Happy and Prosperous 2014!

Riddle:  What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire?

 We celebrate Christmas in our family on Christmas Eve.  This year our nephew Adam, newly wed, newly pregnant, and with a new house, hosted it. (He can't stop smiling!)  His house is on the far northeast border of the Cities.  The gathering was fun, lots of good talk, good presents, good food.  But on leaving, we found a heavy snowstorm was underway.  Fortunately, Ellen is really good at driving in bad weather, so I sat as quietly as I could in the passenger seat as the snow-clogged highways rapidly worsened.  Some people were driving very slowly but the occasional idiot, celebrating his new four-wheel-drive vehicle, would come plowing up and try to pass.  We were caught in the middle.  The lane markers had vanished, so the cars were sometimes trying to occupy three lanes on a two-lane road, or (always the ones driving very slowly) taking up space in the middle to make one lane of it.  We had taken nearly an hour to get to Adam’s house; it took us nearly two hours to get home.  But we made it in excellent order, not a detour into a ditch or a fender-bending encounter with another car, not even a scary loss of traction, the kind where the back end breaks loose and tries to overtake the front.  I consider that the best Christmas present I got!

The mercury has retreated nearly down into the bulb of the thermometer; it was eleven below zero at seven o’clock  Monday morning.  It is going to stay very cold for the next week.  It’s been snowing lightly, the roads are slick and the snow, very low in moisture at these temperatures, lifts into a fog at the slightest breeze.  But it’s supposed to clear later today, which is good, as we are expecting company to come and continue what has been a New Year’s Eve tradition at our place for about thirty years: penny-ante poker.  Most of us play so rarely we have to put out sheets of paper listing the rank of the hands – but by the end of the evening we’re playing all the varieties there are, from Texas hold’em to Indian chief.  With a pause at midnight for a glass of bubbly and a chorus of Old Lang Syne.

Happy New Year, everyone! 

Answer:  Frostbite!