Holiday messages…
Even though I know you’re suffering with all the hustle and bustle and blather and twaddle associated with the ubiquitous commercialization of the holidays, I’ll still start this post with some commercials from the sponsors of this blog. (Hey, that’s me!)
Books make good gifts for the readers in your circle of family and friends (assuming they’re readers like you). They’re easy to wrap and send (especially ebooks!), and they’re a far better and less dangerous entertainment than the neighborhood’s lightshows (remember that Chevy Chase movie?), new dog walkers out walking the kid’s new dog without a leash (young dogs have sharp teeth), or neighbors with their AR-style rifles looking to start an argument about how much fire your BBQ produces. In fact, they generally offer better quality entertainment than a streaming video subscription or a new computer game.
All my books are available in ebook format wherever quality ebooks are sold. (The latest ones just aren’t on Amazon, but who says that giant retailer sells anything of quality?) If you want print format, try the mystery-thriller The Midas Bomb or the hard sci-fi thriller yet Game-of-Thrones-like Rogue Planet; or A. B. Carolan’s sci-fi mysteries for young adults (and adults who are young at heart), The Secret Lab, The Secret of the Urns, and Mind Games—all of these are available in both ebook and print formats and reasonably priced. (You’ll spend more at MacDonald’s and have a healthy meal for your mind!)
I can also offer some freebies: Check out the list of free PDF downloads found on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page—two free “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novels, Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, are even on that list! (One occurs at holiday time in NYC and London!)
Holiday greetings. Now the above commercial messages weren’t all that painful, were they? And we have them out of the way, so there’s still some time for holiday greetings.
Human beings are so damn creative that they’ve created many ways to celebrate the winter solstice and the beginning of winter. (Maybe more to mourn the dying of the light and have a funeral for the old year?) Most of these traditional celebrations have their origins in the northern hemisphere and are a simple consequence of the Earth’s axis tilt. Those origins are interesting if only because that tilt affects the entire globe, of course, yet the same calendar holidays are celebrated at the same time in southern climes when it’s summer! (I suppose there are older cultures in the southern hemisphere that celebrate their coming of winter in July, but I’ll leave it to readers to tell me about them.)
In any case, to all those celebrants around the globe, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
And that’s all I’ll write about this for the rest of 2022! I have my own shopping to do!
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Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
