This time of year leads me to the archive of my mother's handwritten letters.  She loved the holidays.  It was a family gathering time, a time for giving her home-baked wares to other, and a spiritual celebration.  While thumbing through my photo box of old letters looking for something dated in December, a January 1996 envelope caught my attention because it was thicker than other envelopes.  My mother often included newspaper article clippings that she wanted to share with me or Snoopy, For Better or Worse, Hagar the Horrible comic strips.  She also signed off "drink more vodka" at the end of her love letters.  My parents didn't drink wine or beer, let alone vodka. (I don't know where they got me.)  Tucked inside this thick envelope was included a clipping "Fig- and mango-flavored vodkas seem to be the wave of the future."  In Russia, where grain has been distilled into vodka for nearly 1,000 years, a flavored vodka ---- and they do flavor vodka in Russia----- cannot, by law, be labeled vodka.  That's why there are names like Limonnaya for lemon and Pertsovka for pepper on bottles of Stolichnaya, a Russian vodka that now comes in four flavors.  Pineapple-coconut-vanilla bean and fig and mango are a couple of flavored vodkas concocted by American master chef, Erik Blauberg.  Along the margin of this article, my mother penned......."This is what we need........more vodka."  Don't know what her fascination was with vodka, but anytime I see Grey Goose, Absolut, or Smirnoff, I smile and think of my mother. 

Tonight is Station 25's Christmas dinner at the Martins Creek Community Center where we everyone brings a covered dish or two.  We baked my brownies and make a big batch of cole slaw.  It's been raining for three days and we're thankful it was not snow.  Sunday is predicted to reach mid-sixties and be sunny!  We're counting on that prediction to be true because I need to get outside and finish putting up decorations. 





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