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It makes me sad that the color blue is associated with sadness. Why is it considered sad to “have the blues?” To me, blue is the most joyful of all colors. There’s nothing I can see that makes me happier than a beautiful, blue sky. And what about someone’s lovely blue eyes? I know a type of music is called “the blues’ but where did that name come from? Can anyone tell me why blues are supposed to be sad?

When I was a kid and my little brother was learning to talk I could understand him when my parents couldn’t, and they’d often ask me to tell them what he was saying. I was an interpreter! I now realize he was using intonation patterns instead of words to communicate. When I was five years old we moved from the East Coast to California and I was amazed at how people out west used different words for many things. I decided I wanted to learn every language in the world. I had no idea how many languages there are. I studied Latin and German in High School and French in College (That’s another story.) But the only language I became fluent in besides English is American Sign Language.

Today’s date in numbers is 2/2/’22. That is a nice sequence and would be a great day for a special occasion like a wedding or baby to be born. The next similar date will be 3/3/’33 but that will be 2033 instead of 3033. So today is a special day and I hope everyone finds it full of special things.

Every year every car manufacturer comes out with new designs.And every design must have a new name.That wasn’t difficult back in the 1940s and earlier. (My father had a Hudson-Essex Terraplane. I think it had been built in 1913.)But, how in the world can they keep thinking of more changes to vehicles, and then new names for the new models?Or will they eventually go back to things used in the past like tail fins and rumble seats?

Back in history men usually took on the same jobs their fathers had. Because some ancestor had taken on the job of a carpenter in the past, Joseph was a carpenter. If he’d been a rabbi, priest, farmer or fisherman he couldn’t have just left everything and gone to Egypt. Because his family had gold, frankincense and myrrh they could live comfortably in Egypt, but if they needed more money Joseph could earn some as a carpenter with only a hammer, nails, and whatever was needed to cut wood. And he could easily take up his trade when the family returned to their home town. Whatever ancestor had first become a carpenter certainly had no idea that his choice would influence the history of the world.

I can’t remember where I saw this information, but it goes with my previous controversial posts about Christmas. Back when Jesus was born, young people usually lived with their parents until they got married. There were no official wedding ceremonies where couples exchanged vows. Instead, they would have a big banquet party to announce that the bride now belonged to the groom. At the end of the party the groom would say to the bride, “I go to prepare a place for you so that where I am, you may be also.” Then he would go buy, fix up, or, maybe in the case of a carpenter, build a house. The bride would return to her parents until he came to get her. Of course if the groom had been previously married he would bring his new wife home with him at the end of the party. So Mary wasn’t just engaged to Joseph. She was officially his spouse when the angel appeared to her. But she was still a virgin.

I’ve always wondered where people got the ideas that angels were ladies in white dresses who sat on clouds and played harps, and Cherubs were baby angels. Centuries ago people had no idea of the size of the Universe, and clouds wereconsidered part of the sky. White was considered a symbol of purity and harps played pretty music. But in the Bible angels were spiritual warriors, and people who saw them were terrified.And the angels called cherubim were awe inspiring. At least portraying angels as female gives girls parts to play in Christmas pageants. Except for Mary, all the other characters are masculine.

Christmas cards and picture books usually show a stable as a small building in a meadow or field and the manger as a box like a bassinet with the infant Jesus lying in it. But that is completely wrong. The manger was a feeding trough, big enough for Mary to lie in while giving birth. The stable of an inn was usually the rear part of the ground floor, behind the kitchen and the room where guests signed in and had their meals. The bedrooms were all upstairs. That stable would have been full of steeds belonging to other guests at the inn, and perhaps the inn owners. And it probably didn’t smell very pleasant.

Lots of Christmas cards and illustrations show three kings, each carrying a gift, going to Bethlehem or arriving at the stable where Jesus was born. But those pictures are not accurate. In the first place, those men were not kings. I guess during the Middle Ages it was assumed if they had such expensive gifts as gold and expensive spices they must have been royalty. And the Bible says they brought those three gifts but it doesn’t say there were three men. It was probably a group of Magi, or scholars, that came. And the star in the east was actually stars that seemed to be in the same place so they shone brighter than usual. Astronomers say an incident like that happened at about the time of Jesus’ birth. And the ‘star’ didn’t move across the sky. It appeared in the astrological sign of the House of David, so the wise men would have travelled hundreds of miles to get to Jerusalem. They would have seen the star every night no matter how far they travelled from their homeland, so it may have seemed to them that it was moving across the sky. And they didn’t find Jesus in a stable. According to the Bible, they found Mary, Joseph, and the baby in a house, probably several days after Jesus had been born.