Christmas Stockings - Janet Lane Walters #BWLAuthor #MFRWAuthor #Christmas #Traditions #Stockings

 

 

Christmas Stockings

 

 

I don’t have any one book completely dedicated to Christmas but Christmas is a feature of the Leo Aquarius Connection. It’s also coming up in my next Moonchild story – Haunted Dreams. But Christmas Stockings is what I’m talking about this month.

 

My father was a steelworker in Pittsburgh, PA and often during the years after WWII there were strikes and many of them extended over Christmas. In our house, this meant money could be scarce so my parents spent the year finding things to put in the stockings for their children and themselves. My mother loved to knit and so she made us stockings. These were magnificent and able to stretch to massive proportions. Unfortunately most of them have disintegrated over the eyars and I believe there are two and maybe three left. Those were stockings, she mad for my children and not of woolen yarn. Perhaps the kind still have some of them

 

The tradition continued with my parents filling stockings for children and grandchildren until first my father and then my mother died. I’ve taken on that chore and I really enjoy doing this. Finding odd and different things for each person. Often in all the stockings, there were socks. I still continue this tradition. I stopped sending oranges when the stockings had to be mailed. This was after the year one of the orangers was flattened in the mail.

 

This year with Covid in the air, and children and grandchildren at a distance, I had to make the stockings to be mailed early. So of the fifteen I do every year, 7 have been sent. The rest will be done on Christmas Eve – maybe a day or two earlier and be around the tree and fireplace for everyone. What I wonder is who will maintain this tradition started when money was scarce when I no longer can.

 

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What's that smell? by J.C. Kavanagh

The Twisted Climb - Darkness Descends
Book 2 of the Award-winning series

Have you ever had one of those "Did-that-just-happen?" moments? The kind where you shake your head in disbelief?

I had a scheduled endoscopy procedure at a clinic in Barrie, Ontario. I mentioned this during a Zoom meeting with my girlfriends, telling them I was having the procedure later in the week. They all nodded their heads knowingly. What I didn't know, though, was that endoscopy is a general term for both ends.

On the morning of my procedure, I arrived at the clinic, tummy empty for 12 hours as required. I undressed from the waist up, tied on a hospital gown and waited in the bed. The technician peeked around the curtain, clipboard in hand. He asked a few general questions to which I responded in the negative or positive, always the right answer. Until he said, "Is this your first colonoscopy?"

"Oh no no no no," I responded. "You have the wrong person. And the wrong end."

He flipped through a couple of pages and then nodded. "Right, then. You're here for a gastroscopy."

I gulped. "So... if I didn't clarify, you would have... you would have done unspeakable things to my unprepared bottom-end?"

It was now his turn to say "Oh no no no no."

I pulled up the covers in my cold bed. I wasn't sure which area of my body to double-cover but I sure was grateful for the clean gitch covering my nether regions. If ever there was a time for wearing a rear-end chastity belt, it was now.

"You're sure?"  I asked him. Boy oh boy, if there was a mistake, it would be of epic failure for all involved. I knew that a colonoscopy procedure took place after you rid your bowels of every spec and particle of poop. A gastroscopy, my procedure, involved abstaining from food and water for about 12 hours. Clean stomach only. Top end.

Gastroscopy procedure

He ticked off another box on his clipboard and said they'd bring me in shortly. After pulling the curtain around my bed, I heard his shoes squeak to the bed beside me. He asked the patient similar questions to what he just asked me and then he stated, "This is your second colonoscopy."

There was silence. "Um, yes," my hidden neighbour said slowly.

"And you haven't had anything to eat or drink for 24 hours?"

More silence. Then a soft, choking kind of laugh. "Yeah, sure."

"Are you sure," he countered.

"Yeah, I think so," she replied.

Uh oh, I thought. 

Too late, though, as I watched through the open curtain at the end of my bed. My colonoscopy neighbour was getting wheeled to the procedure room.

It wasn't long before it was my turn. The same fellow came back, pulling the curtains away from my bed with a flourish. He did not look happy.

He wheeled me into the procedure room. 

I gagged.

"What is that smell?"

The doctor, the nurse, the technician and the anesthetist looked everywhere but at me. 

"I own a sailboat," I explained, "and I make sure the toilet tank is emptied on a regular basis. I also use a special liquid that ensures the tank and hoses never smell like it smells in here."

Then they all looked toward one area, to a large floor basket on my left. 

"Oh no no no no," I said, shaking my head. The contents must have come from that patient ahead of me. Proof that she really was not prepared for the back-end procedure. "You know that I'm here for the top-end scope. Right?"

"Yes, yes," soothed the nurse. 

The doctor motioned with her head toward the basket. "You best remove that," she told the technician.

They put me on my side and the offending basket was removed. A gastroscopy is a procedure where you're placed under short-term anesthesia and the doc inserts a long tube down your throat and into your stomach and upper bowel and proceeds to take pics and video. They're looking for ulcers, perforations and alien creatures.

Thankfully, I had nothing to report. No excitement at the top end.

But if you're looking for excitement, adventure, action, suspense and a hint of paranormal, you will love The Twisted Climb series. There's no gagging but there is a lot of 'did-that-just-happen?' moments. A great Christmas gift for teens, young adults and adults young at heart. 

Enjoy the Christmas season and be safe.

 

J.C. Kavanagh, author of

The Twisted Climb - Darkness Descends (Book 2)

voted BEST Young Adult Book 2018, Critters Readers Poll and Best YA Book FINALIST at The Word Guild, Canada

AND

The Twisted Climb,

voted BEST Young Adult Book 2016, P&E Readers Poll

Novels for teens, young adults and adults young at heart

Email: author.j.c.kavanagh@gmail.com

www.facebook.com/J.C.Kavanagh

www.amazon.com/author/jckavanagh

Twitter @JCKavanagh1 (Author J.C. Kavanagh)

The Enduring Mystery of the Mary Celeste

 

The Mary Celeste (Inset: The captain's wife and daughter)

Finding abandoned ships floating on the high seas are not uncommon occurrences. As an example, the MV Alta, a 2,400 ton vessel, was found floating near the Irish coast in the beginning of this year. It had had broken down near Bermuda and while the crew had been rescued, the ship had been drifting for nearly seventeen months, skirting Africa, the Americas and Europe. The details after that remain murky: the owners might have abandoned it in international waters; it might have been hijacked, and finally, left to drift.

One such abandonment, captured the imagination of the world, and the subsequent varied explanations became a sort of cottage industry. The fate of the Mary Celeste, built in Nova Scotia under British registration and sold to American interests in 1868, remains a mystery to this day.

In December of 1872, off the coast of the Azores, the Mary Celeste was discovered floating alone, in a disheveled but seaworthy condition, by the Dei Gratia, a Canadian merchant vessel. The ship’s ample supplies, its cargo and all the crew’s belongings remained on board. Only the lifeboat, a small yawl, was missing. The ships’ log revealed nothing out of the ordinary. It seemed that the ship had been abandoned in a hurry, yet no reason for its abandonment could be discovered and the ship’s crew could never be found.

The Dei Gratia

The story might have ended there, except for two things. One was the personal tragedy of the Captain, Benjamin Briggs, who arranged to have his wife and baby daughter on board. He left his son, who was seven at the time, with his mother. The death of the mother, the daughter and the orphaning of the son aroused public sympathy.

The second reason was due to a fictionalized report written by a twenty-five year old ship’s surgeon named Arthur Conan Doyle. While he had no connection to the Mary Celeste, the creator of Sherlock Holmes wrote the report in the first person, claiming the disaster to be the result of a white-race hating fanatic named Jephson, who commandeers the ship to Africa.

While thoroughly un-factual, the story caused a sensation when published in the Cornhill Magazine. Immediately, other publications came out with even more fantastic accounts. Other “survivors” told their tales (despite the fact that no survivors were ever located,) each more lurid that the rest.

The accounts included thievery, murder, madness, treasures of gold and silver, giant squid and even “mystical experiences” that somehow tied the ship’s abandonment to the lost continent of Atlantis. The more bizarre the story, the more it was lapped up. In the 1930’s two well-received radio plays aired, movies were filmed in 1935 and in 1938, and a play performed in 1949. In 2007, the Smithsonian Chanel aired a documentary on the subject.

In the end, the Mary Celeste, could not outrun her bad luck. Despite being made again sea-worthy, she sat in a dock unused, having gained a reputation for bad luck. After a change in ownership, she sailed again, resulting in heavy losses. Her owners, in desperation, ran her aground on a reef near Haiti, hoping to collect insurance. Their plot was discovered, resulting in the suicide of one of the owners, madness of another and the impoverishment, death and disgrace of the third, three months after the trial.

Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy, and "Karma Nation," a literary romance. He is published by Books We Love (www.bookswelove.com)