Loose Leaf Notes

1. You know that scene from A Christmas Carol when Scrooge wakes up with a change of heart after having been visited by the ghosts throughout the night? It’s Christmas morning and he goes to the window to shout down to a little boy and ask what day it is and whether the prize turkey is still hanging in the butcher’s window.   Well, that’s how I feel when I hear my husband Joe’s truck pull up and I fling open my bedroom window, look down and see that he brought us home a deer.

2. A mixed message? Joe has a camouflage hunting cap with the word “Swag” spelled out on the front.

3. Driving home from Roanoke Friday night, I was hoping to stop to buy some Kahlua. I passed a Packaging Store and was about to pull in when I remembered that the Package Store (aka as the packy) is what we call liquor stores in Massachusetts and in Virginia a Packaging Store is where they sell actual packaging material.

4. Do you know your ABCs? In Virginia those letters stand for Alcohol Beverage Control and we have the first ever ABC store in Floyd now.

5. Speaking of windows, I call the photo above of Jeanie O’Neill’s downtown Floyd boutique that was in the Floyd Press this week, “You don’t need to go to the city to see great Christmas window displays.”

6. Whenever it’s Christmas I try to wear red but usually end up changing back to colors I’m more comfortable in.  I guess I like seeing red more than wearing it and I have enough red in my last name.

7. The photo to the right is one of me from 1970 that I recently came across while in my mother’s house in Massachusetts.  It was taken on the last Christmas that I ever spent in my childhood home.  I moved into my own apartment soon after and just before the town took our house through eminent domain (see HERE) to build a sewage plant on our land. I was working at a hip boutique in Boston at the time where I sometimes posed as a live mannequin in the window. A woman I met then who only wore purple inspired me to try the same.  I even wallpapered my room with purple tissue paper from the boutique.

8.   “How can we be Irish with a name like Redman?” I remember asking when I was a girl.  Our name almost sounded Jewish to me, like the Goldmans and Shumans at school.  Redman is not our true name–and the oral history of it goes like this:  My father’s mother was born in Ireland and so was his father’s mother.  But his father’s father, Oscar Lundquist/a.k.a. Charles Redman, was born in Sweden.  Oscar was the black sheep of the family and at the age of 17 he stowed away on ship to America.  When a ship’s yachtsman named Charles Redman died, he took over Charles’s job, as well as his name and was able to enter the country without trouble.  Our Irish names, Bergin, Dineen, and Murray, were all carried by the women.” – From A.K.A Redman/ The Jim an Dan Stories

9. We have a song about a White Christmas, a Blue Christmas and a Red-nosed Reindeer.

10. I took the picture to the left in the fall of 2007 and titled it “Red on Red Collison.”

11. Red is important in feng shu, the Chinese art of placement.  It’s the Chinese color for luck and happiness, the marriage color in India, and the symbolic color of love and romance, courage and passion in the West.   In the system of feng shu, it’s believed that every room needs a touch of clear, pure red.  It’s suggested that you tie a red ribbon over items to activate good luck and that you put red flowers in a vase in the living room or dining room to draw positive attention.

12. A red carpet or a magic one?

13.  (Below) A Floyd “Guess Who?”

_______Thirteen Thursday