Over time, and in the Christmas spirit, we've been posting past Christmas letters. This one is the 2011 letter.

Happy Holidays!

 I’m not a great believer in exclamation points, but this seems like the right occasion.

 We try to write about things that have happened to us each year, and this year it seems the answer is not much. We had the usual good summer fishing, but less company than usual. Dean’s sister Martha broke a string of 30 years of summer trips to Alaska. That’s a non-happening of some magnitude. Half of those years featured sleeping on a futon supported by an air mattress supported by our basement’s concrete floor. So far as we know, though, that’s unrelated to her failure to turn up. She says she sleeps on that futon better than anywhere else. Very cool, supremely quiet, peaceful.  

She did have an adventure last summer that would have discouraged even the strong-hearted, which she is.  She and our nephew were fishing some distance upriver from us well out of  sight but near a group of three men. A brown bear/aka grizzly appeared below them coming upriver. This is worse than it sounds, because the only escape, short of scaling cliffs and bushwhacking through untrammeled wilderness without  a compass or a GPS, was downriver through the bear.

  We’ve been trapped in that situation before, and it doesn’t lead to anything good. One of the times we were caught, we were fishing on the Situk at Yakutat, a village on the Gulf of Alaska that is strictly fly-in and fly-out, and doesn’t – or didn’t then –have much in the way of population or tourists. We were about twelve miles east of town, maybe half a mile above the mouth of the river, and all by ourselves. Our car was parked where the road petered out at the mouth. An hour or so into fishing, a brown bear decided to become friends. He appeared upstream on the opposite side, coming down toward us. We very naturally retreated out of the river on our side. He disappeared. We waited maybe ten minutes, scanning for bear, decided he was long gone, and concluded that Dean could wade out and resume fishing (the deep hole full of salmon was on the bear side) while I stood watch. Dean waded about two-thirds of the way to the other side and cast, looking down his fly rod at his fly as it hit the pool. He also found he was looking along the rod right into the eyes of the grizzly, which had very silently insinuated himself into a deadfall right on the edge of the far bank. Which wasn’t very far. The Situk at that point was maybe thirty feet wide, so Dean was within ten feet of the bear. Bears are fast as lightning and good swimmers, so ten feet away was not a good location. 

We retreated again with some celerity, but the bear held fast. We had a .41 magnum pistol, and we decided to shoot in the air to scare him off. We aimed maybe thirty or forty feet above his head (you could do that on the Situk and not worry where the bullet came down, because you certainly weren’t going to hit any human over there on the bear side). The .41 magnum makes a heck of a crack when fired and is a large caliber, big enough that it lopped the top out of a
sizable spruce on the other bank, but apparently not big enough. Instead of erupting out of the brush and hightailing it, the bear cocked his head with an interested look and sniffed a couple of time as if he rather liked the smell of gunsmoke.  One of us asked the other what we should do next, and we decided the first thing to do was reload that bullet. While we were doing that, the bear got up and purposefully took himself downriver, where he proceeded to cross to our side and start up toward us.

With the bear athwart our only escape route, and possibly feeling revengeful for the bullet, what we  should do next didn’t require debate. We certainly weren’t going to wait for him and serve lunch. We did the prudent thing – we retreated upriver and we kept retreating until we had put a mile or so between us and his last location. Then we huddled about what to do next.  We knew there was a possible escape route upriver – another highway crossed the Situk at what was called Nine-Mile Bridge. But Yakutat is temperate rain forest, totally vegetated with devil’s club and similar evil if beautiful foliage, all growing higher than your head, deer moss hanging down into your face, and bear trails everywhere. We suspected night would come before we could bushwhack all those miles and reach the bridge, so we’d be spending the night in the open and, assuming we reached the bridge, there might not be traffic for days. So, eyes locked on our back trail in case the bear was really interested in us, we decided that we’d halt and hold for a few hours. Which we did. Then we started inching slowly and carefully down river toward our car, gun and bear spray at the ready, flinching at every intersecting bear trail, and jerking at every noise or wind-shivered leaf. Sort of a back-to-back progress as we held off imagined enemies.

 Martha’s experience was similar but wetter. The bear had them blocked and was moving upriver on their side. The factor in their favor is that a grizzly has never been known to attack a group larger than four (they say). So the five of them would still have been okay, if the party of three had not taken it into their head to cross the river to get away from the bear. Pointing out that this was a bad idea did no good. That left Martha and Don by  themselves and well short of the magic won’t-attack number. Their choice then became to stand their ground on a narrow, shaly path between a cliff and the river, or cross. There are places where you can cross the Russian river if you don’t mind wading across hard current that comes well up your thighs. But that was not one of them. I’ve gone out a little too far to fish a few times and been swept away by that force of current. And Martha is short. But she gamely tackled the river. When she got about halfway across, water over her hip waders, holding on to Don for dear life, the men ahead suddenly reversed course and came barreling back toward Martha and Don, shouting, “#%$@&&%#, the bear is crossing!!!!” And so it was. So Martha and Don had to turn and struggle back to the original side in 35 degree water, sloshing and freezing. You’ve heard the expression tight-jawed? That would describe her when she related the incident. If she’d had a gun, I swear she would have shot, not the bear, but the three men.

 I don’t know if this incident had anything to do with her breaking her streak, and she swears it was just coincidence, but it does lead to speculation.

 We are well. We have made several videos this year, including one on making molasses and one on a visit of a college group interested in sustainability during which we made soap, made hominy (both using lye), strung green beans on twine to make shuckey beans, caned a chair seat with hickory bark, shucked, shelled, and ground corn to make cornmeal, and used the corn shucks to make a shuck mattress. We have a couple of parts done of a video on hog killing, with at least one part to go, and are interviewing people for a proposed  video on timber theft. Our other accomplishment this year was a web site on our doings called Cornett
Media, thanks to a lovely tech person called Julia, who set it up for us, and trained us to use it. She did such a good training job that we have since set up two more sites, one for the non-profit we’re allied with, Eco-Outpost, Inc, and one on timber theft. You can find them respectively at http://www.cornettmedia.com, at http://www.ecooutpost.org, and at http://timbertheft.weebly.com. The videos mentioned above are on one or another of those sites, along with many more.

 For those of you who are just learning of them, or haven’t checked them in a while, take a look. And have a very merry Christmas and a great 2012.

 Dean and Nina

Update: Martha didn't make it to Alaska in 2012 either, so our suspicions are growing.

Originally  posted 12/06/2011

As I said earlier, a life which is split between Alaska and Kentucky often involves sharp differences in experiences. Those sometimes show up in our annual Christmas letters, which don’t usually focus on what we’ve done (won the Nobel prize, walked on the moon, are the parents of not one, but three little geniuses, etc), but on what happens to us. With Christmas approaching, I’ve been rereading past letters, and thought posting one of those a week would be a nice lead-up to the holidays. The past two I posted were about Christmas in Alaska, so I thought it might make a change to tell you about Christmas in Kentucky, particularly Old Christmas, a tradition still alive in the area. That letter follows:

"Christmas is rushing down on us, and we seem to be in contention for the “Least-Prepared” Award this year.  We’re both fine so we can’t excuse ourselves by blaming health problems.  We just haven’t gotten to it.   I’ve bought a present
for exactly one person so far, and have 8 days to remedy that.  By necessity, this year Dean and I may switch our celebration to Old Christmas and exchange our gifts on January 6th.  

 Old Christmas is still a remembered tradition here in Eastern Kentucky.  I don’t know many other places where that is so, but here traditions are slow to die.  When Dean was growing up, they received presents on Old Christmas as well as December 25th – not as many, but otherwise just like Christmas.  Furthermore,
Christmas and Old Christmas each had their own traditions.  

Modern Christmas in this area was not so much a religious holiday as a festivity: it was was more closely associated with alcohol than with religion.  In fact, Christmas was a real boon for moonshiners, because businesses bought moonshine  and passed it out to employees.   On Christmas Day, the men in the
house drank moonshine all day long, and expected every visitor (or at least every male visitor) to partake.  Then and now, everybody shot off guns to mark the occasion.  Dean says that along Mill Branch, where his grandparents lived, gun shots echoed all day long on Christmas.  

One  of the big Christmas traditions was to make carbide cannons, which made
wonderful and very loud fireworks.  Dean remembers walking past one house that had shot off so many carbide cannons that the valley was filled with smoke.  You don’t see carbide cannons anymore, at least to my knowledge, but I suspect the fading of that custom has more to do with the advance in underground mining technology than with anything else.  In the old days, miners had carbide lights in their hardhats, so carbide was readily available.  Today it is not.

There were other traditions.  One was to write notes to Santa Claus and send them up the chimney.  The scientific explanation may be that the draft carried them up, but the traditional lore was that it was fairies.  

Christmas dinner was different, too.  Few kept geese, and most were not that crazy about turkey, so Christmas dinner was always chicken or ham.  Everybody had chicken and pigs.  In fact, in Appalachia, pork was the staple meat.  People might have a milk cow, but very few raised cattle for meat.  Steak to Appalachians was cubed steak, floured and fried like chicken.  I was an adult before I ate what most people think of as steak.

People around this area of Kentucky ate black-eyed peas on New Years, something we never did where I grew up in West Virginia.  I think of black-eyed peas as a southern tradition.  But of course this county in Eastern Kentucky was a Confederate-leaning county (Kentucky was a very divided place in the Civil War), whereas West Virginia was determinedly Union, which may explain that difference.  Civil War memories and attitudes linger as long as other traditions
here.

On Old Christmas, Dean’s grandmother always baked a big flat cookie that she produced only on that day and that verybody shared.  And there is of course a legend that animals are gifted with speech on Old Christmas.  There’s a song that goes, “On Christmas Day, The Animals Pray, On Christmas Day, So They Say.”  That "Christmas" is Old Christmas, of course.  I’ve heard that saying all my life, but never been in a barn or manger at midnight to test it for myself.  Dean says he once tried when he was little but fell asleep before Old Christmas arrived.  On Old Christmas eve, instead of hanging stockings as you did for Christmas, you put your shoes beside your bed the night before and woke up on Old Christmas to find  them holding candy or other goodies.

Another Christmas tradition was  “Christmas Gifting.” If you encountered another person, you tried to yell “Christmas  Gift” before they did. If you struck first, they had to give you something –  nothing very big, but something. Although I grew up in Southern Appalachia only about 120 miles away from Dean’s home, I had never heard of that. I learned fast, though, out of necessity. I particularly learned to answer the phone on Christmas with “Christmas Gift” instead of “Hello,” because if I didn’t I would hear “Christmas Gift” barreling down the phone line at me from Dean’s brother or one of his sisters on the heels of my hello. In the days before caller ID, it caused me  some embarrassment to find that I’d greeted a total stranger with “Christmas Gift,” but that was better than being caught myself, especially because I felt so triumphant at having got in first. Dean’s sister Martha is particularly good at “Christmas Gifting” people. Over the years she’s caught me so many times and I am so far in arrears that there’s no hope of ever catching up.

We don’t observe Old Christmas any more, unless it happens by default this year, but, whatever your customs, tradition, and religion, we want to wish you wonderful holidays.  We also fervently wish that our servicemen and servicewoman on deployment have as good a Christmas as one can away from home, and one and all get back from their deployment safely.

Happy Holidays,
Dean and Nina"

Update: I thought it might be  helpful to explain Old Christmas to those to whom it is an enigma. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued a decree switching the Christian world from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calender to bring the calendar more in line with the
actual length of the year. Some countries adopted the new calendar immediately, but not all. Since the decree was issued after the Protestant Reformation of roughly sixty years before, and around 50 years after Henry VIII had had his little contretemps with the Pope and the Catholic Church, Great Britain was one of the laggards. It didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752, almost 200 years after Gregory's edict.  Since most Appalachians came to America (then still part of Britain) well before that 1752 change, they had always used the Julian calendar. By the time the change was made from the Julian to the Gregorian way of counting, the calendar difference was twelve days. So, in 1752, twelve days "disappeared" during the adjustment. That disappearance made Christmas leap twelve days forward from its accustomed place, and shift two days of the week. Not everyone accepted that, so they simply added twelve days to the new December 25th, and celebrated Christmas on the day it would have been celebrated before the "disappearance" of those twelve days, and that day, of course, was January 6th. 

An interesting sidelight of this calendar change was that Alaska was still part of Russia when Great Britain and English America made the change. Russia, like many eastern orthodox churches, was one of the laggards and had not adopted the Gregorian calendar before the sale of Alaska,  so Alaska didn't make that adjustment until Seward bought it from Russia.  That was in 1867, at which point Alaska "lost" even more days than the twelve lost in 1752. When I
mull over the fact that for 300 years, countries that were cheek and jowl with each other observed calendars that were roughly two weeks apart, I wonder how those who went to, or did business with, other countries, coped with that problem. It must have led to a lot of arithmetic and a lot of headaches.

A life which is split between Alaska and Kentucky often involves sharp differences in experiences. Those sometimes show up in our annual Christmas letters, which don’t usually focus on what we’ve done (won the Nobel prize, walked on the moon, are the parents of not one, but three little geniuses, etc),  but on what happens to us. With Christmas approaching, I’ve been rereading past letters, and thought posting one of those a week would be a nice lead-up to the holidays. This  one was written  in the nineteen-nineties, and gives a real feel for a Christmas in Anchorage,  Alaska, at least that year.

 “It’s been very cold here – ten to twenty below. The Christmas lighting is
spectacular, but we still don’t have any snow. Vapor from the creeks and the extreme cold have coated the trees and shrubs with a heavy layer of white frost, though, which has given our surroundings a very winter-wonderland effect. There’s not much activity; everything is very quiet. We can hear the  crunch, crunch of footsteps as people walk by on several inches of sidewalk  frost seven stories below. The whole thing is very  Robert-Serviceish.

In spite of the cold, the weather has been lovely. We’ve seen Mount McKinley
almost every day on the northern horizon.  There are still eagles and ducks flying around the city, and the ice in Cook  Inlet is a never-ending show as it shifts with wind and tides. The light is  another source of fascination. The sun came up on the very tops of the mountains  at 10:30 a.m. today, and got down to the houses at about 10:45. Every dawn and  sunset there’s a rosy glow around the sky about 20 degrees above the horizon.  The Chugach, Talkeetna and Alaska mountain ranges are visible along with Mountain McKinley, but the lights of the city dominate now that the days are so short. The view from our windows is beautiful. We’re under six hours of daylight now, and dropping fast. The sun never gets far above the southern horizon in its abbreviated journey, and at
midday autos cast a shadow three  times their length.

It’s been a long time since we spent a winter in Alaska, and we’d forgotten about the wonderful atmospheric effects here. Night before last, the moon not only rose full and clear above the Chugach mountains, but was preceded by a paler image that stayed just above and to its right. We’ve seen reflections  of mountain ranges on the opposite horizon, and incredible rainbows. Winter is  also the time to see the fata morgana. All in all, it’s something not to be  missed.”

The letter sounds idyllic, and in many ways it was, but trouble has a way of intruding, and it showed in the new year. Because of the lack of snow, the  ground had no insulating cover, and the frost kept driving deeper and deeper. Eventually it drove past ten feet, the depth at which city water lines are buried, and pipes started to burst all over. Since the ground was frozen, the water, which had to go somewhere, would travel along just under  the frost line and would pop up in unexpected places, like a suburban basement. Tracking these burst pipes was a challenge for the city's utilities department, but excavating down to the break was even more
challenging. Driving around town, you’d see a steam thawer at work somewhere and know it was being used to thaw the ground for  excavating down to the (one hoped) break that might be there. It was a miserable  time for those affected; a basement full of water with
temperatures below zero  will depress your spirits, to say the least. So, as life often falls out, a few of us - notably the city utilities department people who had to work out in the extreme cold -  paid for the Christmas  the rest of us enjoyed.