Christmas

Since high school, Chris Cunningham and John Hermanson of Storyhill have been mining the synergistic power of harmony singing and the scenic imagery of Montana to forge their memorable, acoustic guitar-based songs. On an auspicious 2020 winter solstice, during the great confluence of Jupiter and Saturn, they chatted with Musician's Spotlight host John Floridis about their new holiday album.

Fir trees, decorated and lighted, are such a fixture of American homes at Christmas that it's difficult for us to imagine that it was not always so. But on a time scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the beginning of life on earth, the Christmas tree tradition begins somewhere around 9.999999999.

Emily Dickinson's Black Cake

Greg Patent writes:

The poet Emily Dickinson prided herself on her skill as a cook, and she was extremely proud of her black cake. This is a scaled-down version of her recipe, which was quadruple this one, and baked in a milk pail.

To Toby Thompson, the Christmas spirit is really just the warmth of community, something we can find any time of year.

Going for a hike at this time of year just isn’t the same for a botanist. The flowers are dead and all the leaves have fallen. Not much material for a field note out there. But here in my kitchen there are lots of interesting and colorful members of the vegetable kingdom because I’m preparing my holiday dinner.

Hi!  I’m Dr. Jamison Starbuck, a naturopathic family physician.  I’m here today to talk about two plants that I always think about during the Christmas season.

I bet most of you know about the Three Kings.  The Christmas story talks about them, three Wise Men who made a long journey riding through days and nights from the Far East to bring gifts to the baby Jesus in the manger.

Do you remember what the three gifts were?

They were gold, frankincense and myrrh.