Happy Un-Hallmark Christmas!

This morning I awoke to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing Joy to the World, and I realized that I was in fantasyland again. As with Christmas last year, I am in a quandary. Shall I write my Christmas letter as if I worked for Hallmark, or shall I let LittleBill do it? (LittleBill, as those of you who do not have computers may not know, is one of my cats. He is the author of my personal blog, In the Humble Opinion of LittleBill.) He has been acting strangely all week, and he drove me nuts until I finally got up and gave him the go-ahead to say what he wants. He wrote my biography, which you who read him found in my blog some time ago, and you know he's pretty strange, so don't blame me.

The major change in my life this past year took place last December when the friend of a friend gave me an old computer. I had never touched one in my life until that was all hooked up. Then a friend insisted that I start a blog, and he set it up for me. This has worked out very well, especially since the local paper here went to hell and many of its readers and contributors, including me, have cancelled our subscriptions. Much to my amazement, it has opened up a whole new world for me. There is a downside too, however, the main problem being that I am shaped like a cashew nut. But LittleBill is chewing my ear and clawing at my hands, so I have to let him go ahead.

If you remember my biography, the first half of my life was an ocean of misery as an unloved child in a privileged family. That must have been the reason that rescuing animals became so important to me. I have rescued (and kept for the rest of their lives) over 100 animals of various types, mainly cats and dogs. Now that I am too old to go where there are animals in trouble, I adopt them from adoption centers, and I always ask for the one that no one else wants. My little secret is that they are the best kind. In fact, when my family went to school recently so that my son-in-law could give the children a look at Mercury crossing the face of the Sun, someone was giving away a litter of kittens. To make a long story short, I ended up with the runt of the lot, who fit comfortably in my hand at that time. I named her Mercury and LittleBill adores her. She is now a hellion, and when I went to see the source of a crash, I found a lamp shade on the floor, and triumph on her face.

In a nutshell, I have my daughter and her family living nearby, my son living happily on Kauai, and my dear 7 cats and one remaining dog living in our little pool of happiness.

Most of my friends have been birdwatching companions, which was a major turning point in my life. I will never forget my first time out, when I saw a brown bird at some distance sitting on a fence. I raised my newly purchased binoculars to my eyes for the first time and saw that it was a Western Bluebird, with a lovely blue back and rosy breast. Unlike nature lovers who like to kill, birders are undoubtedly the major sponsors of the environmental movement.

It is hard to think that oceans of happiness spending money and time consuming what the earth has to offer for one's particular comfort and pleasure should be a person's main goal in life, as it has come to be for so many Americans. At the same time that many of us are treating ourselves to bawbles and huge SUVs, women of Africa are being raped and slaughtered in front of their children, and thousands are starving to death. And at the very moment you read these words, there are dismembered bodies still writhing and screaming on the streets of Baghdad. It is virtually impossible to realize that such disparate lives coexist on this planet.

OK, LittleBill, I know you had to get this off your mind, but that's enough. For the rest of you, I love you all and care for you and wish you happiness living in what I hope are little pools of happiness. I will be mailing pictures to some of you after Christmas.

Anne, LittleBill, Mom, Grandma, Duck Duck, Rudy