THE ORGANIST wore “Sorels”...

 and played the piano!

Christmas Eve 2015 was the beginning of our WHITE CHRISTMAS!  We had received 8 inches of snow when the church decided on only ONE Christmas Eve Service at 3 PM, canceling the 6 PM service to get people home before dark.  The brave and hardy dozen enjoyed the candlelight and all of the traditional Christmas Carols, a lovely solo by Carl Rudolph and some Christmas snacks after the last candle was extinguished.

My husband did his traditional Christmas Eve shopping and we headed home to The Resort to help two guests park, I shoveled a path to their cabin as their chains were askew and the road too icy for them to actually drive to the cabin.  Then we attempted a quick and easy fix on the furnace in another cabin to no avail.  A light supper served as an appetizer to a two-hour crawl under the cabin to repair the faulty furnace.  Praise GOD for the offer by the young-adult son of the guests to shovel out the access to “the furnace room.”  Our total accumulation of snow was over a foot plus what the plow had pushed toward the access doors!  All is well that ends well!  Cabin is now “toasty”, and so was the shower to remove the dust and decay from laying in the dirt under the Cabin where the Raiders actually WON the football game on the TV above us!

Our Granddaughter’s boyfriend was at the Raiders game; having a Raiders fan in a 49er family is a bit of a stretch!!  Otherwise, he is a nice young man!  She and her family were going to attend the 6 PM service that was cancelled.  Our son said that was an excellent idea as it took him six tries to get up the hill going to their house on the ice. This is the winter we have been waiting for since the last “good one” five years ago!   That was the last snowy winter we had here in the central Sierras!  The Christmas Eve Storm was a day after the RAIN to 7000 feet storm – nearly 7 inches of rain!  We were so thankful for the ski area and snow play area to receive the needed white covering!!   It looks so pretty and with a morning temperature of 9 degrees today, it will stay pretty!!

A Merry Christmas was had by all and the packet of Christmas gifts from Grandpa is being picked up TODAY from the Sonora Post Office where it finally STOPPED its rotation to West Sacramento, thanks to alerting the staff that doing the same routine procedure more than twice didn’t seem like the correct way to solve a delivery problem.  It was simply a wrong zip code requiring, at best, a phone call to the correct Post Office for pickup, especially since the addressee IS the Post Office in Strawberry!!  If the system is broken, be creative and find a solution, don’t wait for the customer to find out that the system is broken!!    Happy New Year to all the Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx employees who work their hardest the last two weeks of December!!   We can add the vacation industry people who solve problems even on Holidays when the snow is falling from the sky and piling up in their parking spaces!