As I write these entries every day, I keep hearing the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" going through my head. An interesting URL popped up on my e-mail list yesterday. It's called Irish Christmas Traditions. At the bottom of the page is what I found interesting. Seems there is a Catholic history associated with the song I just mentioned, something I never knew before. Scroll down to the bottom half of the page to read about it. That's what I love about the Internet. I come across so much information that I wouldn't see if I was just in a library browsing around. We woke up to a winter wonderland. Hee hee, another song, my favorite. "Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?" Pretty, pretty outside. It looks to be three inches of snow out there lining the rooftops, the fences, and the cat enclosure. The snow doesn't stop our cats. Kaboodle was out there bright and early making tracks on the walkway. Bill's car cover got christened. Trouble was he left his gloves in the car. He stood there wiping all the snow off the cover and I kept telling him he was defeating the purpose of the tarp. Finally, he just pulled it off and, voila, clean windows. That will really help whenever we get freezing rain. No more chipping away at the windshield. He never did find his gloves.               I did a good deed for the day. Two young teen boys came to our door with snow shovels in hand. Three inches of snow and they shut the schools down in Hamilton and the surrounding area. Yeh, all you in Canada can laugh. I was surprised, too, in a way. I lived in Canada for four years and saw how they handle the snow problem. They're used to it so they are prepared to the hilt to get to the streets and start scraping. Gee, even after 12 inches of snow, they didn't shut down the schools. Usually I'm a Scrooge when it comes to anyone coming to the door panhandling anything but there was something about these two youngin's that appealed to me. They were a quiet, nonassuming duo. When I asked them how much they charged, they looked embarrassed, shuffled their feet, looked down at the porch and the one nearest the door (obviously the dominant one in the pair) said, "Well, we, uh, kinda rely on whatever it is the people want to give us." I liked that response so I said, "Sure. Go ahead. Will five bucks be enough?" They looked at each other and instantly beamed with surprise that someone was going to let them shovel their sidewalks for money. That made my day and probably theirs, too. I upped the ante to $8.00 after scrounging around for some change. It's a moot point because all this snow will melt off on Saturday but...what the hey. It saves Bill from having to go out tonight to shovel and it gave them boys some smoke money. Well, maybe. I like to think that there's going to be a few candy bars in their pockets instead. Now I'm off to Wal-Mart to buy us a snow shovel. We seemed to have somehow lost ours. Hmmm, wonder if they are a'sellin' Christmas trees over there, too?