It’s Sunday afternoon here in Daejeon, South Korea and I am just twelve hours away from getting on an airport limousine bus to begin the first leg of my journey to Laos to be with my family for the holidays.

It’s been 11 months since we last we’re together and as you can probably imagine I’m pretty much on Cloud Nine as I prepare for this journey which I have been preparing for since January 16th—the day I came to Korea.

I have a three-hour airport limousine ride to Incheon International Airport, followed by a five-and-a-half flight to Bangkok (not including the stopover in Hong Kong. After arriving at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, I have a three-hour layover before departing for Vientiane at 8:00 local time. One hour and thirty minutes I will be walking out of the arrival exit and there will be Aon and Jeremy Aaron waiting for me.

And for the rest of the story and lots and lots of photos, well you will just have to be patient.

In the meantime, I want to wish everyone here a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. May the holidays, no matter how you celebrate them depending upon your faith, be filled with much warmth, happiness, and blessings. I would also like to wish you all a very Happy New Year and hope 2010 is a prosperous and active year for you all.

Thank you for all your kind comments and for stopping by to say hello and keeping in touch with me as much as I have tried to stay in touch with you.

God Bless you all.

“With Every Christmas Card I Write….”.

And the hits keep on coming and coming.

I never imagined this essay would be so popular, but then again it is about Christmas cards and maybe more people are sending them this year. I most certainly did!

Check it out (if you haven’t already).

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

]]> http://jeffreyalanmiller.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/with-every-christmas-card-i-write-2/feed/ 1 Jeff http://jeffreyalanmiller.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/the-three-wise-guys/ http://jeffreyalanmiller.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/the-three-wise-guys/#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 06:20:29 +0000 Jeffrey http://jeffreyalanmiller.wordpress.com/?p=3621 ]]>

Growing up in the American Midwest during the 1960s there were a lot of rituals or customs associated with Christmas from buying a real Christmas tree to visiting Santa Claus in a small hut and begging the jolly man in red for whatever presents you wanted that year.

Every family had their own rituals and customs too—like what kind of snacks to put out for Santa Claus (in my house it was cookies and Coca Cola because our mother liked Coca Cola), where to hang your Christmas stockings (we had no fireplace so ours were hung on a door knob) or when to open your presents on Christmas morning (my family were purists, no gift opening on Christmas Eve).

One custom which I looked forward to doing every Christmas was riding around towns in the Illinois Valley (an area around 90 miles southwest of Chicago), specifically, LaSalle-Peru-Oglesby-Spring Valley with my grandparents to view the Christmas decorations residents had put up in their yards. Before the Arab Oil embargoes and energy crises of the 70s put a bit of a Scrooge damper on holiday festivities when people had to cut back on utility costs, putting up Christmas decorations was a very big part of the holiday.

Some towns even had contests for the best holiday decorations and as has been depicted in such films as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) and the more recent Mathew Broderick-Danny DeVito flick, Deck the Halls (2006) when the two neighbors tried to outdo each other.

It was usually a day or two after Christmas when my grandparents bundled up my brother and I and we piled into my grandparent’s car for the annual Christmas decoration tour. The tour was usually combined with visits to a few relative’s homes—on my grandmother’s side of the family—to exchange presents with her sisters and brothers as well as her nieces and nephews.

I don’t think my grandfather really liked viewing all the Christmas decorations as much as my grandmother and I did. He called some of the homeowners crackpots for putting up all that junk and running up the electric bill. And then he would launch into a tirade about how commercial the holiday had become. He did like the Nativity scenes some of the local Catholic churches set up for Christmas (he was a die-hard Catholic until the Pope said it was okay to eat meat on Fridays and mass stopped being conducted in Latin; it wasn’t too long afterward when he stopped going to church altogether).

On one cold, clear night a day or two after Christmas, my grandparents and I (my younger brother was only about two or three at the time and stayed at home) rode around LaSalle and Peru viewing the Christmas decorations as well as the Nativity Scenes at St. Roch’s and St. Pat’s in LaSalle. I had been quiet in the backseat until we drove past one of the larger Nativity Scenes that had life-sized statues.

“Look Grandma and Grandpa it’s Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus and the three wise guys.”

Where I picked up “wise guy” at the age of five or six must have been a complete mystery to my grandparents who started laughing in the front seat, probably thinking it was the cutest thing I could say. My grandmother, who suspected I had picked it up from my grandfather, would correct me and set me straight about the proper term to use.

“What you mean to say Jeffrey is the three wise men,” she said with the patience of a saint and probably taking every ounce of willpower she could muster not to keep on laughing.

Of course, I was too young to know any better and couldn’t understand why wise guys wasn’t nice to say. My grandmother on the other hand, sensing an overabundance of cuteness on my part would go on to tell this story until I was in my 20s.

The other night, a song reminded me of a girl from a long, long time ago.

It is funny how the mind works and what you might remember at any given moment; or what memories might be triggered by something you smell, hear, taste, or see.

The other night, I was listening to this song “Hospitality on Parade” (1975) by the group Sparks and it reminded me of eating Christmas cookies my grandmother baked and Pat Hardy, this girl I sort of had a crush on back in high school. I had bought the band’s 8-Track Indiscreet and was listening to it a lot back in 1975 around the holidays and when I was hanging out with Pat and some of her friends on the east side of LaSalle, going to lunch with her and friends to McDonald’s, or stopping to visit her at work at Bergner’s before I went to work across the street at K-Mart.

One memory begets another memory.

I was walking down the street, coming home from a long day at the language institute the other night, with this song on my iPod when I happened to look up at the second floor of this beauty shop across the street and noticed a light on in the window. The building looks more western in design than most of the homes and buildings on this street—western in that it didn’t have a blue or red tile roof.

For a split second, when I saw that light on in the window, with the drapes drawn, that song by Sparks playing, the cold, foggy night, thinking of Christmas, I was instantly teleported back in my mind to December 1975. It reminded me of Pat’s house and the times we hung out with each other.

Those days and nights back in 1975 were a fleeting moment of innocence that would be gone forever. Six months later, I was in the Air Force and although Pat and I exchanged many letters the first couple of months I was in the military, I would only see her four times in the next thirty-three years.

The other night though, for as long as it took for those memory tumblers to click into place, I got to see an old friend in my memories as I walked home.

Have Yourself a Merry Beatles’ Christmas.

“Good King Wencelas last looked out

On the Feast of Stephen, Ho!

As the slow ray around about

Deep and crisp and crispy.

Brightly show the boot last night

On the mossty cruel.

Henry Hall and David Lloyd,

Betty Grable, too-oo-oo.”

If you haven’t gotten into the Christmas spirit yet, musically speaking that is, or you are looking for something a little more nostalgic-albeit rock and roll nostalgia-to get into the musical spirit of the season, you might want to find a copy of The Beatles’ Christmas message recordings which were recorded for their fan club members from 1963-1969.

I first wrote this essay a few years ago on my blog and updated it again last year. If you are a Beatles’ fan and you never heard of these recordings, you will find this blog post quite interesting.

The first time I heard these messages was back in 1978 while listening to the Dr. Demento broadcast from an FM station in LA. Ever since then I have always listened to these messages around the holidays. They are much easier to find these days then they were back in the early 80s when listened to them again.

I hope you will be able to find them and enjoy listening to them.

North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe….

Billy Joel’s musical history lesson in his 1989 hit “We Didn’t Start the Fire” hits (pun intended) a little close to home when he mentions, North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe, and Panmunjom. And it is not just because I have been living and working in Korea since 1990, but the references to the 1950-53 Korean War which has been a part of my life since 2000 when I wrote my first newspaper article on the conflict until now and the novel I am writing about the conflict.

Stopping by a Palace on a Snowy Day.

Believe it or not, in the 19 years that I have lived in South Korea (as of December 9th) it has only really snowed heavily four or five times in Seoul and Daejeon (where I live now).

This was one of those times in March 2004. It might have only been a few weeks before Spring, but Seoul had been transformed into a winter wonderland; especially at Kyongbok Palace in downtown Seoul, one of the county’s most famous palaces.

Remembering John Lennon — October 9, 1940 — December 8, 1980.

Where were you on that tragic December night 29 years ago?

Vintage Christmas Cartoons From the 1950’s.

What would the holidays be without some vintage Christmas, holiday cartoons and animated films to enjoy?

Aside from some of the perennial holiday favorites like “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” there are some holiday favorites that you may not have heard of like these three animated films/cartoons which were popular on WGN’s Channel 9 TV out of Chicago.

Soon, you will be humming or whistling, “I’m Hardrock, I’m Coco, I’m Joe!”

“With Every Christmas Card I Write….”.

That’s right, with just a little over two weeks until Christmas it is time to start cranking out those Christmas and holiday cards. If you are like me, when you send Christmas cards you and want to write something special, you will find the essay at the link above quite interesting and useful.