As is my custom, I’ve taken in college football playoff and bowl games with some real cliff-hangers this season. I love college football. Heightened interest comes if either I or one of our children is an alumnus of the school – even accidentally – which brings me to the North Dakota State/University of the Incarnate Word (UIW) game.

In her book, Wildseed Witch, Marti Dumas skillfully weaves a modern-day teenager’s obsession with establishing a makeup YouTube channel with an unexpected scholarship to a fancy finishing school for young witches.

Joseph has lost his staff. The moss on the manger roof is splotchy. The donkey has no ears and the cow only one of her horns. Since the nativity scene came from Sears and was inexpensive in the first place, why don’t we just replace it?

I’ve suggested a new and a middle-aged Christmas book, but we mustn’t leave out the standard so I will add an age-old classic. My first memory of A Christmas Carol was a production by Hardy Baptist Church at Christmas.

The medical technician paused as she turned to leave after checking my left eye’s dilation for cataract surgery. Her eye caught on my hand resting on the arm of the patient’s chair. “My,” she said, “that’s such a pretty ring.”

Last week, I reviewed a new Christmas book. This week I am reviewing one that has been out a since 2001. I am labelling it a “middle-aged” book. My Mississippi Book Club chose it as our December selection.

My Mississippi role model, Eudora Welty, interspersed writing with gardening or vice versa. Two of my current writer friends, Kimberly Willis Holt and Jo Hackl do, too. I am in good company as I take a break from putting words on a page to dig in the dirt.

In Dashing through the Snowbirds by Donna Andrews, Christmas in Caerphilly already has enough going on for Meg Langslow. The Canadians, a group of a dozen programmers, who are doing forensic genealogy and DNA are stuck far from home and family with an unreasonable boss named Ian Meredith.

I don’t take every writing challenge I see, but sometimes I can’t resist. The prompt said, “Tell about a group you were in where you felt like you did not belong.” The best I can remember, I joined Biographers International Organization (Bio) about ten years ago when I first began work on telling Ezra Jack Keats’s story. Their website said they were for a worldwide membership of biographers.

Now and again, a reader needs a respite with a cozy mystery. The generally accepted definition has these mysteries with a woman sleuthing around as an amateur who is probably dismissed by the professional detectives and police. Usually, the murder takes place only to be discovered after the fact in a small village or community with lots of gossips.

When all the emphases in morning newscasts are on Black Friday, holiday menus, celebrity sightings, and even my favorite college football, I’m concerned that we are forgetting about things that matter even more. Mental pictures of innocent children caught in the path of bombs and Ukrainians who have fled their homes crowd out of my mind the biggest bargains at the largest sales.

I suggested this book in a post way back in November 2016 and have been thinking of it again this year. Sharing the Bread by Pat Zietlow Miller is billed as an old-fashioned Thanksgiving picture book.

I’m no Nikki Grimes, but I decided to have my own turn with a tanka. It’s kind of like a kid who watches Eli Manning throw the long football touchdown pass for the Giants on Sunday afternoon and then goes out in the backyard to practice passing with his brother.

The setting for Garvey in the Dark by Nikki Grimes will seem familiar to today’s readers who have experienced all of Covid and its fallout. Looking ahead to future readers, it will become historical and give a picture of the great pandemic to generations to come who did not live through it.

Procrastination came up in a recent conversation, and there were several practitioners. Some of them were even good friends. Okay, judging by their responses, you can procrastinate all the time, and it’s not that deadly.

In the final of three blogs prompted by the “Getting There” article in Smithsonian magazine, I think about those who had no bus at all – neither the yellow one with a lengthy ride on which I did homework nor the farm wagon converted to school transportation ridden by my mother. Two favorite writers reached into the truth of their ancestors to produce fiction that tells this story well.

Whether or not you recall my promise back in September to give a review of The Little Princesses after I had reread it, I remember, and you get it today. The book was written by Marion Crawford, who was the governess to Elizabeth and Margaret, and published in serial fashion in magazines in the 1950s where I read it in Mama’s Ladies Home Journal.

In my second blog about those school buses, I go back in time to a not quite school bus era. My mother, also named Virginia, started to school as a six-year-old – anxious to learn to read and equally anxious not to draw any attention to herself.

Having spent almost a fourth of my life in Louisiana, Sarah Guillory’s middle grade novel, Nowhere Better Than Here enticed me. Jillian Robichaux loves her home with bayou sunsets, a story-telling grandmother, and interacting with the nature she finds in the coastal town of Boutin.

The current issue of Smithsonian with an article called, “Getting There” about those yellow school buses triggered some thoughts and memories. In new information, I learned that the now standard color was first known as National School Bus Chrome and later called National School Bus Glossy Yellow.