned to the Philippine govern-
ment.
December 11
-1781: Scottish physicist and kaleidoscope inventor David Brewster was
born.
-1803: French composer Hector Berlioz was born.
-1843: German pioneer bacteriologist Robert Koch was born.
-1882: La Guardia, Fiorello (Henry), Mayor, lawyer, U.S. representative,
and social activist, was born in New York City. In 1933 he was elected
to the first of three terms as mayor of New York. His work for housing
and welfare reform, as well as his "common touch,"
demonstrated by his reading of the Sunday comics on the radio during a
newspaper strike, earned him the love of millions of New Yorkers, who
knew him as "the Little Flower," an apt nickname since he stood
only 5'2".
-1913: Italian film producer Carlo Ponti was born.
-1918: Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk,
Russia. He went to great lengths to write and eventually publish his novels
under the Communist regime of the Soviet Union. After fighting in World
War II, he was arrested for writing letters that criticized Joseph Stalin.
He was sentenced to eight years in Russian labor camps, where he worked
as a miner, a bricklayer, and a foundryman. Upon his release, he was exiled
to a village in Kazakhstan, where he taught math and physics. He began
writing prose in secret, being careful not to show his work to even his
closest friends, in case word got out to Soviet authorities. He said he
was "convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print
in my lifetime." Then, in 1961, the Soviet government adopted slightly
looser censorship standards. Solzhenitsyn decided to risk trying to publish
his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).
He succeeded, but two years later the government took his books out of
print and forced him to stop publishing. Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts were
smuggled into Europe and America, and they drew the attention of several
major writers. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature,
even though he still couldn't publish in his home country. It wasn't until
the collapse of the Soviet Union that his works became widely available
in Russia. Today, he's considered a national hero.-1922: American short
story writer Grace Paley was born in New York City. She was raised in
the Bronx by Russian immigrants who spoke Yiddish, Russian and English
around the house. She started writing poetry at an early age, and took
a course from the British poet W.H. Auden when she was 17 years old. As
she grew older she felt an urge to write fiction, but she was raising
two children and felt that she didn't have the time. One day, she fell
ill and arranged for her children to go to an after-school program while
she stayed home and rested. Without the children there to take care of,
she sat down at a typewriter and started writing what would become her
first short story, "Goodbye and Good Luck." She wrote two more
stories and began to send them to the editors of magazines, but no one
would publish them. Eventually, she showed the stories to the ex-husband
of a friend, who worked in publishing. He said the stories were so good
that if she could write seven more like the ones he just read he was sure
he could get them published. Paley wrote seven more stories, and The
Little Disturbances of Man was published in 1959. Her short stories
are often about the lives of ordinary people in New York, especially women.
Many of her stories don't have much action or plot. Paley often goes long
stretches without writing. She starts stories by writing down a few sentences
and letting them sit for as long as it takes for her to think of what
should come next. Sometimes, she said, it takes months or even years.
Her second book of short stories wasn't published until 1974, 15 years
after her first collection. She spent the years in between protesting
the Vietnam War and participating in the civil rights and feminist movements.
She has called herself a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative
anarchist."-1928: Rafael Cortijo was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico,
and he died of cancer on October 4, 1982 in the caserío Lloréns
Torres at the age of 53. He led the revolution of popular bomba and Plena
music in the 1950's. He mainstreamed popular Black culture on the island
and won immense respect and compensation for musicians from the barrios.
He is the only Puerto Rican in the Music Hall of Fame in Paris and he
is credited with starting an avant-garde in Puerto Rico's native rhythms
in the early 80s.
-1931: Actress Rita Moreno was born.
-1931: American poet Jerome Rothenberg was born in New York City. His
first collection of poetry came out in 1959, and since then he's published
over 20 more. He's also a well-known translator who has translated poems
from French, German, Spanish, Aztec, Navajo, Hebrew, and Seneca.
-1937: Jim Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan. One day, he was out
hunting in the woods when he fell off a cliff and hurt his back. Thomas
McGuane suggested that Harrison write a novel. He began work on Wolf,
and it was published in 1971. Harrison wrote a few books of poetry and
another novel, but he was struggling to make just $10,000 per year. Then,
in 1979, he came out with a series of novellas entitled Legends of
the Fall. It was so successful that Harrison was able to buy a farm
near his old home in Michigan, as well as a cabin in the woods of the
Upper Peninsula.
-1939: Thomas McGuane was born in Wyandotte, Michigan.
He's the author of many novels, including Ninety-two in the Shade
(1973), Nothing but Blue Skies (1992), and The Cadence of Grass
(2002). He grew up in an Irish family that loved to tell stories, but
his parents discouraged him from becoming a writer. When he left for Michigan
State University, he devoted himself to reading and writing fiction, hoping
to make it big as a writer and show up his parents. He developed a circle
of friends that included Jim Harrison, and they exchanged stories and
books. Harrison used his connections in the publishing world to help get
McGuane's first novel, The Sporting Club (1969), published. McGuane
lives on a ranch in Montana, where he raises cattle and takes care of
dogs and horses. He's an avid fisherman, and published a book about fishing
in 1999 called The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing. For a while,
he was a serious rodeo competitor.-1940: Singer
David Gates was born.
-1943: Actress Donna Mills was born.
-1944: Singer Brenda Lee was born.
-1949: Actress Teri Garr was born.
-1951: Joe DiMaggio announced his retirement from baseball after 13 seasons
with the New York Yankees.
-1953: Actor Ken Wahl (Wiseguy) was born.
-1954: Singer Jermaine Jackson was born.
-1972: Apollo XVII astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt landed
on the moon for a three-day exploration.
-1983: 30,000 women tried to rip down fences around a U.S. cruise missile
base at Greenham Common, England.
-1984: A nativity scene was displayed near the White House for the first
time since courts ordered it removed in 1973.
-1989: Bulgarian leader Peter Mladenov set a May 31 deadline for free
elections in the Eastern European country. He also called for a constitution
stripping the Communist Party of its
guaranteed dominant role in Bulgaria.
-1991: William Kennedy Smith was acquitted on rape charges by a jury that
deliberated less than 77 minutes following a 10-day televised trial.
-1992: The three major TV networks agreed on joint standards to limit
entertainment violence by the start of the next fall's season. Women priests
were approved by the Church of England.
-1993: Parliamentary elections were held in Russia. Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle
of the ruling center-left Coalition of Parties for Democracy won Chile's
presidential election.
-1994: Up to 40,000 Russian troops invaded Chechnya, a semi-autonomous
republic on Russia's border with Georgia, to put down a secessionist rebellion.
-1995: Two Japanese cult members admitted they had released the toxic
sarin gas in Tokyo subway trains the previous March that killed 12 people.
-1996: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's son, Uday, was shot and wounded.
-1997: A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that Microsoft Corp.
could not bundle Microsoft Internet Explorer with Windows 95.
-1998: The International Olympic Committee began an internal investigation
into rumors that bribes had been offered by cities seeking to be chosen
as sites for the Olympic games.
December 12
-1745: John Jay, first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was born.
-1800: Washington, D.C. was founded.
-1805: Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was born.
-1821: French novelist Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen, France (1821).
He's best known for the novel Madame Bovary. As a young man, he
rebelled against his middle class family, dropped out of school, and studied
literature on his own. Eventually, his father convinced him to go to law
school, but he was distracted by writing projects that he could never
seem to finish. In 1844 he had a nervous attack. He dropped out of law
school, his father bought him a house on the River Seine, and Flaubert
devoted the rest of his life to writing. After his father died, he moved
back in with his mother, where he lived until he was 50 years old. He
lived by his own maxim, "Be regular and orderly in your life so that
you may be violent and original in your work." He was a perfectionist,
and spent hours at his writing desk every day. It took him about five
years to write Madame Bovary, which was published in 1857. Madame
Bovary is about the adulterous affair of a provincial housewife. Critics
complained about its amoral depiction of sin, and Flaubert had to go to
court to allow the book to remain in print. Most of Flaubert's novels
were neither critical nor popular successes. A Sentimental Education
(1869) sold fewer than 3,000 copies in the first four years after it was
published. But he became hugely popular in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, especially among European writers like James Joyce,
who admired Flaubert's style of realism in which the writer leaves no
trace of himself in his work.
-1863: Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was born.
-1870: Joseph Hayne Rainey of South Carolina was sworn in as the first
black to serve in the U.S. House.
-1893: Actor Edward G. Robinson was born.
-1901: A radio message was transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean for the
first time.
-1915: Singer Frank Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey. He recorded
dozens of hits, including "I Get a Kick out of You," "I've
Got You Under My Skin," and "Night and Day." Sinatra grew
up in Hoboken, the son of Italian immigrants. He knew early on that he
wanted to be a singer, and his mother supported his decision to drop out
of high school to sing in nightclubs. In 1935, he formed a group called
the Three Flashes with three other young men from Hoboken. After a while,
he decided his best chance to make it big was to sing alone, so he quit
the group and went back to solo nightclub gigs. In 1939, a trumpet player
named Harry James heard Sinatra singing on a local radio station, and
James signed him for $75 a week. Sinatra made his first recording the
next month.
-1923: TV game show host Bob Barker was born.
-1924: Former New York Mayor Edward Koch was born.
-1929: British playwright John Osborne was born in London. He grew up
in a working class family, and his father died when he was young. When
he was 16, he quit school and began acting with traveling companies. He
started writing plays when he was 19, and his first play was produced
when he was 25. Two years later, he came out with his most famous play,
Look Back in Anger (1956). It's a bleak play about a 25-year-old
man named Jimmy Porter who lives in a tiny apartment with his wife and
business partner. Jimmy owns a sweets shop, but he has no real hope for
the future, and he becomes involved in a love triangle with his wife's
friend. The play was revolutionary in British theater. Before Look
Back in Anger, most plays in England were classics, melodramas, or
genteel, drawing-room comedies. They usually had a likeable main character
for audiences to identify with. Osborne changed all that. The term "angry
young man" was coined to label the discontented British youth of
the 1950s, and Osborne inspired a generation of writers, artists, and
musicians.
-1937: Japanese planes bombed and sank the U.S. gunboat Panay in the Yangtze
River north of Nanking, China. Japan later said it was a mistake.
-1938: Singers Connie Francis was born.
-1941: Dionne Warwick was born.
-1951: Talk show host Rush Limbaugh was born.
-1952: Former Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby was born.
-1959: Musician Sheila E was born.
-1962: Former tennis player Tracy Austin was born.
-1975: Actress Mayim Bialik ("Blossom") was born.
-1981: Martial law was imposed in Poland.
-1985: The crash of an Arrow Air DC-8 military charter on takeoff from
Gander, Newfoundland, killed all 256 aboard, including 248 U.S. soldiers.
-1989: Five Central American presidents, including Nicaragua's Daniel
Ortega, called for an end to the rebel offensive against El Salvador's
U.S.-backed government.
-1990: 15 people were killed and more than 260 injured in a pileup on
a foggy Tennessee highway.
-1991: The Russian parliament ratified a commonwealth treaty linking the
three strongest Soviet republics in the nation's most profound change
since the 1917 revolution. North and South Korea concluded an historic
agreement to reunify peacefully after 46 years of division
and animosity.
-1992: Princess Anne, the only daughter of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain,
became the first divorced royal in the inner circle to remarry when she
wed Cmdr. Timothy Laurence.
-1993: Russian voters approved a new Constitution.
-1996: A French gunman took 35 hostages in a Paris office. The standoff
ended without injuries.
-1998: President Clinton began a trip to the Middle East that included
a visit to the new Gaza International Airport in Palestinian territory.
December 13
-1577: Sir Francis Drake embarded on a voyage to circumnavigate the globe.
-1642: Dutch navigator Abel Tasman discovered New Zealand.
-1797: German poet Heinrich Heine was born in Dusseldorf, Germany. He's
one of the most popular German poets of the nineteenth century. He wrote
a series of love poems, each one of which ended with an ironic, witty
twist. These poems were collected in The Book of Songs (1827),
but they didn't sell well. He spent the next decade struggling to find
work, writing for various newspapers, and hoping that he wouldn't get
in trouble for his unpopular political views. He wrote many more poems
and dramas, but late in his life his early poems were rediscovered, and
they made him rich and famous. Many of them were set to music by composers
like Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms
-1816: The nation's first savings bank, the Provident Institution for
Savings, opened in Boston.
-1835: Clergyman Phillips Brooks, who wrote the Christmas carol "O
Little Town of Bethlehem," was born.
-1862: An estimated 11,000 Northern soldiers were killed or wounded in
a battle with Confederate troops outside Fredericksburg, Va.
-1887: World War I hero Sergeant Alvin York was born.
-1910: Actor Van Heflin was born.
-1915: Mystery novelist Ross Macdonald was born Kenneth Millar in Los
Gatos, California. He's famous for his series of detective novels about
the private investigator Lew Archer: Moving Target (1949), The
Drowning Pool (1950), and The Way People Die (1951). Most of
his novels are about corruption in Southern California.
-1920: Former Secretary of State George Shultz was born.
-1925: Comedian/actor Dick Van Dyke was born.
1927: American poet James Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio. Wright's
hometown was located in a heavily industrialized area of the state that
Wright called "my back-broken beloved Ohio." There was a coal
mine and a steel mill near his house, and he grew up surrounded by blast
furnaces and smoke stacks. During the winter, all the snowdrifts in his
town turned black from soot. In the summer, he swam with other boys in
the Ohio River, which was full of runoff from the factories that lined
the banks. He called the Ohio, "[that] beautiful river, that black
ditch of horror." He started writing poetry when he was eleven years
old. His father worked at the Hazel-Atlas Glass Company, and Wright took
a job at the same factory when he got out of high school. After working
there for a few months, he decided that he had to get out of his hometown.
He served in World War II and used the G.I. Bill to study at Kenyon College.
He got a job teaching English at the University of Minnesota, and published
two books of poetry, but he suffered from depression and alcoholism, and
he lost his teaching job for missing classes. His poetry hadn't attracted
any attention, his marriage had broken up, and he wasn't sure what to
do next when, one day, he read an issue of Robert Bly's literary magazine
The Fifties. It impressed him so much that he wrote Bly a sixteen
page single-spaced letter. Bly wrote back and invited him to a farm in
western Minnesota, and the two became great friends. Wright
had been writing all of his poetry with formal meter and rhyme, but Bly
encouraged him to write free verse, and the result was his first important
book of poetry, The Branch Will Not Break (1962). It got great
reviews and contained many of his most famous poems, including "Autumn
Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," "A Blessing," and "Lying
in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota."
He went on to write many more books of poetry, including Two Citizens
(1973) and To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977). Throughout his work,
he kept coming back to the subject of his hometown.
-1929: Actor Christopher Plummer was born.
-1941: Singer/actor John Davidson was born.
-1948: Rock singer Ted Nugent was born.
-1948: Rock critic Lester Bangs was born in Escondido, California. His
father was an alcoholic and an ex-convict who disappeared when Bangs was
nine years old. His mother was a Jehovah's Witness, and he grew up going
door to door with her, evangelizing, holding signs that said, "What
Is Your Destiny?" After he heard The Beatles and The Rolling Stones,
he fell in love with rock 'n roll, ran away from home and got involved
with the Hell's Angels. He tried to go to college to study journalism
but dropped out just before his twentieth birthday. He wanted to join
a rock band, but the only instrument he could play was the harmonica.
Then, in 1969, he wrote his first music review and sent it to Rolling
Stone magazine with a note that said, "Look . . . I'm as good
as any writer you've got in there. You'd better print this or give me
the reason why!" He was shocked when they actually accepted it. Bangs
went on to write for a variety of different magazines, but instead of
just writing about the music, he used music as the starting point for
long, rambling essays about American life and culture. He wanted to write
serious literature, and hated the fact that people considered him a hack
journalist. He tried to write a book throughout the 1970s, but he struggled
with alcoholism and drug addition, and in 1982 he died of a drug overdose.
After his death, much of his work was collected in the book Psychotic
Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1987), and he is now considered one
of the greatest rock critics of all time.
-1950: Actors Wendy Malick was born.
-1958: Steve Buscemi was born.
-1963: Football player and novelist Tim Green was born near Syracuse,
New York. He is possibly the first professional athlete ever to publish
a novel while he was still an active player. While in college on a football
scholarship, he studied writing with the authors Tobias Wolff and Raymond
Carver. They encouraged him to write about what he knew, and what he knew
was football. While playing as a defensive end for the Atlanta Falcons,
he published his first novel, Ruffians (1993), a thriller about
professional football. He has gone on to write several other novels about
the seamy side of the football business, including The Red Zone
(1998) and Double Reverse (1999). His most recent novel is The
Fourth Perimeter (2003).
-1967: Jamie Foxx was born.
-1982: The Sentry armored car company in New York discovered the overnight
theft of $11 million from its headquarters. It was the biggest cash theft
in U.S. history.
-1990: The last of the U.S. hostages being held by Iraq, five diplomats
in Kuwait, flew to freedom. Troops were rushed to Soviet Georgia and a
state of emergency was imposed after inter-ethnic violence killed three
people.
-1991: The leaders of the Central American countries held a summit meeting
and agreed to pledge $4.5 billion to fight poverty.
-1992: Ricky Ray, 15, one of three hemophiliac brothers barred from attending
a Florida school because they had the AIDS virus, died.
-1993: In Canada, Kim Campbell resigned as leader of the Progressive Conservative
Party.
-1997: The Getty Center museum complex, built on a hilltop overlooking
Los Angeles, was officially opened.
-1998: In a non-binding plebiscite giving Puerto Ricans the opportunity
to express a preference as to the future of political status of the island,
the "none of the above" option was supported by 50 percent of
voters -- indicating that most wished to retain Puerto Rico's current
status as a U.S. commonwealth.
December 14
-1919: Novelist and short story writer Shirley Jackson was born in San
Francisco. She was the daughter of upper class, high society parents,
and she never lived up to their expectations. Her mother wanted her to
be a socialite, but Shirley was awkward, unattractive, and intellectual.
Her mother once told her that she wished Shirley had never been born.
She was shunned by her classmates in high school and spent all her time
alone, reading and writing. She made a vow to herself that she would write
a thousand words every day for the rest of her life, in order to prove
herself to everyone who had rejected her. In college, a man named Stanley
Edgar Hyman fell in love with her when he read one of her short stories.
He was Jewish, and her parents were horrified when she married him. They
moved to a small town in Vermont, where her husband taught literature
at Bennington College. She was an eccentric woman, and the local townspeople
talked about her behind her back. They called her a Communist, a witch,
an atheist and a Jew. She felt as though everyone in town were watching
her and judging her, and she began to dread leaving the house. One
day, she sat down and wrote a story about a small New England town where
one resident is ritually chosen by lottery each year to be stoned to death.
She finished the story in two hours and sent it off to The New Yorker,
where it was published as "The Lottery" in 1948. The story generated
more reader response than any story ever published by The New Yorker
up to that point. Hundreds of readers wrote to the magazine, demanding
to know what the story meant, or asking to cancel their subscriptions
because they were so disturbed. "The Lottery"
made Shirley Jackson famous, but she still struggled to find time to write
while raising four children. She eventually wrote two memoirs about the
experience of parenting, Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising
Demons (1957). Her memoirs were lighthearted and funny, but she also
wrote several dark novels, including The Haunting of Hill House
(1959), about a group of people who try to spend a night in a house with
ghosts, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), about a
woman who has poisoned her entire family.
-1945: Stanley Crouch was born in Los Angeles, California. He's an African-American
writer who has written several books of essays, including Notes of
a Hanging Judge (1990) and The American Skin Game, or, The Decoy
of Race (1995). As a young man, he became disillusioned with the civil
rights movement and got involved with the Black Nationalists, who believed
in living separately from whites rather than trying to assimilate. He
eventually came to feel that Black Nationalism was a form of reverse racism.
He has gone on to argue that Black Nationalism killed the Civil Rights
movement because it encouraged African Americans to define themselves
by their race alone.
-1951: Amy Hempel was born in Chicago, Illinois. She's the author of several
books of short stories, including Reasons to Live (1985), At
the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), and Tumble Home (1997).
As a young woman, she had a series of traumatic experiences: her mother
committed suicide, she had a motorcycle accident, and then she a car accident.
She said, "I went from accident to accident, hospital to hospital;
I'd walk out of the house in the morning and half look up to see when
the . . . safe was going to fall out of the sky and smash me into the
sidewalk." She became so afraid of death that she decided the only
way to conquer her fear was to enroll in an anatomy class and dissect
cadavers, and it worked. She got a job counseling terminally ill patients,
but she wanted to write fiction on the side and wasn't getting anywhere
with it. She finally decided to move to New York City, and discovered
that it was only after she had left California that she could write about
the life she had been living there. She wrote a series of extremely short
stories about the strange people she'd known and experiences she'd had,
and published them in her first collection, Reasons to Live (1985).
It begins, "My heart-I thought it had stopped. So I got in my car
and headed for God."
December 15
-1791: Bill of Rights Day, which commemorates the passage of the first
10 amendments.
-1932: Irish writer Edna O'Brien was born in County Clare in the west
of Ireland. She was raised on a farm, just outside a village of 200 people
that O'Brien would later call "enclosed, fervid and bigoted."
The town was devoutly Catholic, and O'Brien's parents discouraged her
from reading anything other than religious texts. In her Catholic school,
she read the Bible, prayer books, and occasionally a passage from Shakespeare.
After high school, she packed up a suitcase, bound it in twine, and moved
to Dublin. She lived in a poor area of town and studied to become a pharmacist.
She had never bought a book before, but one day she purchased a copy of
Introducing James Joyce (1942) by T.S. Eliot, which included passages
from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). O'Brien later
said encountering Joyce "was the most astonishing literary experience
of my life." She said she realized for the first time that a writer
can draw on his or her own life for material; and she knew that's what
she wanted to do for a living. She wrote her first
novel, Country Girls (1960), at the age of 26, in only three weeks.
It's the first book in a trilogy that follows the lives of two women from
their childhood in a convent school in the west of Ireland to their unhappy
marriages in London. The books talk openly about poverty and sexuality
and religious repression. They were banned in Ireland as soon as they
were published. Country Girls was called "a smear on Irish
womanhood" and was burned at churches in O'Brien's childhood home.
But readers in Britain and America loved her work, and O'Brien has gone
on to write many more successful novels about people struggling to find
happiness in twentieth-century Ireland.
December 16
-955: 18-year-old Ottaviano, the only son of Duke Alberic II of Spoleto,
who ruled Rome, became Pope John XII: when his father ordered his election.
John's pontificate lasted nine years, and he is said to have died in the
arms of his mistress.
-1485: Catherine of Aragon was born. The first wife of King Henry VIII
of England, Catherine was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.
-1770: Ludwig van Beethoven, composer, was born in Bonn, Germany. In 1787
he had lessons from Mozart in Vienna, Beethoven was tolerated by Vienna
society despite his physical unattractiveness and arrogance. Just as he
was developing a reputation as a composer, he began to go deaf, but stoically
accepted the fact. Best known works include "Pathetique" and
"Moonlight" sonatas, "Eroica" and "Choral"
symphonies.
-1773: Boston Tea Pary Day
-1775: Jane Austen was born in the parish of Steventon in Hampshire, England.
Her family was just wealthy enough to be considered part of the gentlemanly
class, and her father often struggled to obtain enough money to support
her many brothers and sisters. Austen went to school for a time in the
city of Southampton, but she came home when she nearly died from typhoid
fever. Her real education began when she discovered her father's library.
She began to write stories to entertain her family, inventing satires
that poked fun at the great 18th-century novelists. Just after she turned
20, she began to write first drafts for many of her novels. One of these
was "First Impressions," which later became Pride and Prejudice.
Her father sent the manuscript to a publisher, but received no response.
Her family moved to the resort city of Bath in 1800, and for many years
she appears to have written very little. She fell in love with a man she
met at the seashore, but soon afterward he died unexpectedly. Then she
traveled with her sister to visit a young, clumsy man named Harris Bigg-Wither,
who asked for her hand in marriage. She accepted his proposal, but the
following morning she did something unheard of in those days: She told
him she had changed her mind. She would remain unmarried her entire life.
Austen published her first book, Sense and Sensibility, in 1811.
The title page said only that the book was written "by a lady,"
and nobody outside her family knew she was the author. Then she began
to work on a new draft of Pride and Prejudice. She wrote on a table
in the drawing room, hiding her notebooks whenever she heard someone come
through the door. Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, and
it became a sensation with the British public. Austen
wrote several more novels, with her identity no longer a secret, but her
readers grew less enthusiastic. The critics ignored her next book, Mansfield
Park (1814). Then she wrote Emma (1816), which is now believed
to be one of her greatest books. Austen died in 1817, when she was 41,
probably of Addison's Disease. Her last novel, Persuasion, was
published a year later.
-1863: Philosopher and poet George Santayana was born in Madrid. He is
famous for saying, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned
to repeat it," which became the epitaph for The Rise and Fall
of the Third Reich, a book by William L. Shirer (1959). Santayana
wrote a great deal about art and the importance of creative thinking.
He once said, "Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms,
but do not let it deceive you. Enjoy the world, travel over it and learn
its ways, but do not let it hold you." As he grew older, he became
tired of his teaching position at Harvard and what he called the "thistles
of trivial and narrow scholarship," so he left Harvard and spent
the rest of his life writing. His books include many philosophical works,
as well as collections of poetry. He also spent about 20 years working
on a novel, The Last Puritan (1935), about a young man's struggles
in Boston high society just before World War I.
-1901: Anthropologist Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia into a family
of social scientists. She's famous for her book Coming of Age in Samoa
(1928). She wrote the book after she visited the South Pacific island
and found its people to be more open about sexuality than people in the
Western world. Her work has sparked debate and criticism in recent years,
but she's still known as one of the forerunners of modern anthropology.
-1917: Arthur C. Clarke was born in Somerset, England. He is a scientist
who has also written many science fiction novels. Clarke built his first
telescope when he was thirteen. During World War II, he served in the
air force and also sold his first stories. Then in 1945 he wrote an article
called "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide
Radio Coverage?" The article explored the possibilities for a satellite
that could broadcast signals while orbiting the earth, an idea that would
eventually come to fruition as the communications satellite. Clarke soon
began to write many books imagining human contact with extraterrestrial
life. In 1968 he wrote the book 2001, and the same year he co-authored
a script for the film version with director Stanley Kubrick. The story
is set in what is now the present day, but in a world where humans have
the power to fly through the solar system. Astronauts head toward Jupiter
when they receive a mysterious signal from alien life forms, but their
mission is thwarted when the spaceship's computer tries to take control.
-1950: President Truman proclaimed a national state of emergency in order
to fight "Communist imperialism."
December 17
-1760: American Revolutionary War soldier Deborah Sampson, who fought
as a man under the alias Robert Shurtleff, was born.
-1770: Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized on this day in Bonn. No one knows
when he was born. As a young man he was a virtuoso piano player, and he
wrote most of his famous compositions after he began to go deaf. Beethoven's
music became immensely popular during his lifetime, but he never stopped
having troubles with money. Since his father spent much of his time drinking,
Beethoven became in charge of the family finances when he was still a
teenager, working as a court organist for the Elector of Cologne. He took
a trip to Vienna to try to make his way as a musician, but he had to return
home before he could gain a foothold. A few years later he went back for
good, playing the piano at private parties for the city's aristocrats.
Just before he turned forty, a small group of princes
and archdukes agreed to give him an annual salary with no conditions attached.
The arrangement made Beethoven more independent than almost any composer
before him. But he still struggled with all of his expenses. When his
brother died, he had to pay for the education of his young nephew. The
price was 2,000 florins, which was half of his yearly salary. He also
kept servants, enjoyed fine wine and lived in a summer house each year.
When his Ninth Symphony premiered in 1824, he tried to raise the ticket
prices in order to help pay his debts. But he didn't make nearly as much
from the concert as he had hoped. -1790: The Aztec
Calendar or Solar Stone was uncovered by workmen repairing Mexico City’s
Central Plaza.
-1807: Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was born.
-1894: Arthur Fiedler, conductor, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. In
1930 he took
over the Boston Pops Orchestra and for almost a half century he was the
most beloved conductor of light-classical music in the U.S.A. Active in
promoting music through various
mediums, he was also made an honorary fire chief because of his practice
of chasing every major fire, day or night, and became a familiar figure
to Bostonians at the scene of the fires.
-1903: The Wright brothers made the world's first flight in a power-driven,
heavier-than-air machine that cost about $1000 to build. With Orville
at the controls and Wilbur on the ground, the plane flew 120 feet in twelve
seconds in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Although man had dreamt of flying
for centuries, it took these two unschooled young men (bicycle shopkeepers
by trade) to finally lift us off the ground. They'd spent several weeks
camping on the Outer Banks, a narrow, sandy peninsula on the Atlantic.
The day began with gray skies and sharp winds, and the brothers huddled
in a shed to warm themselves. Orville said years later that he should
have realized it was much too dangerous to fly in that weather. But they
had already waited several days for the right flying conditions, and they
wanted to get home before Christmas. Around mid-morning, they decided
to give their machine a try. Orville shook hands with his brother and
climbed into the pilot's seat. The machine built
up a speed of about 10 miles an hour, rose about ten feet off the ground,
and landed almost immediately. The brothers made two more attempts, and
still they barely got anywhere. Then Wilbur tried again. He flew straight
into the wind for nearly a full minute, covering 852 feet. After he got
out of the plane, it promptly rolled over and tumbled straight toward
the ocean. The plane would take months to repair, but they had made their
first successful flight.
-1903: Novelist Erskine Caldwell was born.
-1925: Army Gen. William "Billy" Mitchell, outspoken advocate
of a separate U.S. Air Force, was found guilty of conduct prejudicial
to the good of the armed services. He was awarded the Medal of Honor 20
years after his death.
-1929: Journalist William Safire was born in New York City. He was the
senior speechwriter for President Nixon, and since 1973 he's been a political
columnist for the New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished
commentary in 1978.
-1930: Publisher Bob Guccione was born.
-1936: British singer/actor Tommy Steele was born.
-1939: The Nazi warship Graf Spee was scuttled off the coast of Uruguay
as British vessels pursued it.
-1945: Actor Ernie Hudson ("Ghostbusters") was born.
-1946: Comedian Eugene Levy ("Second City TV") was born.
-1954: Actor Bill Pullman ("Independence Day") was born.
-1967: The Clean Air Act was passed by Congress.
-1981: American Brig. Gen. James Dozier was kidnapped in Rome by Italy's
Red Brigades. He was freed 42 days later in a raid by Italian anti-terrorist
forces.
-1986: A Las Vegas federal jury awarded entertainer Wayne Newton $19.3
million in his defamation suit against NBC. A judge later reduced the
award to $5.3 million. A federal jury in Detroit cleared automaker John
DeLorean of all 15 charges in his fraud and racketeering trial.
-1990: Secretary of State Baker told NATO that Iraq might withdraw from
Kuwait around the Jan. 15 deadline. NATO rejected the partial solution.
-1991: 15 people were killed and 20 wounded in clashes between Soviet
troops and guerrillas in a disputed Armenian enclave.
-1992: Israel tried to deport hundreds of Palestinians to Lebanon but
Beirut closed the border, trapping them in the Israeli-controlled "security
zone." President Bush formally signed the North American Free Trade
Treaty simultaneously with the leaders of Mexico and Canada.
-1993: President Clinton acknowledged the $500 million gift of philanthropist
Walter Annenberg to public-education reform.
-1994: North Korea said it shot down a U.S. Army helicopter in North Korean
airspace, killing one pilot. The second pilot was reportedly uninjured
but was held in North Korea.
-1996: The United Nations elected Kofi Annan of Ghana the new secretary-general.
-1997: New Jersey became the first state in the United States to permit
homosexual couples to adopt children.
-1998: The U.N. World Meteorological Organization said 1998 was the warmest
year ever recorded.
December 18
-1708: Playwright Christopher Fry was born in Bristol, England. He wrote
plays in blank verse at a time when most British plays were realistic
social comedies. He's best known for The Lady's Not for Burning
(1948), a play set in the Middle Ages about an ex-soldier who wants to
die and a young woman who is accused of being a witch.
-1708: Hymn writer Charles Wesley was born in Epworth, England. He went
to Oxford University, where he formed a small religious study group that
included his brother John and a few other friends. They were nicknamed
"the holy club" and later "the Methodists" because
of their methodical worship and strict discipline. The group eventually
broke up, but a few years later John and Charles Wesley founded the first
official Methodist Society, laying the foundations for modern-day Methodism.
After graduating from Oxford, Charles grew frustrated with Christianity
and began to question his beliefs. He went on a mission to the new American
colony of Georgia in 1735. He worked as a secretary of the governor, but
he found it hard to adapt the rough lifestyle in America. Wesley wrote
over 6,500 hymns, including "Hark! the herald angels sing,"
and "Oh for a thousand tongues to sing."-1786: German composer
Carl Maria von Weber was born.
-1778: Joseph Grimaldi, known as the "greatest clown in history,"
was born.
-1856: English physicist Joseph Thompson, discoverer of the electron,
was born.
-1865: Slavery abolished by 13th Amendment in the United States.
-1870: British short story writer Saki was born Hector Hugh Munro in Akyab,
Burma. He wrote short, whimsical stories about the British upper class,
stories that were full of witty sayings and surprise twists. Munro was
raised in rural England by two aunts. When he was 23 years old and still
hadn't decided on an occupation, his father found him a job with the military
police in Burma. He soon caught malaria and returned to London. While
he was recovering, he decided he was going to be a writer. When he was
well enough to leave his family's home, he moved to London and spent his
days reading and writing at the British Museum. His first book was a history
of medieval Russia called The Rise of the Russian Empire (1900).
His next book was a satire of the British government, The Westminster
Alice (1902), which he wrote under the pen name Saki. It was hugely
popular, and he began to write short stories under the same name. He loved
animals, and often wrote about them in his stories. His first story, "Dogged,"
is about a vicious fox terrier who lives with a stuffy bachelor. In Saki's
story "Tobermory," a cat living in a country house learns to
talk, and starts repeating what guests say about each other in secret.-1879:
Swiss modernist painter Paul Klee was born.
-1886: Baseball pitcher Tyrus "Ty" Cobb was born.
-1904: Film director George Stevens ("Giant") was born.
-1913: West German statesman Willy Brandt was born.
-1915: President Wilson, a widower for one year, married the widow Edith
Bolling Galt.
-1916: Actress Betty Grable was born.
-1917: Actor Ossie Davis was born.
-1943: Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards was born.
-1946: Steven Spielberg, academy award winning film director, was born
in Cincinnati, OH. Even as a child, he knew he wanted to make movies.
When he was 13 years old, he won a contest with a 40-minute film called
Escape to Nowhere. When he was 16, he produced a movie called Firelight
that made a $100 profit at the local movie theater. He wanted to study
film at the University of Southern California, but the film school rejected
him, so he went to California State University in Long Beach and majored
in English. One day, he was taking a tour of Universal Studios when he
slipped by security, found an abandoned janitors' closet, cleaned it up,
and turned it into an office. He discovered that if he wore a suit and
tie he could walk right past the security guards at the front gate, and
he began coming in to his makeshift office every day. While he was there,
he started making a short silent movie called Amblin'. It caught
the attention of some Universal executives, and he began to make TV movies.
His first real breakthrough was Duel (1971), a suspenseful thriller
about a man in a small car being terrorized by a man in a large truck
for no apparent reason. It came out on TV in the U.S. and in theaters
in Europe. Four years later, he directed Jaws (1975), one of the
most successful movies ever made. Spielberg's parents divorced when he
was a child, after years of intense arguing. Many of his movies deal with
the relationships between parents and children, especially fathers and
sons. In Close Encounter of the Third Kind (1977), children and
parents are abducted from their homes. In E.T. (1982), Elliott
befriends an alien, in part to make up for the loss of his father. And
in the more recent film Catch Me if you Can (2002), the main character
runs away from home and becomes a con man after his parents announce their
plans to divorce. Spielberg has seven children:
one with his first wife Amy Irving, and the rest with wife, Kate Capshaw.
-1950: Movie critic Leonard Maltin was born.
-1955: Actors Ray Liotta was born.
-1964: Brad Pitt was born.
-1966: Kiefer Sutherland was born.
-1969: Singer Tiny Tim, 44, married 17-year-old Miss Vicky Budinger on
Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show."
-1972: The United States resumed heavy bombing and mining operations against
North Vietnam after the communists refused to agree to end the war.
-1978: Katie Holmes ("Dawson's Creek") was born.
-1980: Singer Christina Aguilera was born.
-1985: Congress approved the biggest overhaul of farm legislation since
the Depression, trimming price supports.
-1989: A pipe bomb killed Savannah, Ga., City Councilman Robert Robinson,
hours after a pipe bomb is discovered at the Atlanta federal courthouse.
A racial motive was cited in a rash of bomb incidents. The Romanian government
sealed the borders amid reports of a deadly crackdown on dissidents. The
United States launched Operation Just Cause, sending troops into Panama
to topple the government of General Manuel Noriega.
-1990: Moldavia became the sixth Soviet republic to refuse to participate
in a 10-day meeting in a mounting affront to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
-1991: General Motors announced it would close 21 plants and eliminate
74,000 jobs in the next four years to offset record losses.
-1993: Vice President Gore wrapped up a tour of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
and Russia -- during which he signed a series of agreements.
-1996: New rating codes were announced for American television programs.
-1997: South Koreans elected longtime leftist opposition leader Kim Dae
Jong president, marking the first time in the nation's history that a
member of the opposition had defeated a candidate of the New Korea Party
and its predecessors. The six-mile-long Tokyo Bay tunnel connecting the
cities of Kawasaki and Kisarazu opened. The project took 8 1/2 years to
complete and cost $17 billion.
December 19
-1777: Gen. George Washington and the Continental Army began a winter
encampment at Valley Forge, Pa.
-1820: Women's suffrage leader Mary Livermore was born.
-1843: Charles Dickens published Christmas Carol, the story of
Ebenezer Scrooge, whom Dickens described as "a squeezing, wrenching,
grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner. Hard and sharp as
flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire." In
the book, Scrooge learns the Christmas spirit of generosity from three
ghosts who show him his past, his present, and his future. Dickens wrote
the novel after his first commercial failure. His previous novel, Martin
Chuzzlewit (1842) had flopped, and he was suddenly strapped for cash.
Martin Chuzzlewit had been satirical and pessimistic, and Dickens
thought he might be more successful if he wrote a heartwarming tale with
a holiday theme. He got the idea for the book in late October of 1843
and struggled to finish it in time for Christmas. It finally came out,
and it was a huge bestseller.
-1861: Italo Svevo was born Aron Hector Schmitz in Trieste. His novel
The Confessions of Zeno (1923) is considered one of the greatest
Italian novels of the 20th century. Svevo was a bank clerk who hated his
job and wanted to be a writer, but his first two self-published novels
were completely ignored. His wife's father got him a more prosperous job
at a paint company, and he gave up on literature, settling down to live
a comfortable life. Then, ten years after he had stopped writing, he decided
to take some English classes for business reasons. The tutor he found
was a young, aspiring writer named James Joyce. The two men got to talking
about writing, and Svevo suddenly confessed that he had written two novels.
He gave copies to Joyce, and Joyce loved them and told Svevo he was a
neglected genius. It took Svevo more than ten years to complete his next
novel, a fictional memoir of a patient undergoing psychoanalysis. The
Confessions of Zeno was published in 1923, and it was also ignored,
but Schmitz sent a copy to Joyce, and Joyce sent it to all his literary
friends. They declared it a comic masterpiece, and Schmitz became a literary
celebrity in Europe. He only lived for two more years, but they were the
best two years of his life. A new translation of his last novel, now called
Zeno's Conscience, came out in 2001.
-1861: Constance Garnett was born Constance Black in Brighton, England.
She's best known for providing the first widely available English translations
of the important Russian novels of the 19th century. After marrying the
literary critic Edward Garnett, she became friends with some Russian exiles
and decided to learn the language. She loved it so much that she traveled
to St. Petersburg in 1893 and became friends with many writers and revolutionaries.When
she returned home, she decided to begin translating as much Russian literature
as she could. Her eyesight grew worse and worse,
so she had a Russian friend read the novels aloud to her one sentence
at a time, and she dictated her translations. She somehow managed to translate
about 5000 words a day. She finished Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in six months,
and went on to translate Dostoyevsky's complete works, about two and a
half million words long. In many cases, her translations of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky,
Chekhov, and others were the first versions read by English and American
writers in the early 20th century.
-1868: Novelist Eleanor Porter ("Pollyanna") was born.
-1875: The father of Black history, Carter G Woodson was born.
-1902: Actor Ralph Richardson was born.
-1906: Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev was born.
-1910: French dramatist Jean Genet, a pioneer in the theater of the absurd,
was born.
-1933: Actors Cicely Tyson was born.
-1944: Tim Reid was born.
-1946: Robert Urich was born.
-1958: The U.S. satellite Atlas transmitted the first radio voice broadcast
from space, a 58-word recorded Christmas greeting from President Eisenhower.
-1963: Jennifer Beals was born.
-1972: Alyssa Milano was born. The splashdown of Apollo XVII ended America's
manned moon exploration program.
-1984: The United States formally withdrew from UNESCO in a effort to
force reform of the U.N. cultural organization's budget and alleged Third
World bias. The prime ministers of Britain and China signed an accord,
returning Hong Kong to China in 1997.
-1986: Attorney General Edwin Meese said President Reagan did NOT know
that money Iran paid for U.S. arms was going to Nicaraguan rebels.
-1990: A judge in Oshkosh, Wis., dismissed the case against a man convicted
of sex assault against a woman with at least 46 personalities.
-1991: The Bank of Credit and Commerce International agreed to plead guilty
to federal racketeering charges, forfeiting $550 million.
-1996: O.J. Simpson was called to the witness stand in his civil trial
for damages in the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
-1997: The motion picture "Titanic" opened in U.S. theaters
to generally favorable reviews.
-1998: President Clinton became only the second U.S. president to be impeached
when the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment,
charging him with
perjury and obstruction of justice. The allegations stemmed from the actions
he took to conceal his relationship with former White House intern Monica
Lewinsky. House Speaker-designate Bob Livingston, R-La, announced he would
not be a candidate and would be leaving Congress. Two days earlier, Livingston
admitted he'd had extra-marital affairs "on occasion."
December 20
-1803: Louisiana Purchase Day, the anniversary of the transfer of the
Louisiana Territory from France, which doubled the size of the United
States.
-1911: Novelist and short story writer Hortense Calisher was born in Manhattan.
Though she has written several novels, she's best known for the many short
stories she published in The New Yorker magazine, most of which
are compiled in The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (1975).
After she got married and moved to a small town in New York State, she
began to feel paralyzed living the life of a mother and housewife. One
day, she got the idea for her short story "A Box of Ginger"
while walking her son to school. She typed it up and sent it to The
New Yorker, and it was published in 1948. Her first collection of
short stories, In the Absence of Angels (1951), came out three
years later to great acclaim. Many of her most anthologized stories are
based on her childhood.
-1989: U.S. troops invaded Panama after Manuel Noriega
refused to give up power.
December 21
Winter Sostice, the shortest period of daylight for the Northern Hemisphere
-1620: The Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock on the shores of Massachusetts.
The Mayflower carried enough furniture for 19 cottages, as well as pigs,
goats, guns, journals and bibles. Native American tribes had already skirmished
with the Pilgrims as they explored the banks of Cape Cod. William Bradford,
who became the governor of Plymouth Plantation, wrote that they reached
the new continent and found nothing but "a hideous and desolate wilderness,
full of wild beasts and wild men." For the first year, the Pilgrims
and Indians lived peacefully together. They signed a peace treaty in the
spring and had a plentiful harvest. But there was trouble the following
January. The chief of a tribe called the Narragansett wanted no part in
the peace treaty, and he sent Bradford a sheaf of arrows wrapped inside
a snakeskin. Bradford sent the snakeskin back to him, stuffing it with
bullets. Then the pilgrims built a wall around their village, eleven feet
high and a mile all around. A year later, in March 1623, Bradford sent
a group of heavily armed men to a neighboring camp of English settlers.
They had been told that the Indians there were planning a massacre. Led
by Miles Standish, they arrived at the village and cornered four Indians.
Standish took them into a hut and killed them with a knife. Then he ordered
his men to kill all the Indians in the village, but some escaped into
a swamp. He cut off one of the Indians' heads and brought it back to Plymouth,
placing it on a spike for all to see.
-1804: Benjamin Disraeli was born in London. He was Britain's first and
only Jewish prime minister, as well as a best-selling novelist. Disraeli
was always known as a man of fashion and high society. An acquaintance
once said that he would go to a dinner party wearing "green velvet
trousers, a canary-colored waistcoat, low shoes, silver buckles, lace
at his wrists and his hair in ringlets." His
father was a writer, and he grew up around people who loved books but
didn't care much about politics. Soon after he turned 20, he decided he
wanted to write romance novels. His first book, Vivian Grey (1826),
became one of the most talked-about novels of its time, even though Disraeli
called it "as hot and hurried a sketch as ever yet was penned."
He wrote several more books, and then entered politics as a member of
the conservative Tory party. While in parliament, Disraeli was known as
one of the "big Englanders" who wanted to expand the British
Empire. He secured the Suez Canal for Britain and worked to prevent the
expansion of Russia.
-1879: Joseph Stalin was born in the village of
Gori, Georgia. He rose through the ranks of the Communist party to become
a ruthless dictator for almost 30 years. Stalin was also one of the founders
of the Pravda in 1912, the newspaper that eventually became the propaganda
voice for the Soviet Union. He once said, "The writer is an engineer
of the human soul." Stalin was born into a
poverty-stricken family, and his father abused him. As a child, he contracted
smallpox and was left with permanent scars, while another illness crippled
his left arm. His mother wanted him to become a priest, so he enrolled
in an Orthodox theological seminary. He was expelled from school after
he decided he was more interested in revolutionary politics than religion.
Then he put all his energy into his work for labor activist groups, and
he raised money by robbing government trains. Stalin
was one of Lenin's close associates during the Russian Revolution that
began in 1917. He returned from fighting in Russia's civil war in 1920
and suddenly became gravely ill with appendicitis. It was thought that
he might die. But a doctor performed a risky operation and he made a full
recovery. He completed his rise to power after Lenin died in 1924.-1905:
British novelist Anthony Powell was born in Westminster, England. He's
best known for his novel in 12 volumes, A Dance to the Music Of Time,
published from 1951 to 1975. The books chronicle the daily life of a group
of English acquaintances through much of the 20th century. Powell also
wrote seven volumes of diaries and memoirs, as well as a prolific output
of literary criticism.
-1913: Although the origins of the crossword puzzle can be traced to nineteenth
century children's books, journalist Arthur Wynne is credited with creating
the first modern crossword puzzle. It appeared in New York World on December
21, 1913 and soon became a regular feature. More and more papers starting
carrying crosswords, and by 1924 crossword puzzles were a worldwide craze.
In celebration of the crossword puzzle's eighty-fifth anniversary, here's
a tour of the best online crossword sites for kids and their families.
-1917: German novelist Heinrich Boll was born in Cologne, Germany. He
grew up at the same time that Hitler rose to power, and wrote fiction
about the way his country changed after the Second World War. He worked
as an apprentice bookseller as a young man, and shortly afterward he began
to write. He enrolled at a university to study classical philology, but
he had barely begun his studies when he was drafted into the German army.
He fought in the war from 1939 until Americans took him prisoner in 1945.
Afterward, he returned to Cologne with his new wife. He repaired a house
that had been destroyed in the bombings, and also began to work on his
books. His best-known novel is Group Portrait With a Lady (1971),
about the life of a war widow. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1972.
-1937: Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered.
-1988: A terrorist bomb exploded aboard a Pan Am Boeing 747 over Lockerbie,
Scotland, killing 270 people.
December 22
-1864: During the Civil War, Union Gen. William T. Sherman sent a message
to President Lincoln from Georgia, saying, "I beg to present you
as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah."
-1869: Poet Edward Arlington Robinson was born in Head Tide, Maine. He
came from a wealthy family and expected a life of ease, but his father
died, his family lost its fortune in the depression of the 1870s, and
his mother was struck down by an illness so contagious that no undertaker
would touch her body. The brothers had to dress her, make a coffin for
her, and bury her themselves. One brother became an alcoholic, another
a morphine addict, and Edward lived on the brink of starvation, writing
poetry that never attracted any notice. Somehow, though, Kermit Roosevelt
came to read Robinson's poems, and gave them to his father, Theodore Roosevelt,
who arranged a job for the poet in the Customs House. Roosevelt told him,
"I expect you to think poetry first and customs second." All
he had to do was show up at his desk, read the morning newspaper, and
leave it on his chair to prove he had been in. This sustained him until
he started to write poetry that won some praise. Finally, in his fifties,
he won the Pulitzer Prize the first year it was awarded. By the time he
died, he was one of the best-known poets in the country.
-1905: Poet Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana. He said that
he wrote poetry to "seduce women and overthrow the capitalist system."
He was orphaned before he was twelve, got kicked out of high school, worked
as a reporter, and served a prison term for owning a brothel. After he
moved to California he began reading mystic texts, supported some of the
early Beat poets, published his own poetry, and started translating poetry
from Latin, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Italian and Spanish. He spent as
much of the year camping in the mountains as he could, long before camping
emerged as a counter-culture activity. He produced a comprehensive manual
on woodcraft with detailed instructions on packing knapsacks and making
pine-bough beds.
December 23
-1790: The founder of scientific Egyptology, Jean Francois Champollion,
born in Figeac, France. He is credited with unlocking the code of the
Rosetta Stone, an ancient language key discovered near Alexandria in 1799.
By determining that the hieroglyphic symbols represented sounds as well
as concepts, depending on their context, he resurrected an ancient Egyptian
language that had been dead for thousands of years.
-1860: Poet and editor Harriet Monroe was born in Chicago, Illinois. She
founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in Chicago in 1912.
-1926: Poet, translator and editor Robert Bly was born in Madison, Minnesota.
He has written over thirty books of poetry, including Loving a Woman
in Two Worlds (1987), The Light Around the Body (1967), and
Iron John: A Book for Men (1990).
December 24
-1822: Victorian poet Matthew Arnold was born in Middlesex, England. He's
best known for his long, melancholy poems in collections such as The
Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849).
-1823: The poem, now known as "The Night Before Christmas,"
was first published anonymously in a small newspaper in Upstate New York
in 1823, and its original title was "Account of a Visit From St.
Nicholas." It was a huge success, and it has been published in book
form so many times that it now exists in more editions than any other
Christmas book ever printed. Fourteen years after its first publication,
an editor attributed the poem to a wealthy professor of classical literature
named Clement Clarke Moore. At first, Moore dismissed the poem as a trifle,
but he eventually included it in a volume of his collected Poems
(1844). A legend grew that Moore had been inspired to write the poem for
his children during a sleigh ride home on Christmas Eve in 1822, and that
he had based his version of Saint Nicholas on his Dutch chauffeur. Recently,
new evidence has come out that a Revolutionary War major named Henry Livingston
Jr. may have been the actual author of "The Night Before Christmas."
His family has letters describing his recitation of the poem before it
was originally published, and literary scholars have found many similarities
between his work and "The Night Before Christmas." He was also
three quarters Dutch, and many of the details in the poem, including names
of the reindeer, have Dutch origins. But whoever
wrote the poem, "The Night Before Christmas" changed the way
Americans celebrate the holiday of Christmas by reinventing the character
of Santa Claus. The name Santa Claus comes from Sinter Klaas, the Dutch
name for Saint Nicholas. He was a bishop in Southwest Turkey in the 4th
century and had a reputation for extraordinary generosity. He became known
as the patron saint of children, and many European children began to celebrate
St. Nicholas Eve on December 5th. On that day in Hungary, children leave
boots out for St. Nicholas to fill with presents. In Germany, Switzerland
and Belgium, children are visited by a man in bishop's robes who listens
to prayers and gives presents. In Holland, St. Nicholas arrives by steamboat
from Spain, and travels around the country on a white horse, tossing gifts
down chimneys."The Night Before Christmas"
combined the celebrations of St. Nicholas Day and Christmas, and made
children the focus of Christmas celebrations. The poem was also the first
representation of Santa Claus as a magical, elf-like being who travels
through the air on a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer. After
the publication of the poem, the ritual of gift giving became a boon to
merchants, and they became Santa's biggest fans. Stores began to launch
Christmas advertising campaigns on Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving Day
parades first began as Christmas shopping promotions. In 1939, the retail
business community persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to set the annual date
of Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November, which ensured a four-week
shopping season each year. Retailers now count on Christmas for more than
50 percent of their annual sales. In Holland, children are now visited
by St. Nicholas on December 5th, and on Christmas Eve they are visited
by Santa Claus, whom they call, "American Christmas Man."
-1931: Suspense novelist Mary Higgins Clark was
born in New York City. She's the author of many novels, including Weep
No More, My Lady (1987), Loves Music, Loves to Dance (1991)
and Mount Vernon Love Story (2002).
-1950: Poet and essayist Dana Gioia was born in Los Angeles. He's the
author of the poetry collections Daily Horoscope (1982), The
Gods of Winter (1991), and Interrogations at Noon (2001). He's
also written a book of essays, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry
and American Culture (1992). In January 2003 he was named director
of National Endowment for the Arts.
-1992, President Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger
and five others in the Iran-Contra scandal.
December 25
Christmas
Christmas is Christianity's celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ,
its Messiah. The holiday is marked with the giving of gifts (an imitation
of the Magi's bringing of gifts to the Christ child), the singing of carols,
children's pageants that retell the birth stories in the Gospels and special
church services. It's an important time for Christians but not the holiest
day of their year. That honor belongs to Easter. On the Western calendar
Christmas is December 25 (some Eastern Orthodox traditions celebrate January
7). As for the "twelve days of Christmas," they run from Christmas
Day to Epiphany on January 6. Advent is a four-Sunday season to prepare
for the coming of Christmas.
123Christmascards.com: http://www.123christmascards.com/
Free Christmas ecards.
*The 12 Days of Christmas Cost Index: http://www.pncbank.com/12days/
How goes the economy? The cost of 5 gold rings dropped by 5.6 percent,
and the pear tree by 28.6 percent from last year, but the price for swans
and calling birds has driven costs up markedly from last year's survey.
*Christmas-Carols.net: http://www.christmas-carols.net/
*Christmas Wreck by Frank Stockton: http://www.blackmask.com/books51c/chriswreck.pdf
*Concerning the Christmas Eve Address by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston
Churchill
http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/holiday/tree/
http://www.npr.org/dmg/dmg.php?prgCode=ME&showDate=24-Dec-2002&segNum=12&NPROldMediaPref=RM
*Cowboy Camp Christmas by Baxter Black: http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfId=890481
*e-cards: http://www.e-cards.com/
This site offers both subscription and free cards. It also allows you
to personalize the color, type, music and "stamp, as well as music
selection.
*Hallmark: www.hallmark.com
After free registration, you gain access to hundreds of free ecards for
many occasions.
The Littlest Shepherd Watches Over the Flock: http://www.amarillonet.com/stories/122102/fea_blackthelittle.shtml
*Old Christmas by Washington Irving: http://www.blackmask.com/books19c/oxmas.pdf
The Oxen by Thomas Hardy: http://www.poemtree.com/poems/Oxen.htm
Children's Book of Christmas Stories: http://www.blackmask.com/books72c/cbcst.pdf
A Luckless Santa Claus by F. Scott Fitzgerald: http://www.blackmask.com/books42c/lucklesssanta.pdf
Mrs. Claus' Kitchen: http://www.claus.com/kitchen/htmlkitchen.shtml
Mrs. Claus' twenty-five recipes are divided into three categories: Elf
Bedtime Snacks, Santa's Favorites, and Reindeer Cravings. All her recipes
are easy and full of kid-appeal. For example, did you know reindeer love
wormy apples? You can make them by spreading peanut butter on apple slices,
and topping with yummy, gummy worms. Most of these recipes don't even
require baking! When you're ready to leave the kitchen, there's lots to
explore in the rest of Santa's Village. NorthPole.com: Mrs. Claus' Cookbook:
http://northpole.com/cooking/cookbook.html
At the NorthPole.com, Mrs. Claus has been very busy collecting and sorting
holiday recipes from her all friends, so her cookbook has hundreds of
recipes. Focusing on sweets (with four out of six categories) her collection
includes Creamy Chocolate Truffles (which actually look pretty easy),
Two Minute Microwave Fudge and Microwave Peanut Brittle. Each recipe can
be emailed to a friend; and the link to send Mrs. Claus your own recipe
is on the cookbook start page.
Red & Yellow Bright Ideas: Christmas Recipes: http://www.marsbrightideas.com/christmas/recipes/
Why are the red and yellow M&M's the only ones with bright ideas?
Does this mean that the other colors are, umm, less than bright? Anyway,
their seasonal ideas include recipes, family activities,
homemade gifts and decorations made with all varieties of Mars candies
(not just M&Ms.). If you'd like regular ideas in your email box, you
can sign up for Red & Yellow's Bright Ideas Newsletter.
Find out about how Christmas is celebrated in countries around the world
in Christmas.com's WorldView section: http://christmas.com/worldview/.
Click anywhere on their interactive map to link to a description of how
people living in that country celebrate the Christmas season. Not every
single country has a detailed description, but you will find information
for nearly 400 of them at this site.
All I Want for Christmas is a Nice, Clean Earth: http://askeric.org/Virtual/Lessons/Science/Environmental_Education/ENV0004.html
An environmental look at the December holidays!
Christmas trees
The first recorded documentation of decorating a Christmas tree was in
1604 in Strasburg, Germany. Decorating Christmas trees appeared as a tradition
in the U.S in the mid-1800's and has evolved over the subsequent 150 year
period to the production and distribution system we know today. People
often choose natural trees because they like the tradition of going out
to buy one, bringing it home and then docorating it. The like the feel
and smell of the real thing. Natural Christmas trees are evergreen trees
that keep their needles all year long as they grow outside. Their seeds
are from cones. We don't see the cones on Christmas trees because they
are usually too young to have them, or the tree farmers have cut them
off. Christmas tree farms create habitates for wildlife, songbirds and
small mammals such as rabbits. Tree experts say that each time a tree
is cut down, three seedlings are planted. Christmas trees are biodegradable.
That means that if they are left outside, they will break down naturally,
just like fall leaves or fallen trees. Trees are often chopped up and
used as mulch. Mulch is put around plants to keep them moist and to keep
thier roots from freezing. Some Christmas trees are sunk in fish ponds
to make homes and feeding areas for fish. You can find the nearest recycling
program by dialing 1-800-CLEANUP, or logging onto www.realchristmastrees.org.
How a Christmas Tree Comes to Be
The nursery: Trees that are specially grown to be Christmas trees are
often raised in a hot-house nursery. The seeds come from cones. They live
there until they are from 6 to 12 inches tall.
Into the field: In some cases, seedlings from a nursery are moved to a
field. Small seedlings are planted together and protected from the summer
sun and wind and given a steady amount of water and nutrients so they
grow sturdy roots.
To the farm: A Christmas tree farm will buy seedlings and plant them in
fields where they will grow from 7 to 10 years, depending on the climate
and tree type. Here workers feed the seedlings into a planting machine
pulled behind a tractor. The tractor uses a funnel-shaped feeding system
to plant the seedlings into the ground. It also places soil around the
seedling so it won't tip over.
The growing: The farmers have to trim the trees to make certain they grow
into the right shape. After 7 to 10 years, trees might reach 6 to 8 feet
high. Then they are ready to harvest. Most Christmas tree farms are family
businesses.
The harvest: In November the trees on farms are harvested. They are tagged
and often wrapped with a cord. Sometimes they are carried out of the field
in a helicopter.
To market: The trees are loaded onto trucks to be taken to market. How
fresh the tree stays depends on how well it is cared for after it is cut.
It should be stacked neatly in a shaded area and kept wet, moist and cool.
Sold: some families enjoy going out to a Christmas tree farm and cutting
down the tree themselves.
National Christmas tree
Students from Washington, D.C. thought of having a National Christmas
Tree in 1923. First Lady Grace Coolidge convinced er husband to follow
through with the students' plan to put up a tree on the Ellipse near the
White House. President Doolidge turned on the switch to light this first
National Christmas Tree. There has been a Christmas Tree near the White
House grounds ever since. The National Christmas tree was not lit, except
for the top ornament, in 1979-1980 in honor of the American hostages in
Iran. When the hostages were released, the tree was ighted for a short
time in 1981. In 1963, the National Christmas tree was not lit until December
22nd because of a national 30-day period of mourning following the assassination
of President Kennedy. During World War II, from 1942 to 1944, the tree
was not lighted.
The tallest living Christmas tree is believed to be the 122-foot, 91-year-old
Douglas fir in the town of Woodinville, Washington.
Rockefeller Center Christmas tree
Rockefeller Center is a place in New York City made up of office buildings
and stores. In the middle of them is an open-air plaza that is used as
an ice-skating rink and as a place to display a huge holiday tree. The
tree that Rockefeller Center usually uses is a Norway sprice. In the forest,
these trees don't grow so tall and big. The ones used in Rockefeller Center
often stand alone in people's front or back yards.
Christmas lights
For about 400 years, people decorated their Christmas trees with candles.
The legend is that the Rev. Martin Luther started this custom in the 1500s.
He was looking up at the winter night sky, feeling wonder at the beauty
of the stars. He wanted to bring the feel of the night sky indoors so
that his family could enjoy it. He decided to put lighted candles on the
family's Christmas tree.
Unfortunately, lighting candles on the tree was a fire hazard. People
often kept buckets of water nearby in case the tree caught fire. Most
people did not even put up their trees until Christmas Eve. That way the
trees were still fresh, and there was less danger of them catching on
fire from the candles. Candles would be lighted only for about half an
hour on Christmas Eve and maybe on Christmas Day.
Thomas Edison made the first pracical lightbulb in 1879. He soon realized
how wonderful electric lights would seem during the winter holidays. He
turned on the first public display of lighting on New Year's Eve, 1879,
at Menlo Park, New Jersey, near the railroad tracks. He wanted train passengers
to see electric lights burst out of the darkness as the train approached
Menlo Park. The first electric Christmas tree lights were invented only
three years later by Edward H. Johnson, vice president of the Edison General
Electric Co. He designed a string of 80 red, white and blue lights for
his Christmas tree. He had to blow each glass bulb by hand and hand-wire
each string of lights. The colored bulbs had to be hand-painted.
In 1882, Conrad Hubert, and Joshua Lionel Cohen, began making holiday
lights. However, they soon stopped using their lights for decoration.
They used them in flashlights instead. Conrad Hubert went on to found
the American Ever-Ready flashlight company. Joshua Lionel Cohen started
making electrical toy trains and founded Lionel Trains.
The Edison General Electric Co. began selling strings of lights to the
public in about 1890, but it cost hundreds of dollars to light a tree.
This would be equivalent to thousands of dollars today. Few people had
electricity. They had to buy a battery to power the lights and light strings
and to be hand-wired.
In 1895, President Grover Cleveland asked the General Electric Co. to
make lights for the White House Christmas tree. After that, Christmas
lighting caught on, and wealthy people began having Christmas tree parties.
Most people still could not afford to buy tree lights, though. Some people
rented strings of lights for the season.
However, by 1900 many businesses and stores were putting up lighted Christmas
trees for the public. Cities began lighting outdoor Christmas trees for
everyone's enjoyment.
The General Electric Co. sold the first already-wired "Christmas
tree lamps" to the general public in 1901. These were strings with
nine white bulbs. One light string and the lights to hook to it might
cost the avearage person a whole week's wage. But by the 1920's, most
American homes were wired for electricity and holiday lights had become
affordable.
Christmas Food Traditions
In Ireland and Britain, a favorite Christmas dish is plum pudding, which
may be aged for several weeks before being served. The pdding is sometimes
topped with a symbolic sprig of holly.
In France and Belgium, a favorite Christmas dessert is buche de Noel,
a cake shaped like a yule log. Belgiums sometimes breakfast on a sweet
bread called cougnou, which is traditionally shaped like the baby Jess.
The German stollen, a fruity cake is shaped in the same way.
Ukrainians, at Christmas dinner, set an extra place at the table for deceased
family members, whose souls are said to come to the table to feast on
the 12-course meal. Each corse is dedicated to one of Christ's 12 apostles.
Traditional foods inclde kolach, a Christmas bread braided in a ring to
represent the Christmas Trinity.
In Poland, some believe Christmas dinner, or wigilia, must be enjoyed
by an even number of people or someone might die in the coming year. But
an even number of dises in the meal portends bad luck. Bits of bay often
are placed under the tablecloth to represent Christ's birth in a manger.
In Mexico, children celebrate Christmas by wearing blindfolds and taking
turns breaking open a candy-filled pinata.
EdHelper.com: http://www.edhelper.com/Christmas.htm
Christmas Math, Word Finds, Crossword Puzzles, Christmas Scrambled Words,
Christmas Vocabulary, Christmas Word Chop, ...
Christmas! Christmas! Christmas! from Not Just for Kids!
http://www.night.net/christmas/index.html-ssi
You'll find everything from Christmas pictures to color to crafts or holiday
word-search puzzles.
Christmas section: http://www.lil-fingers.com/jump/xmas.shtml
Christmas hide-n-seek game, coloring pages, coloring
cards and matching game
Christmas Activities: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7997/xmascrafts.htm
Christmas At Making Friends: http://www.makingfriends.com/xmas.htm
Christmas Fun And Crafts: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7134/Christmas/chrcrafts.htm
Crafts For Christmas: http://www.imagitek.com/xmas/crafts/
Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/rudolph/rudolph.html
The Scrooge: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/scrooge/thescrooge.html
Voices Of Children Around The World: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/kids_voices.html
Christmas Activities For Kids: http://www.dltk-kids.com/crafts/xmas/
Christmas Craft Ideas: http://www.amazingmoms.com/htm/christmas_crafts.htm
Elf School: http://www.claus.com/elfschool/index.shtml
Kids Holiday Crafts: http://www.geocities.com/PicketFence/7191/xkids.html
Santa Claus Crafty Crafts: http://www.claus.com/santashome/crafts.shtml
Santa Claus Game Room: http://www.claus.com/games/index.shtml
The ABC's of CHRISTMAS: http://www.bigfatbaby.com/p.cfm?p=/newfun2/winter/abcxmas.cfm
Audio Christmas Stories: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/audio_story.html
Do you Believe In Santa Claus?: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/do_you_believe.html
Frosty The Snowman: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/frosty/frosty_main.html
Here Comes Santa Claus: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/america/east/magic_entry.html
How The Grinch Stole Christmas: Audio: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/thegrinch/thegrinch.html
Online Christmas Card: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/card.html
Adopt Elf Buddies: http://www.claus.com/toyworkshop/buddy.shtml
Coloring Pages: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/clrbook/coloring_pages.html
Elves Movie Theater: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/movie.html
Elves Music Words: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/sheets.html
Merry Christmas in 150 Languages: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/greet.html
Mrs. Santa Claus: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/mrs_claus.html
Online Letter From Santa: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/letter.html
Reindeer Barn: http://www.claus.com/reindeer/index.shtml
Santa Claus Toy Workshop: http://www.claus.com/toyworkshop/index.shtml
Santa Show: http://www.claus.com/santashow/flashshow01.shtml
Santa Tracker: http://www.northpole4kids.com/2001/html/santa_radar.html
Email Santa Claus Christmas Letters!: http://www.emailsanta.com/
This site offers wish lists, emails to Santa and Rudolph, plus kids can
play reindeer games.
Christmas on the Net: http://www.holidays.net/christmas/
An Inside Outside Merry Christmas: Story Creations
http://www.searsportrait.com/Home/index.asp
Christmas Recipes: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/xmas/food.html
Magical Christmas Tree: Story Creations: http://www.searsportrait.com/Home/index.asp
My Adventure With Rudolph: Story Creations: http://www.searsportrait.com/Home/index.asp
Santa's Workshop: Story Creations: http://www.searsportrait.com/Home/index.asp
Twas The Night Before Christmas: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/xmas/stories/niteb4.html
Wishbook Favorites: Story Creations: http://www.searsportrait.com/Home/index.asp
A Christmas Celebration: http://www.itschristmas.com/
A Fun Christmas: http://members.home.net/raptors/Rudolf.htm
James And The Christmas Wagon: http://www.imagitek.com./james/
Sally Saves Christmas: http://www.candlelightstories.com/page1.htm
Santa's Secret Village: http://www.northpole.com/
Snoopy's Christmas Dream: http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Glade/7960/
A ChildFun Christmas: http://www.childfun.com/christmas/
Candy Cane Ornament: http://www.night.net/christmas/f-o-cane.html
Christmas Coloring Book: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7134/Christmas/chrcolor.htm
Christmas Tags: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7134/Christmas/chrtags.htm
Christmas Theme: http://www.southcom.com.au/~jennifert/xmas/chrstthm.html
Reindeer Theme: http://teachers.net/lessons/posts/747.html
Christmas Crafts:
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/1170/crafts.html
http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/christmas/crafts.htm
Christmas Games:
http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/christmas/games.htm
http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/christmas/print.htm
http://www.preschooleducation.com/gchristmas.shtml
Christmas Ornaments: http://www.preschooleducation.com/achristmas.shtml#orn
Christmas Sticker Fun: http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/christmas/stickers.htm
The Christmas Story: http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/Christmas_Story/xmas_hmpg.html
Virtual Christmas Tree Farm: http://www.christmastrees.on.ca/vtfsite/mainactivity.html
Write To Santa:
http://www.claus.com/postoffice/tosanta.shtml
http://www.usacitylink.com/xmas/scletter.html
Christmas Projects
Cinnamon Ornaments
If you make them on Friday, by Monday they'll be dry and ready to decorate
with paints and/or glitter. Also, always have some extra cinnamon on hand.
If the "dough is too soft you can add more.
Mix: 1 cup of cinnamon (a 3 oz. jar), 1 cup of applesauce, and 2 Tablespoons
of Elmer's glue.
Knead about 10 minutes until pliable.
Roll out onto cinnamon dusted board.
Cut into shapes with cookie cutters.
Put double pointed tack in edge OR punch small hole in top for ribbon.
Place on wire screen to dry.
Yield: about 15 small ornaments.
CINNAMON ORNAMENTS
1 can Cinnamon
1 Jar applesauce
Drain the moisture from the applesauce for 10 or 15 minutes (or longer
if necessary) by putting it in a colander or strainer which you've lined
with a coffee filter (or something similar). Pour the whole container
of cinammon into a bowl and add just a little applesauce at a time; stir;
keep adding but check carefully each time; until you have a VERY STIFF
dough. Roll out the dough between
two sheets of waxed paper until it's around a quarter inch thick, then
cut it with cookie cutters. Make holes in the dough cutouts with drinking
straws. Put the cookies in a very low oven (only about
175-200 degrees F) for several hours; watch carefully so they don't burn
(if they start to, lower oven). Or you can air-dry them for several days,
turning them over carefully each day. When OMPLETELY
DRY, put ribbons thru the holes and hang on the tree.
Package
Topper or a
Tree Ornament
Materials:
1 or 2* CD ROMs per ornament you wish to make (*2 is you want to have
both
sides look finished)
flocked miniature Christmas bears, Santa's or any other tiny ornament
you like
metallic Christmas stickers or Christmas Confetti
Small velvet bows (the color depends on the color of the ornaments you
are using)
Glue gun or tacky glue
Procedure
1. Glue the CD ROMs together, label side to label side if you choose to
use two CD ROMs
2. Glue your ornament in the center of the CD Rom
3. Glue the bow at 12:00
4. Place or glue the stickers or confetti pieces at 6:00, 3:00, 9:00,
2:00, 10:00, 4:00, and 7:00 in that order to guide you to better spacing
and placement.
5. Attach a hanger at either the bow.
Use Christmas gift for class students, package toppers or a tree ornament
for your tree.
Cinnamon Dough ornaments that works pretty well with
cookie cutters.
Cinnamon Dough
1 Cup Ground Cinnamon (Can get jars cheap at Michaels Craft Stores)
4 Tablespoons White Glue
3/4 to 1 Cup Water (Adjust as needed)
Stir together cinnamon, white glue and 3/4 Cup water. Adjust water as
needed to make dough as thick as real cookie dough. Refrigerate dough
for 2 hours. When ready to roll out, sprinkle dry cinnamon on the work
surface. Roll the dough out on the cinnamon. Use you hands to knead the
dough until
it is smooth. You will need lots of dry cinnamon on your hands and rolling
pin. Roll the dough to 1/4" thickness. NO thicker, or it will take
FOREVER to dry. Cut out shapes with cookie cutters. Poke holes in ornaments
for hanging and decoration. I poke two holes side by side for the center
of
raffia bow ornaments.
Easy ornaments
Get dogbones in the box. You can use small or large. Holding it up and
down ways, glue wiggly eyes near the top 1/4. Add a red pom pom nose.
Put a tiny gold jingle bell and red thin ribbon near the bottom. Add pipe
cleaner antlers. Glue a piece of magnet to the back and in about 5 minutes
had a cute reindeer refrigerator magnet. If you wanted it to be an ornament,
leave off the magnet and glue a
ribbon near the top for hanging. If you just want it to be a dog, leave
off the antlers and make the nose brown or black.
"Left-Right" Christmas Story -
pass present right or left each time one of those word s is mentioned
in the story.
Once upon a time there was a little boy named Tommy WRIGHT. He lived with
his mother, Mrs. WRIGHT and his father Dr. WRIGHT and his sister Sara
WRIGHT. He had four shiny quarters LEFT from some birthday money that
Grandma WRIGHT had sent him besides the $8.12 LEFT in his piggy bank.
Now it was time to buy the RIGHT present for each member of the WRIGHT
family. So one morning he hopped RIGHT out of bed, RIGHT into his slippers
that were RIGHT next to his bed and quietly LEFT home. He went carefully
ACROSS the street to the big store on the LEFT side Main Street. The store
was decorated with lights and Christmas ornaments. Tommy WRIGHT thought
and thought about Christmas presents and he looked at all the things for
sale. "Let's see," said Tommy, "I know, I'll get Mother
Wright some warm gloves. Here is the RIGHT one but where is the LEFT one?
Oh! Here it is, RIGHT under the RIGHT one. I sure hope they are the RIGHT
color. They cost $3.06 so I have $6.06 LEFT to spend. Now for Daddy WRIGHT--
would he like a truck or maybe a ball or a LEFT handed catcher's mitt?
I know, I'll get him a football so we can play catch RIGHT in your own
back yard when he comes home from work. Let's see, I had $6.06 LEFT and
the football is $5.06 so now I have $1.00 LEFT for Sara's present. Here
is what she wants. A pretty new purse and I think I have just enough money
LEFT to buy it. Tommy WRIGHT clutched his presents happily and went running
RIGHT up to the lady at the counter and gave her all the money his
RIGHT pocket. "Is that RIGHT?" , he asked as he gave her his
money. "It will be $1.05 with tax," she said" "Oh
no," said Tommy WRIGHT, "I forgot about tax," Tommy WRIGHT
started crying . Tears streaked RIGHT and LEFT down his little face. RIGHT
then the door burts open and in came Santa Claus who had LEFT the North
Pole and had come RIGHT to Tommy WRIGHT's town to take orders from children
for Christmas. "ho, Ho, Ho," said Santa. "We can't have
Santa's helpers sad like this. Let's see now, I bet I have five pennies
RIGHT here in my LEFT pocket. Santa Claus checked his LEFT pocket and
found nothing. "Oh, no," said Santa. "I must have put them
into my RIGHT pocket instead of my LEFT. Here they are RIGHT here in my
RIGHT pocket, Tommy. Ho!
Ho! Ho! and a Merry Christmas to all the WRIGHT's from Santa Claus and
his helpers." Tommy WRIGHT LEFT the store, ran back ACROSS the street
and all the way home to tell his sister Sara WRIGHT that he had seen and
talked to Santa. He was so happy that he wrapped his presents RIGHT away
and LEFT them under the Christmas tree. Mr. and Mrs. WRIGHT and Sara WRIGHT
were thrilled with their presents. Tommy WRIGHT felt really happy even
thought he had no money
LEFT. Christmas morning for the WRIGHT family was joyful and Christmas
LEFT
nothing to want.
"Pass" Christmas Story
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
(Passing Game version: Everytime the word "pass" (or variation
thereof like "past" or "surpassed") is said, the unwrapped
gifts are passed. )
As the days of the year swiftly pass, we come at last to the Christmas
season. At this time, as at no other, we like to dwell on memories of
the past. Although our childhood seems as but yesterday, in reality many
years have passed since we gathered around the fire and visualized Old
St. Nick passing over our housetop as we listened to the familiar lines
of "The Night Before Christmas." As we gather here today and
form this friendship circle, let the lines of the old familiar Christmas
poem pass through our minds, and if possible keep all other thoughts from
interfering with these memories of the past.You remember, it went like
this --
"Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house--"
(I've often wondered just what time it was, and have liked to imagine
it to be about half past twelve.)
"Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse" (Things would
have picked up if the cat had passed a mouse about that time)
"The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that
St. Nicholas soon would be there." (My! How things have changed in
the passing of years! Santa Claus of today is very different from the
Santa of the past.) But, passing back to the story :
"The children were nestled all snug in their beds While visions of
sugarplums danced in their heads And Mama in her kerchief and I in my
cap-- (You would have passed out if you could have seen us!)
"Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap." (Can't
you just feel that feather bed you used to sleep on at Grandmother's--a
bed that has been passed on from generation to generation?)
"When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter I sprang from my
bed to see what was the matter. Away to the window I flew like a flash
Tore open the shutter and threw up the sash,
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,
Gave a luster of mid-day to objects below." (Ah! me! What memories
of the past that recalls, moonlight, snow, sleigh bells, and ......cold
feet.....and passing the buck as to who would make the fire this time.)
"When what to my wondering eyes should appear
But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer
With a little old driver so lively and quick,
I new in a moment it must be St. Nick." (Regardless of what child
psychologists may say, isn't this a fascinating legend that has been passed
down to us and shouldn't we pass it on to others to enjoy?
Well, let's pass it on!)
"More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled and shouted and called them by name--
Now Dasher! Now Dancer! Now Prancer! and Vixen!
On Comet! On Cupid! On Donner! and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall,
Now dash away, dash away, dash away all!" (Even yet those lines give
me a thrill that causes chills of excitement to pass up and down my spine
while passing through my mind.)
"As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly
When they meet with an obstacle mount to the sky,
So up to the housetop the coursers they flew,
With a sleigh full of toys and St. Nicholas, too,
And then in a twinkling I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof." I'm sure you weren't
as silly as I, but in those days long past it came to pass that I could
really believe that I heard them. With the passing of years we still
love the old legend.
"As I drew in my head and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot." (Doesn't
that recall other thoughts of the past--the open fireplace--and didn't
you
often wonder how Old Santa would ever pass through that small opening?)
"A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack." (Now listen
to this: Nothing in the past, present, or future will ever surpass the
description of Santa. It describes personality, laughter, and good-will
personified.)
"His eyes how they twinkled, his dimples how merry,
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry.
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow.
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, (I bet the smell of that
pipe surpassed any you ever smelled.)
"And the smoke--it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and round little belly
That shook when he laughed like a bowl frull of jelly." (I never
have jelly or jello passed to me at the table that a mental picture of
Santa Claus doesn't pass through my mind.)
"He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him in spite of myself.
A wink of his eye and a twish of his head (when he passed by)
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread."
He spoke not a word but went straight to his work
And filled all the stockings (not passing up even the baby's sock)
Then turned with a jerk
And laying a finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose-- (and passed out of sight)
He sprang to his sleigh--to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down on a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, as he drove out of sight,
"Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!!" (Thus passed
dear old St. Nick out of the scene of activity for another twelve months.
And thus passed the happy memories of our past childhood days, and we
are jerked up from our dreams into the stern reality of the present as
we remember that the minutes are passing, passing, passing, and yet we
have much to accomplish before we are ready for Christmas--even though
in our minds we like to dwell upon the happy Christmases of our past.
Let's close the book on our past and open it to the reality of the present.
What you have in your hand belongs to the present holder.
Party games: http://www.partygameideas.com/Christmas-games.htm
More party games: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/xmas/party.html
Individual or group games: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7134/Christmas/chrgames.htm
pictogram-style guess the carols: http://216.77.254.136/shoebox/christmas/xmas-contest.htm
answers here: http://216.77.254.136/shoebox/christmas/carols.htm
in Word format: http://www.stmary.k12.la.us/holidays/christmas/Christmas%20Carols.doc
in calendar format: http://blackdog.net/holiday/christmas/calendar/index.html
Christmas Around the World: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/3852/christmas.html
Scroll down for links to Christmas traditions in other countries
Christmas greetings from around the world: http://users.aol.com/WSCaswell/message.htm
Bilingual Night Before Christmas: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/3852/twas.html
Christmas puzzles: http://www.interads.co.uk/puzzle/
Christmas activities: http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/christmas_pages.htm
Christmas idea box, includes crafts: http://www.theideabox.com/special.nsf/christmas.html
for teachers: http://www.gospelcom.net/ifc/ifc98/ifc98pg5.shtml#story%201
Food Timeline: Christmas Foods: http://www.gti.net/mocolib1/kid/christmasfood.html
"Origins & history of selected traditional Christmas foods,"
like mincemeat, plum pudding, eggnog, stollen
-1642: Mathematician Sir Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, England.
One of the most important scientists of all time, he established the laws
of motion, he developed the first theory of gravity, and he invented calculus.
-1775: Washington crossed the Delaware.
December 26
Boxing Day and St. Stephen's Day in England, Canada, and several other
countries. The origins of this national holiday are not certain, but it
might come from an old custom of wealthy estate owners giving small gifts
or money, wrapped in boxes, to their servants and those who worked for
them. Servants were needed on Christmas Day to help with their masters'
holiday events, so they were often given a rest the next day. St. Stephen
is honored today as the first Christian martyr, having been stoned to
death for blasphemy.
-1792: The inventor of the first calculating machine, Charles Babbage,
was born in London, England. He was obsessed with the notion of mathematical
accuracy in his work and surroundings. He was fed up with what he called
the "intolerable labor and fatiguing monotony" of the hand-calculating
of scientific tables, so he invented and built the Difference Engine,
which could perform large calculations with the turn of a crank. He then
set out to build the steam powered analytical engine, which would have
been the size of a locomotive, but he never found a way to make it work.
He is also known for inventing the speedometer and the locomotive cowcatcher.
-1822: Louis Pasteur, French Chemist and microbiologist, was born. He
proved that putrefaction and fermentation are caused by micro-organisms.
Pasteur's ultimate triumph came with the conquest of rabies, the disease
of animals, particularly dogs, which gives rise to the dreaded hydrophobia
in humans.
-1848: William and Ellen Craft escaped from slavery in Georgia. Mrs. Craft
impersonated a slave holder and her husband, William, assumed the role
of her servant in one of the most dramatic of the slave escapes.
-1891: Author Henry Miller was born in New York City. He was rebellious
by nature. With money his father gave him to finance his college education,
he went on a trip through the Southwest and Alaska. When he returned,
he went to work in his father's tailor shop, but left after trying to
unionize the workforce. After that, he ran a speakeasy in Greenwich Village,
but eventually moved to France for nine years. While there, Henry wrote
about his bohemian experiences in Tropic of Cancer (1934). The
book was immediately banned in the U.S. for its obscenities and graphically
sexual content. In 1964, the Supreme Court finally ruled that Tropic
of Cancer could not be suppressed. It had already sold two million
copies.
-1928: A. A. Milne's classic House at Pooh Corner is published.
December 27
-1874: Novelist and playwright Zona Gale was born in Portage, Wisconsin.
She wrote over thirty novels, plays, and collections, but she is probably
best known for the novel-turned-play Miss Lulu Bett, which won
the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1921. She was raised in a small town in
Wisconsin, and many of her stories depict small town life.
-1896: Author Louis Bromfield was born in Mansfield, Ohio. He wrote Early
Autumn (1926), Out of the Earth (1950) and From My Experience:
The Pleasures and Miseries of Life on a Farm (1955).
-1910: Poet and essayist Charles Olson was born in Worcester, Massachusetts.
He developed a unique, open-form poetic style that he called "projective
verse," and he published an influential manifesto of the same name
in 1950. He began to write poetry himself in the late 1940s, and produced
his first collection, In Cold Hell, in Thicket in 1953, which includes
his most famous poem, "The Kingfishers."
-1930: Novelist Wilfrid Sheed was born in London, England. His books include
The Hack (1963), Office Politics (1966), and The Boys
of Winter (1987).
-1979: Soviet forces seized control of Afghanistan. President Hafizullah
Amin, who was overthrown and executed, was replaced by Babrak Karmal.
December 28
-1856: Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth U.S. president was born in Staunton,
VA. His earliest memories were of the Civil War, seeing Union soldiers
marching into town, and watching his mother care for wounded Confederates
in the hospital. His Fourteen Points, incorporated into the Treaty of
Versailles, laid the foundation for the League of Nations. As President,
Wilson maintained a neutral position in the first years of World War I
but eventually brought the U.S. into the conflict after German submarine
incidents. His initiatives included the Federal Reserve Act and laws against
child labor. Undeniably one of the most intelligent and high-minded presidents
the U.S. has had, he was also rigid in certain ways and unresolved in
others so that when it came to the climax of his life's work, America's
entry into a League of Nations, he was unable to make the appropriate
moves.
-1902: Philosopher, educator, and author Mortimer J. Adler was born in
New York City. Throughout his life, he advocated the reading of classic
books as the best way to educate oneself. As an instructor at Columbia
University, he held seminars on great books, and eventually developed
the idea for a 52-volume set, Great Books of the Western World, which
was published in 1952 by Encyclopedia Britannica
-1911: Author and humorist Sam Levenson was born in New York City. He
said, "Lead us not into temptation. Just tell us where it is; we'll
find it."
-1922: Comic book writer Stan Lee was born Stanley Lieber in New York.
He started at Marvel Comics (then called Timely Comics) when he was 16
years old, and he became the editor and chief writer by the age of 20.
-1927: Novelist Simon Raven was born in London. He wrote 25 novels in
his lifetime, most notably Alms for Oblivion (1959-1976), a 10-volume
saga of English upper-class life.
-1932: Novelist Manuel Puig was born in Vallegas, Argentina. His first
novel was Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (translated in 1971). His best-known
work is The Kiss of the Spider Woman (1979), which brought him
international fame. The Kiss of the Spider Woman tells the story
of two prisoners who have nothing in common but who eventually bond by
retelling the plots of old classic films to one another. It was turned
into a film itself in 1985.
-1981: Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the first American test-tube baby, was born
in Norfolk, Va.
-1997: Terry Nichols was found guilty of conspiracy
of manslaughter in the Oklahoma City bombing.
December 29
-1800: Inventor Charles Goodyear was born in New Haven, Connecticut. While
experimenting with ways to make rubber stronger, he accidentally dropped
a mixture of rubber and sulphur on a hot stove. The accident led to the
development of the process of vulcanization, which made the invention
of the automobile possible.
-1808: The 17th president of the United States, Andrew Johnson was born
in Raleigh, North Carolina, in a two-room log cabin to nearly illiterate
parents. He didn't master the basics of reading or writing until he met
his wife, Eliza, at the age of 17. Never a good speller, he once said,
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a
word." He was strongly opposed to secession, which made him the enemy
of many southerners. Once, on a train, he was attacked by a mob who wanted
to hang him. But an old man in the crowd shouted, "His neighbors
at Greenville have made arrangements to hang the senator on his arrival.
Virginians have no right to deprive them of that privilege." And
he was let go.
-1849: The Christmas carol "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,"
written by Edmund Sears, was published in The Christian Register. Sears
hoped the song would promote "peace on earth, good will toward men."
-1915: Science fiction writer Charles L. Harness was born in Colorado
City, Texas. Novelist and essayist Robert Ruark was born in Wilmington,
North Carolina
-1934: Mary Tyler Moore, television actress, was born in New York City.
Star of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "The Mary Tyler Moore
Show." She has won seven Emmy Awards. Moore, a diabetic, is the International
Chairman of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and has been elected to the
board of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
-1954: Actor Denzel Washington was born in Mount Vernon, NY. Washington
starred in such films as "Malcolm X", "Glory", "Much
Ado about Nothing", and " A Soldier's Story". He started
in television in his role on popular show "St. Elsewhere". He
won an Academy Award for best supporting
actor for his role in "Glory".
December 30
-1865: Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India. He's the author of Kim
(1901) and The Jungle Book (1894), and he was the first British
writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was educated in England,
but then he returned to India to work as a newspaper reporter, writing
stories about British colonial society. He supplied filler and verse to
go in the dead spaces between the stories, and it was collected in Departmental
Ditties (1886) and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). The books
made him famous in Britain well before he returned there to live. His
reputation grew, and he was nominated for many honors, including Poet
Laureate. He declined this post, and many others, but he often wrote as
if he were the national poet of England, exhorting his countrymen to uphold
the Empire.
-1869: Stephen Leacock was born in Hampshire, England. He wrote Sunshine
Sketches of a Little Town (1912), and Arcadian Adventures of the
Idle Rich (1914). He was working as a political economist but his
family needed money, so he started to write humor pieces for Canadian
magazines in his spare time. Eventually he grew to be one of the best-known
humorists in the English-speaking world.
-1910: Paul Bowles was born in New York City. He's the author of The
Sheltering Sky (1949), and many other novels. He lived most of his
life in exile in France and Morocco.
-1972: The United States halted its heavy bombing of North Vietnam.
December 31
-1790: Catherine Read Williams was born in Providence, Rhode Island. She
wrote Fall River: An Authentic Narrative (1838), one of the earliest
examples of public reporting in the United States. It was an account of
the mysterious death of Sarah Cornell, a young mill worker whose body
was found hanging in a barn one winter day in 1832. Cornell was several
months pregnant, and her death was ruled a suicide until a note was found
in her belongings. It said, "If I am gone missing enquire of the
Rev. Mr. Avery of Bristol; he will know where I am." Reverend Ephriam
Avery was a prominent Methodist minister, a married man with several children.
A posse found him hiding in New Hampshire and brought him back for trial,
but Avery was acquitted on all counts. In Fall River, Williams
had a lot to say about the corruption of the New England clergy, and the
book caused a great sensation when it was released.
-1869: Artist Henri Matisse, born in Le Cateau, France.
-1897: A solemn ceremony was held to commemorate the final day of the
existence of the city of Brooklyn before its incorporation into New York
City. The rest of the city was jubilant; crowds gathered, fireworks were
set off everywhere, and bands played "The One New York Two-Step."
-1946: President Truman officially proclaimed the end of hostilities in
World War II.
|
|
