It’s the final day Sunday of Advent and the first full day of winter and the first night of Hanukah, a point in time where many ancient traditions collide.

My own ancient traditions include radio theater productions. I may have mentioned before that I was not a good sleeper, at least not at the hours that children were supposed to be in bed. My parents were dutiful child-rearers, though, and put me to bed promptly at 8. For much of the year, they’d put on the radio or a cassette of music and tell me that even if I couldn’t fall asleep, I should just lie there with my eyes closed and listen.

At holidays, though, though, my dad, who grew up pre-tv, would go to the library and get cassettes out of radio broadcasts, which he would play for my brother and me.

“Greetings from Hollywood,” the announcer would intone on Lux Radio Theatre, who would then introduce a radio adaptation of a recent movie. Often the adaptations, edited down to fit the hour-long show runtime, would star the original cast members, but sometimes an actor would be unavailable, and they would just get another actor to fill in. On Lux, the actress would be expected to tout how, after a long day in makeup on set, she enjoyed using Lux Toilet Soap to keep her skin silky smooth. On other broadcasts, they’d extol other sponsors — Campbell’s Soups or tobacco, for instance. But Lux is the brand I associate most closely with these holiday broadcasts, and Christmas had the best ones of all.

Josh was particularly fond of The Miracle of the Bells. It featured Fred MacMurray, (Alida) Valli, and Frank Sinatra in a Christmas tragedy:

I enjoyed It’s a Wonderful Life, which featured James Stewart and Donna Reed, but not Lionel Barrymore:

Dad is a big Dickens fan, so I know he picked up A Christmas Carol for us to listen to. My guess it would be the Lionel Barrymore-Orson Welles version, which appeared on Campbell Playhouse, because that’s the most famous version (Dad, if I’m wrong, let us know which version you remember):

I hope you enjoy listening as you wrap gifts, bake cookies, or travel. I’ll see you back here tomorrow.

Season’s Greetings! Today is the 21st of December and the Winter Solstice. Friends, our shortest day has arrived, and with each passing day we’ll be gaining a little more light back into our lives. May that be true for us all on a more spiritual level, as well as astronomical.

Today, I’m delighted to introduce a new participant in the Virtual Advent Tour: my dear friend at Blue-Footed Musings. Its author (whom I probably should have asked how she wanted to be referred to here) has shared the lovely story of two of her favorite Christmas things.

Revel in the darkest day, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow, for time it is fleeting.

Today is December 20, which means we’re well and truly into the home stretch of the Virtual Advent Tour.

Our host today is Kathy B at Compassionknit. She’ll have a post up a little later this morning, so do stop over there and check it out. (In the meantime, you can check out her cat with Santa, which made me very jealous.)

I’ll see you back here tomorrow.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Sarah and I got to check out Enchant, which is this massive light display/maze/Christmas bazaar they’ve set up in Nationals Park. We both knew it was going to be a little cheesy, but were hoping for cheesy fun (as opposed to cheesy lame), and it was. We drank cocoa and I ate a pretzel with raclette cheese on it (so it was literally cheesy, as well as figuratively). We found all Santa’s reindeer and told him what we wanted for Christmas, and we enjoyed all the lights and generally had a lot of fun.

2. My office had a holiday party this week, with a white elephant/Yankee swap-type gift exchange. The person who ended up with my silly gift seemed pleased (she was the one who could steal from anyone at the end and instead opted to keep the Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine), and when I offered the equally silly Taco-saurus Rex taco holder to a younger coworker after the fact, she nearly hugged me.

3. My volleyball team came in second for the league this time around, but we remarked afterwards that the team who won hadn’t really seemed like they were having fun, and that if those were the two choices (it’s a false dichotomy, but go with me), we’d pick to lose, but enjoy ourselves together. We stayed after everyone else went home to play 3-on-3, and then a bunch of us headed out to the bar to hang out for a couple more hours.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

Happy 19th of December!

I’m feeling a little under the weather, so I’m going to post this with only a general link to Rudi’s blog. He’s driving from Salt Lake City and arrived in Kansas tonight.

See you tomorrow!

We did it! Or maybe time did it, despite our howling wildly and clinging to its ankles. Either way, we’ve made it to the final week of the Advent season.

Behind today’s door, we have a second post from raidergirl3 at an adventure in reading. She shares memories of Christmas visits to her grandmother and includes one of her Nan’s recipes for us to try. (For those of you don’t know, raidergirl3 is the longest-running participant in the Virtual Advent Tour, which I’m pretty sure is how we “met” oh so many years ago now.)

Before you head off to her blog, though, make sure you listen to the song above. I like to find a Canadian song to pair up with raidergirl3’s post every year. This year, I found a link to “Dear Old Santa,” written and performed by Liah Clayton, a 16-year-old girl from Prince Edward Island, who is donating the song’s proceeds to CBC’s Feed a Family Campaign.

I’ll see you back here tomorrow.