Pat Bertram's Blog, page 175

The Countdown to the Rest of My Life

I had a surprising and surprisingly pleasant Christmas. As it turns out, I did not have to spend the holiday by myself in this echoingly empty house. My dance teacher and her husband adopted me for the holiday, which gave the Yule a family-like aura.

I even went to church with them on Christmas Eve. I was nervous at first — it���s been decades since I set foot inside any church — but it was nice. And powerful. I could feel the belief of those present, and it seemed right to be celebrating CHRISTmas with them. (Particularly since I have recently taken ole Mr. Claus in such distaste.) I felt a bit envious of the congregation���s belief, and nostalgic for the days when I too believed. I had just enough belief, though, to picture the knowing looks on my parents��� faces as together they looked down on this unexpected visitation of mine.

Now begins the countdown to the rest of my life, though I still have not a single clue how it will unfold. I am still going through my stuff, sorting out and packing what I will keep and getting rid of what is no longer important. (I found a cloth for cleaning vinyl records that I bought probably around the last time I went to church, along with some of the adaptors for 45rmp records. The records and record player are long gone, of course, but somehow until now it never occurred to me to get rid of these unnecessary trinkets.)

Sometimes the sorting becomes an end to itself, and it is only when I pause for a break that the reality hits me. I am not packing for anything. Not packing to go home to my life mate/soul mate, not packing for a wonderful adventure, not packing for a new life. Just packing.

I always knew this time would be hard. My stay here at my father���s house was merely a transition from my shared life with my soul mate to . . . whatever. Now that they are both gone, it���s just me heading into an unknown future.

I don���t usually make New Year���s resolutions. I have a list of things that in an ideal world I would do every day, and I will continue to strive for as many of those items as possible. (Things like getting enough water, enough sleep, enough exercise. Dancing, stretching, lifting weights, eating salads. Trying not to get hungry, angry, lonely, tired because they contribute to sorrow and feelings of futility.)

But this year, I will be making one resolution — to be courageous. A person can���t leap into uncertainly without courage, and I will need all the courage I can muster.

***

Pat Bertram��is the author of the suspense novels��Light Bringer,��More Deaths Than One,��A Spark of Heavenly Fire,��and��Daughter Am I.��Bertram is also the author of��Grief: The Great Yearning, ���an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.��� Connect with��Pat on Google+. Like Pat on��Facebook.

Tagged: 45rpm adaptors, belief, church, courage, New Year's resolution

Christmas Wishes

***

Pat Bertram��is the author of the suspense novels��Light Bringer,��More Deaths Than One,��A Spark of Heavenly Fire,��and��Daughter Am I.��Bertram is also the author of��Grief: The Great Yearning, ���an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.��� Connect with��Pat on Google+. Like Pat on��Facebook.

Tagged: Christmas wishes, Merry Christmas, the best things of Christmas

Christmas Eve With the Living

This will be the fifth Christmas since the death of Jeff, my life mate/soul mate. (I had to count, because it didn���t seem right. The fifth anniversary of his death isn���t until March. But yes, five Christmases — 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014.)

We never did much for Christmas except by default. Since the rest of the world was busy with the holiday, we were left to our own devices, so usually we strung some lights around the living room (he loved Christmas lights), heaped plates with finger foods, and watched favorite movies. Since his death, every Christmas Eve I���ve been taking him for a walk around the neighborhood to show him the light displays. (I figure if he still lives in my heart as people tell me he does, then he will see what I will see.)

This Christmas Eve, I will be forgoing this new tradition. A friend invited me to a family Christmas party, and I accepted. An eve with ghosts or an eve with lights, laughter, and lots of Polish food? Not a hard decision to make.

Tomorrow, I will spend the day as we always did, though it will be only me watching our favorite movies, eating delicacies, and drinking a toast to the life we once shared. Despite the conceit that he lives in my heart, I know he is gone. He came, brought the light of knowledge to my life, and then he went back to wherever it was he came from. (Stardust, perhaps. I wish there was a way of sending his remains out to the stars, but his ashes will be forever earthbound).

It seems fitting that I spend one more Christmas in this house, my father���s house. This has been a house of transition for me, a place of refuge to live out my sorrow. But my father is gone now, as are my mother, the brothers closest to me in age, and Jeff, of course. During the next month or two, I will be embarking on a new life (one I have yet to envision), and for the most part, I will be leaving my ghosts behind, with only an occasional tear to remember them by.

But now is not a time to think of those who are gone. I���m going to go put on my sparkly clothes, and spend the evening with the living.

***

Pat Bertram��is the author of the suspense novels��Light Bringer,��More Deaths Than One,��A Spark of Heavenly Fire,��and��Daughter Am I.��Bertram is also the author of��Grief: The Great Yearning, ���an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.��� Connect with��Pat on Google+. Like Pat on��Facebook.

Tagged: Christmas and grief, Christmas lights, Christmas party, ghosts, new Christmas traditions

Cleaning Off My Desk

I���m cleaning off my desk, sorting through the accumulation of the past few years in preparation for my eventual move, and I came across a stack of notes I���ve been saving. I���m not sure what I���ve been saving them for since I haven���t looked at most of them in more than a year, and in many cases have no idea why I have the notes.

For example, I have several snippets of paper with kickstarter.com on them, and one for fundRazer. Apparently at one time I considered crowd funding, but have no idea what I was planning on funding. And one for this fascinating website: http://venusfebriculosa.com/

I found a note to myself: If it isn���t important, make it important. I have a tendency to discount things that aren���t important, and since there���s not much that is important, I end up with nothing. And I want to/need to end up with something. It’s a good reminder, but doesn’t do me much good if I never look at the note.

One paper simply says embrace/remembrance. Apparently I was struck by the similarity of these words, and intended to write a blog post about them, but whatever I planned to say is lost in the far recesses of my magpie mind.

I have a more recent note for bardo/vardo. Within a couple of days, I heard both words, and considered doing a blog post about them, but couldn���t find a way to connect the two since their meanings are so disparate. Wikipedia��says��the term “bardo” refers to the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth. According to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one’s next birth, when one’s consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena. These usually follow a particular sequence of degeneration from, just after death, the clearest experiences of reality of which one is spiritually capable, and then proceeding to terrifying hallucinations that arise from the impulses of one’s previous unskillful actions. For the prepared and appropriately trained individuals the bardo offers a state of great opportunity for liberation, since transcendental insight may arise with the direct experience of reality, while for others it can become a place of danger as the karmically created hallucinations can impel one into a less than desirable rebirth. Yikes. Vardo is much more pleasant — it���s one of those lovely and colorful gypsy wagons. Maybe one can use a vardo to escape bardo.

I found a list of typos I���ve made that sounded interesting, perhaps to use for a character who makes up her own words. Wrod, swampled, fits like a glow, friendshop, wold (for some reason, every time I try to type wolf, it ends up as wold), fung, Zmas (instead of Xmas)

A couple of notes about characters — figure out what they regret and what they are proud of. Also, what do they win by losing and what do they lose by winning.

This little ditty to promote Rubicon Ranch: Riley���s Story, that I never used:

In the desert

The quiet desert

A killer lurks tonight.

In the desert

The quiet desert,

Riley dies tonight.

In the village,

The peaceful village,

No one sleeps tonight.

And quotes:

Life is a myth we tell ourselves.

Everything I���m not makes me everything I am.

Be like thunder — be dangerous and unpredictable and make a lot of noise.

Surprise yourself. Don���t assume you know everything there is to know about your life.

You are a splendid butterfly. It is your wings that make you beautiful. And I could make you fly away, but I could never make you stay.

And finally, just these words on a paper The Symphony of a Life Gone��By. That was the title of a blog post I wrote three years ago that I���d forgotten about, and when I came across it by chance, I was so struck by the post���s beauty that I wanted to remember it.

Well, now that I���ve made a note of these notes, I can just as easily not read them on this blog as I could on the scraps of paper.

***

Pat Bertram��is the author of the suspense novels��Light Bringer,��More Deaths Than One,��A Spark of Heavenly Fire,��and��Daughter Am I.��Bertram is also the author of��Grief: The Great Yearning, ���an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.��� Connect with��Pat on Google+. Like Pat on��Facebook.

Tagged: bardo, be like thunder, interesting typos, notes, Rubicon Ranch: Riley's Story, splendid butterfly, vardo

It’s a Must-Eat-Must World

It seems as if lately I���m running into a lot of ���must���s that do nothing but make me want to��head in��the opposite direction. This is not a ���must��� world. No one knows for sure why we are here and what we are supposed to be doing, otherwise there would be no religions, no philosophies, no psychologies, no debates of any kind. We would all simply do whatever it is that we must, and that would be that. There are certain things that we take as musts, such obeying laws, paying taxes, nourishing ourselves, but even those aren’t musts. We don���t have to do them, though there are consequences if we take that risk.

Since this is a mustless world, we have to make it up as we go along, and none of us has the right to thrust our musts on anyone else.

For example, someone I���ve done some online work for tells me I must not be negative and tell him something won���t work or that I don���t know how to make it work even if I know what I say is��true. And yet, when I asked a woman who manages the management company that manages the office space of such high profile companies as Amazon and Google if she would consider such an assessment to be negative, she said no. That she valued honesty in her employees. That if she knows what doesn���t work, she can head in a different direction and find something that does work. Yes! Exactly. One person’s must not is another person’s must.

Then there is this quote I saw today from Stephen King. He wrote: “You can approach the act of writing with excitement, hopefulness, even despair. You can come to the act with fists clenched and eyes narrowed. You can come to it to change the world. Come to it any way you want but lightly. You must not come lightly to the blank page.” Must not? Must not? Who is he to say what I must or must not do? For some of us, coming lightly to the blank page is the only way we can entice those shy ideas and bashful words to come out to play.

And worst of all, I recently saw a T-shirt with a a picture of santa claus (Not a typo. I���m purposely demoting him/it to a state of non-capitalization) and the words, ���You must believe.��� Must believe? I don���t think so. In fact, because of this thrust to make me believe in something so patently absurd, I no longer have any affection for the creature at all.

In a recent advice column, a woman wrote ���When I have kids, I don���t want to do the whole “Santa” thing. I’d rather tell them about the real St. Nicholas and what it means to give rather than to receive. Even though I’m not religious, I’ll tell them about the birth of Jesus (even though he wasn’t born in December), and tell them about the winter solstice.�����Sounds admirable to me, but her friends told her she was a scrooge for taking her children���s innocence away, which is why she wrote to the columnist for another opinion. The overwhelming online response was that such a woman shouldn���t have children. Even those who agreed she had a right to her stance suggested that ���just for fun��� she wrap a couple of small presents and put them under the tree ���from santa.���

What the hell is going on in the world? Aren���t there more important things to worry about than a must belief in santa claus? The world takes away children’s innocence by starving them, by making them old at a young age (no more dolls for preteens except hooker-like dolls), by creating fearful atmospheres in schools, by television programs that show them things no child should ever have to see, and yet, oh yes, we must make sure they��believe in a mythical creature to keep what innocence is left. Cripes.

So, let���s make a pact for this coming year. I won���t must you, and you don���t must me.

***

Pat Bertram��is the author of the suspense novels��Light Bringer,��More Deaths Than One,��A Spark of Heavenly Fire,��and��Daughter Am I.��Bertram is also the author of��Grief: The Great Yearning, ���an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.��� Connect with��Pat on Google+. Like Pat on��Facebook.

 

Tagged: must believe in Santa Claus, must not be negative, Stephen King on writing, taking away children's innocence, the act of writing

Happy End of the Creeping Darkness!

6:03 pm ET marked this year���s winter solstice, ending the creeping darkness. ���Solstice��� comes from two Latin words, sol meaning ���sun��� and sistere meaning ���stationary��� because on this day, in the northern hemisphere, the sun seems to stand still, as if garnering it���s strength to fight back the darkness.

Technically, the winter solstice marks the moment when there is a 23.5-degree tilt in Earth’s axis and the North Pole is at its furthest point from the sun — from here on, the days will get longer, gaining us an additional 6 and 1/2 hours of sunlight per day by June 21st when the days begin to get shorter again. (This is reversed in the southern hemisphere, so today those down under will be celebrating their summer solstice.)

Though neo-pagans have claimed the solstice for their own, this is one of those natural holidays (holy days) that we all should be celebrating. The end of the lengthening nights. The triumph of light over darkness. We don���t even need the metaphors of light=good and dark=bad to find reason to celebrate this day. It���s simply a day of stillness, of hope. A day to give thanks for the promise that even in our darkest hour, light will return.

My celebration was simple. I lit my bowls of light and went outside and toasted the pale winter sun with champagne. Well, it was really sparking apple/pear cider, but the sun didn���t seem to care. It slid beneath the cloud-shrouded mountains without even a wink or a nod to acknowledge my obeisance. But it will return with greater strength tomorrow. And so will I.

Wishing you a bright and hopeful end of the creeping darkness.

***

Pat Bertram��is the author of the suspense novels��Light Bringer,��More Deaths Than One,��A Spark of Heavenly Fire,��and Daughter Am I.��Bertram is also the author of��Grief: The Great Yearning, ���an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.��� Connect with��Pat on Google+. Like Pat on��Facebook.

Tagged: holy day, natural holiday, solstice, triumph of light over darkness, winter solstice

If you Like Science Fiction …

My friend and fellow author Dale Cozort, a brilliant scientist/historian who delights in playing with alternate histories, is taking part in the Kindle Scout program. I hope you will consider nominating Dale for his new science fiction book Snapshot. Dale explains:

I’ve been working on the Snapshot universe for over five years. I think it’s a spectacular idea. Here is what it���s about:

For eighty million years, the Tourists have been taking Snapshots of Earth, exact replicas of continents. Each Snapshot goes into its own snow-globe-shaped artificial universe. Snapshots are connected like a string of pearls by vents high over their oceans.

Snapshot people and animals quickly diverge from the real world, creating a universe where humans and animals from much of Earth���s history explore, fight and sometimes meet themselves. In October 2014, the Tourists take a North America Snapshot, cutting everyone in that copy off from the real world, but letting them fly to Snapshots where dinosaurs roam, where Indians rule North America or where Soviets or Nazis rule Europe. They may also confront the menace that lurks on the other side of a wind-swept Antarctic Snapshot.

This new Snapshot catches Middle East Analyst Greg Dunne rushing toward Hawaii to join his wife, his unborn sons and his extended family at a family reunion. The Snapshot doesn���t include Hawaii, so it cuts Greg off from everyone he loves. It also thrusts him into the aftermath of a hidden, decades-old massacre, part of a struggle between Germans from a pre-World War II European Snapshot and ranchers from Korean War-era US-53 Snapshot. The prize: a thinly settled North America-sized Madagascar Snapshot, much like the Wild West or the Australian outback. Whoever controls the Madagascar Snapshot controls communications between dozens of Snapshots.

Greg struggles to survive in this cutthroat reality, to remain faithful to a family he may never see again and to find a way back to his original Earth. He is caught between powerful opponents. A rancher who rode a hidden massacre to almost unchallenged political power faces the only survivor of that massacre, a woman driven nearly insane by the experience, but now in her own position of power, plotting revenge.

Snapshot is a fast-paced story of power and revenge set in a unique, marvelously rich universe.

If this story interests you, please nominate Snapshot for Amazon’s Kindle Scout program. It’s a quick process: Click the link https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/332ZJ8YN22MIT, click ‘nominate me’ and you���re done. If Dale���s book is selected, you get a free e-book copy. Sounds good to me!

If the direct link doesn���t work for you, go to��https://kindlescout.amazon.com/, then scroll down to the science fiction and fantasy section and scroll left or right until you find Snapshot.

And oh, if you like science fiction, please check out my novel Light Bringer.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire,andDaughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, ���an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.��� Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: alternate histories, Dale Cozort, Kindle Scout, science fiction, Snapshot

It’s Christmas, Not Santamas

Conrad Guest, author of A Retrospect In Death and A World Without Music (plus several other books) just posted a blog about tolerance, and how there seems to be so little of it, especially now during the Christmas season.

Guest wrote: I���ve long remained publically mute on the subject of Christmas, but this year I voice my opinion. You���re offended that I celebrate Christmas as the birth of a Messiah. You tell me he is but a myth. I have news for you. Santa isn���t real. He doesn���t make toys at his home at the North Pole, nor does he circle the globe on Christmas Eve to deliver toys down the chimneys of billions of people���many who don���t have chimneys. I don���t push on you my belief in God, even though, in my mind, there is a greater chance that He exists than does Santa. But go ahead, put up on your front lawn your inflatable Santa, and the sleigh and reindeer on your roof. I can tolerate that, even if you can���t tolerate the nativity scene on my lawn, and petition City Hall to make me take it down.

His words struck a chord with me. I get annoyed with having to pander to the intolerant at this time of year. It’s CHRISTmas, for cripes sake. That’s the whole point of the day. No matter what non-Christians are trying to make us all believe, the day is not Santamas. I am sick of the constant message that we must believe in Santa Claus, sick of having that stupid myth foisted on me, sick of the eternal seesawing there is/isn’t a Santa Claus. If people are so willing to accept Santa as an icon of the season (an icon who��so obviously isn���t real) then what difference does it make to them if some people use cr��ches or some other image to personify the day? Cr��ches are the spirit of the day and more fitting than santas and elves and those stupid flying reindeer. Taking that red-suited image to the height of absurdity, a neighbor has a nativity scene with a Santa praying over the baby. Huh?

I simply don’t get it. Since the non-Christian world adapted a Christian holy day for their own, then they cannot complain about the religiosity. (Supposedly the Christians co-opted a Roman holiday, so it’s ironic that the same thing is happening again but to Christians this time.) Sometimes when I see one message too many about how we can no longer say, “Merry Christmas” because it offends some people, I just want to scream, “Get over it, folks, It’s CHRISTmas. If you don’t like it, start your own damn holiday.”

The Santa myth is particularly odious since the obese gent so obviously favors the rich. It makes poorer kids feel bad that they weren’t good enough to get the rich-kid stuff they wanted. And why engender a belief in such a ridiculous myth in the first place? I knew a guy who fought in Vietnam. There they were at Christmas, hunkered down on some God-forsaken hill that they had just taken for the second or third time. They got to talking about the most disillusioning moment in their lives, and almost all of them said it was when they found out there was no Santa Claus. Why are people still perpetuating such a lie and for no particular reason?

Oops. Sorry. Didn���t mean to get on my soapbox, but as I said, J. Conrad Guest really hit a chord. Wishing you all a tolerant and happy Christmas season.

***

Related post:��What Do You Say to Someone Who is Grieving at Christmas?

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, andDaughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, ���an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.��� Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: believing in Santa, J. Conrad Guest, Santa, Santa isn't real

Grief: The Great Learning, Day 432

I���ve saved the letters I wrote to my life mate/soul mate after he died, thinking that one day I would write a sequel to Grief: The Great Yearning, the story of my first year of grief. I���d planned to call the sequel Grief: The Great Learning, and detail the lessons gleaned from the second and third years of my grief. Because I no longer want to keep revisiting such angst, there will be no sequel, so I���m publishing the letters here on this blog as a way of safeguarding (and sharing) them.

Although��this letter was written��three and a half years ago, it reflects so much of what I am feeling now. My father recently died, and I am packing in preparation for . . . I know not what. ��I wish I could talk to Jeff, see how he is doing, feel his hug, bask in his smile. I don’t think I will ever lose that desire, ever stop yearning for what I cannot have. His goneness shapes my days somewhat the same way his presence used to. Everything I do is because he is no longer here.

I am more used to the idea of living alone than I was when I wrote this letter, though sometimes��it still��scares me.��But one of the��lessons grief taught me is that��I��can get used to anything, even loneliness and aloneness.��I’m now going to lunch with women I like, so that helps.

Coincidentally, just a couple of days ago, I tossed that route beer bottle into the recycle bin, but as you can see, I still have the photo. Unfortunately, dealing with his ashes isn’t quite so easy. I still don’t know what to do with��them. I’m thinking of waiting for a windstorm, opening the box, and letting Jeff take care of them himself.

###

Day 432, Hi, Jeff.

Just in case you really are somewhere, I wanted you to know I haven���t forgotten you, still miss you, still wish there could have been a better resolution to your health problems than death. But what do I know? Maybe death was the best resolution. I���m not sure I see much hope of things working out for me, but I am trying. I���m getting out and doing things. It still seems as if the only way I can make sense of your death (from my perspective) is to do things I wouldn���t have done if you were alive.

I took a trip along Route 66 with some friends, which was fun. I kept a soda bottle for a souvenir. ���Route Beer.��� Tasted like plain old root beer, but I thought the name was cute. I���ve been going to lunch about once a week, sometimes after the grief group, sometimes with a couple of women I met there. I���m not sure I like the women, but for now, it���s enough that they like me. Yep. I���m that starved for affection.

In a couple of days, I���ll have been here a year looking after my dad. Who knows how much longer it will be. Maybe years. And then after? I truly don���t know.

I feel so hypocritical with all this grief — I wanted the horror of our life to be over, but I didn���t want you dead. Ironically, if you hadn���t been dying, I wouldn���t have wanted our life to be over, but the truth is, I wanted your dying done with. The stress was incredible for me, so I can only imagine how much worse it was for you.

My dying is still to come. It scares me to think of having to deal with infirmities alone, though I think it will be easier knowing that my death will not grieve anyone the way yours did me.

Did I tell you? I finally and forever understand what you mean by the pilot light of anger. I don���t want to be consumed by anger, but a quiet pilot light to keep me going, that is important. I can���t simply accept what life did to us — it���s not right. Maybe the universe is unfolding as it should, as people tell me, but from my standpoint, here and now, I need that pilot light. Maybe it will be a ���pilot��� taking me where I need to go, though I don���t know where that would be.

Part of me wants to find someone so I don���t feel so alone, but I���m not ready for that. It���s a matter of learning to deal with the loneliness. I lived with it before I met you, and I imagine I���ll learn to live with it now that you���re gone. I hope wherever you are that you aren���t lonely. I hope you���re not in pain. I hope you���re delighting in being free of that diseased body. I still have your ashes. I wish we could talk about what I should do with them. I wish we could talk about what I should do with my life. I wish . . . oh, so many impossible things.

I love you. Take care of yourself. I���ll try to take better care of me.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, ���an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.��� Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: aloneness, being alone, lessons of grief, letter to the dead, living alone, loss of a soul mate, writing to the dead

Raining Deer

This is the season where deer seem to rain down on us by the bucket loads, where they reign in various decorations, where they are often seen yoked together by reins.

You���d think reindeer would refer to those reins but the ���rein��� part of reindeer comes from the old Norse word for the creature: hreinn, so a literal translation of reindeer is actually ���reindeerdeer���.

Reindeer used to run wild in Britain, but became extinct long before the Celts and Anglo Saxons showed up. Now they live primarily in the Arctic tundra and northern boreal forests (boreal seems to mean just south of the arctic, but I don���t guarantee that definition.)

But where did the idea of flying reindeer come from?

Some folks have postulated that while reindeer don���t make the fabled winter trip, people do. Donald Pfister, a biologist who studies fungi at Harvard University, suggests that Siberian tribesmen who ingested fly agaric may have hallucinated into thinking that reindeer were flying. Making a correlation to Santa is the idea that Shamans in the Siberian and Arctic regions dropped into locals’ teepeelike homes with a bag full of hallucinatory mushrooms as presents in late December, and since the doors of these places were often blocked by snow, the shamans came down the smoke holes. Add to that mix the fact that the mushrooms were red with white trim (spots, not fur) and the possibility of the shamans taking on reindeer spirits, you have a story not exactly fit for children. But it could explain why Santa lives at the North Pole — that���s where the story originated. (I always thought he lived there because if he lived anywhere else, Denver, for example, it could be easily proven that there is no Santa Claus.)

In 1821, the first known reference to flying reindeer found its way into the Santa myth (an interweaving of St. Nicholas and the Dutch Sinterklaas). The author of the poem ���A New Year’s Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve Number III��� was kept a secret, but the editor of the piece claimed the author heard from his mother, an Indian of the area, that reindeer could fly. (��� ���Twas the Night Before Christmas��� was published in 1923.)

Well, I hung my stocking by the chimney with care (I had to, otherwise it would have fallen down), though I have no hope that some red-suited fellow will soon be filling it. In fact, I hope he doesn���t. Would scare me half to death to see a stranger inside this house.

***

Pat Bertram��is the author of the suspense novels��Light Bringer,��More Deaths Than One,��A Spark of Heavenly Fire,andDaughter Am I.��Bertram is also the author of��Grief: The Great Yearning, ���an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.��� Connect with��Pat on Google+. Like Pat on��Facebook.

Tagged: flying reindeer, myth of the flying reindeer, origin of reindeer, sinterklaas