December 24, 2006

• twenty-five precious seconds

  Today, we have twenty-five seconds more daylight than we had yesterday.  I call that progress. 

  Sunrise 10:15 AM – Sunset 3:43 PM

  A brief power outage this morning gave me a bit of anxiety about getting my Christmas sweet potato pie baked, but the power came back about twenty minutes later, giving me a little jolt of renewed appreciation for the latest version of Mozilla Firefox, which gives us the option of restoring all open windows and tabs after an unexpected interruption.  Can IE do that?  I dunno because we’ve been running Mozilla for years.

  
  
  I’m overflowing with warm fuzzies, anticipating Greyfox’s arrival tomorrow.  Yeah, Greyfox, not Santa.  They both have beards, and they both bear gifts, but the mad gleam in my soulmate’s eyes is a whole ‘nother thing than Santa’s twinkle.

  Doug is outside shoveling snow.  We’ve been getting a lot of snow lately, but a lot less than Anchorage has.  Theirs has set a new record and the city is having trouble getting all the streets plowed.

  Today’s Anchorage Daily News has a story about Papa Pilgrim’s family.  Here’s a teaser, and the ADN link <<back there^^ goes directly to the story.

  
  

  
  
  Dusk on the slope of Lazy Mountain, and a glacier wind rattled the windows of the Buckingham cabin. Jerusalem Hale, her cheeks rosy from the wood stove, hung Christmas garlands and lights along a ceiling beam. Hosanna was in the kitchen area, frosting cookies with the Buckinghams and her little sisters, Psalms and Lamb and Bethlehem.

  Their first Bible study and their home-school lessons were done for the day. Someone started singing a hymn of praise, and the others joined in, adding harmonies.

  Christmas with the Pilgrims will be different this year.

  Papa is in jail. The children have left the name “Pilgrim” behind. They have also left, for now, the remote mining camp in the Wrangell Mountains where they once fought a high-profile access battle against the National Park Service.

  Today, the 15 children of Robert Hale have found refuge outside Palmer with a Christian homesteading family who have nine children of their own.

  Accompanied by their mother, Rose, the children have settled into the Buckinghams’ cozy log home outside Palmer, where eight girls share a bedroom of neatly made bunks and hang their thrift store clothes outdoors on the porch. The boys bunk together, Buckinghams and Hales, in two cramped basement rooms down a stairway choked with overcoats and coveralls.

  The two families have drawn names for a modest gift exchange on Christmas Day.

  It was never that way in the Wrangells, where Papa Pilgrim banned toys and dolls as idolatry.

  “People sometimes sent us presents,” recalled another daughter, Elishaba. “We saw them when they arrived, only we never found out what happened to them.”

  There were no schoolbooks in the Wrangells, no books at all except the Bible. Only the three oldest children ever learned to read.

  More:
  Anchorage Daily News

  • 4:22 pm
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