My office reconfigured.How many times have I said that historically I'm the next-to-last woman in the world to acquire, utilize, and fully appreciate new technology?

I don't know. Let's just go with a bunch.

Make that a whole bunch.

For example, we didn't own a microwave oven until ... I think it was 1992, but I'm not sure. At any rate, it didn't take me long to fully appreciate that particular bit of business.

Got my third and latest one last Saturday, as a matter of fact, because ours blew up that morning.

Relax! No leftovers were harmed in the incident.

Another thing I've oft been heard to remark is that my wonderful children have taught me far more than I have taught them.

For example, TG and I frequently call on the kids (the younger two are even better than the older two) to help with a computer application, or with the installation and operation of peripherals such as scanners, printers, and the occasional strobe light.

(Not only do they know considerably more than we do about these things, but their eyesight is better.)

"Mom, you've got to hear this."

On Christmas Day I learned that TG and the kids had been conspiring for weeks to buy me a new computer. An iMac.

(Sweet machine. Makes my seven-year-old slow-boat-to-nowhere Dell look like the long lost relative of a desktop PC so extinct, geriatric dinosaurs would laugh it to scorn.)

To say I was overcome when I saw the gift is the understatement of the last twelve months.

It was a moment.

But as much as I will cherish the memory of my family's faces when they saw my face when I saw my new iMac on Christmas, I will remember the night before.

On Christmas Eve we were all snug and warm at home together, eating delicious food and telling jokes and laughing and kidding one another, and marveling at the great colorful mound of gifts beneath our twinkling tree.

As usual, throughout the evening each of the kids was fiddling with one electronic gizmo or other.

If it's not an iPod it's an iTouch. If neither of those, it's a webcam or a GPS device or a fancy laptop or a tricked-out cell phone.

(The only one of the abovementioned items that I personally own is an ordinary cell phone. Forget texting; I don't even like to talk on the thing.)

Okay, okay ... I have a Nikon Coolpix L20 digital camera, also courtesy of my children.

But I digress.

On Christmas Eve, daughter Audrey approached me, proffering a set of iPod earbuds. "Mom, you've got to hear this," she told me, and hooked me up, telling me to close my eyes.

This is the song she played for me: Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni singing the aria O Soave Fanciulla from Puccini's La Boheme.

If you listen, please listen to the very end. You won't be sorry.

Breathtaking.

Of all the things I am grateful for when it comes to my children, I am so glad they have both the desire and the capacity to experience and appreciate beauty, and culture, and near-perfect music, and new technology.

Oh ... and my cooking.

Thanks, kids ... iLove you all.

And not only for the iMac.

Melly's Tree.When grandbabies have birthdays, you show up if at all possible.

Since Melanie lives in Lenoir, North Carolina -- less than a three-hour drive from Columbia -- and she was all set to turn five on December 21st, last weekend the family converged on daughter Stephanie's house to properly fete the little darling.

Daughter Audrey drove to Stephanie's from Knoxville on Thursday after work. Daughter Erica and I planned to set out on Friday at noon, after she worked a half day.

TG would meet us there, as he was working in Hickory. Andrew was still on duty at Offutt AFB in Omaha; his travel plans would land him in Columbia late on Saturday and sadly he wouldn't be with us this time.

But on Thursday night, everything changed.

That's when, thanks to Weather dot com, we learned that most of Western North Carolina was under a winter storm warning and expecting many inches of snow.

The snow was due to arrive on Friday at lunchtime. If Erica and I departed Columbia at noon as planned, we would drive into the teeth of the storm.

Not good.

Allissa Observes.

Instead, we sortied at nine thirty Thursday night and, after running a few errands both here and there, arrived on Stephanie's doorstep at one o'clock in the morning.

Snowflakes began their graceful descent as we were chatting over coffee seven hours later.

The snow sheeted down until nearly eleven o'clock that night. Late in the day, millions of tinkling ice crystals began pummeling the pristine landscape.

Nine inches of the sparkling white fantasy material would accumulate before it was over.

That may be a mere dusting to folks who reside above the sweet tea line, but in the Carolinas, it's a blizzard.

TG blew in just after lunch, as main arteries transformed into anxious parking lots and secondary routes became heartstopping public luges.

There was happy news: Andrew was even then in the air, bound for Atlanta, where he would catch a flight to Charlotte in hopes of joining us. Having finished up at Offutt early on Friday, avuncular devotion -- and a fondness for birthday cake -- had motivated last-minute changes in his travel plans.

Snowbound Sisters.

Except, even before he landed in Atlanta, his connecting flight to Charlotte was canceled.

He was aggravated and disappointed until his girlfriend, Nicole -- at home with her parents in Hoschton, Georgia -- offered to fetch him. She and her mother braved a mad snarl of rain-stormy Christmas Friday traffic to save Andrew from spending the night on a bench (or the floor) at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Meanwhile, in Lenoir, we watched Christmas movies on television when we weren't watching our own white Christmas beyond the windowpanes. We baked a birthday cake, and enjoyed the grandbabies, and took lots of pictures, and were grateful for heat and light and plenty of delicious food.

TG Sweepstakes.

Son-in-law Joel, pastor of the Temple Baptist Church in Lenoir, made a visit that morning to the home of a man who had none of those things. He treated the unfortunate gentleman to a hot meal at a restaurant just before the icy, snowy roads turned treacherous.

Not everyone will spend Christmas in a warm, fragrant house, surrounded by loving family members and twinkling lights and gifts and music and laughter and feasting.

Not everyone will spend Christmas privileged with the full knowledge of its meaning, and with the security of knowing the Savior of Whom all the carols sing.

Birthday Girl.

Some families -- maybe even ours -- will spend Christmas Day huddled in silent anguish around hospital beds, or in desperate grief beside coffins.

Some people will despair of life during this beautiful season.

God help us to see them, and to pray for them, and to help them when we can.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. (James 1:17)

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up freely for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? (Romans 8:32)

Merry Christmas!

Old iron.At my wedding in 1979 I gained a husband ... and an awareness of golf.

During the first winter of our marriage, I was a newly expectant mother. On arctic Midwestern Sunday afternoons, following church and dinner, TG would snooze on the couch while I sat in the big rocker, struggling to stay awake as the cultured voice-over stage-whispered live action at a televised PGA tournament.

I was mesmerized by the conspiratorial tones of the announcers as much as by images of balmy-breezed manicured fairways in parts of the world where the temperature never gets below fifty, much less below zero.

TG rarely gets a chance to play anymore, but he dearly loves the game of golf. He watches the tour ardently, and I've seen tears mist his eyes when he hears the poignant Masters music each April.

During the '80s, when we still lived in the metropolitan Chicago area, TG treated me to the Western Open in Oak Brook, Illinois.

All I remember about that day is that my outfit was cute, and we followed Morris Hatalsky around Butler National. I picked Morris because I liked his outfit (the pants were purple), and we couldn't get close to the bona fide "greats" like Toms Kite, Watson, and Weiskopf.

He may be worth a billion dollars, but Tiger Woods is an impoverished man.

Oh -- and I remember that it rained so hard, they stopped play and we had to stand under a tent with about 200 other drowned rats, with water up to our ankles. My sandals were ruined, not to mention my hair, and let's not even talk about my mood.

But I do love to livery a golf cart on a beautiful course on a day when it's neither raining, humid, nor over 80 degrees, and watch my man hit one into the trees onto the green.

The estimable Tiger Woods having brought golf painfully to the fore (I'm not sorry) in recent days, I've been thinking.

Nike, one of his mega-million-dollar sponsors, has declared it wouldn't even consider backing away from the besmirched Tiger -- calling his "infidelities" nothing but a blip on the radar.

Gross immorality, chronic adultery, and all-around degeneracy a blip on the radar?

Now, before anyone goes all righteous on me and wags "He who is without sin, cast the first stone," let me say that I am not judging Tiger.

Sin is sin is sin, and we all sin, and we all need to repent, and we all need forgiveness.

But what if, instead of cheating on his wife times a number known only to the Almighty and generally being several food-chain links below pond scum, the news had broken that Tiger Woods keeps a starving mommy dog and her two bony puppies chained in the dark bowels of his mansion, and that just for fun every night he goes down there and blisters their paw pads with the tip of a great big cigar?

Or if he'd been caught on tape driving his Nike SasQuatch 460 into the bewildered pea-sized brain of a pesky groundhog on his palatial estate?

I bet in that eventuality Nike would have dropped Tiger faster than Obama dropped Reverend Wright.

In a sponsor's eyes, it's "barely a blip" when a celebrity emotionally abuses his wife and children -- provided that his name attached to a product or sport catapults that product or sport into the economic stratosphere.

But by denying them his devotion and fidelity (and only God knows what else), Tiger has deprived his wife and kids of nourishment as surely as if he'd padlocked the pantry in his 3,000-square-foot kitchen.

And if Mrs. Woods is a normal woman (no comment), I believe she would prefer the occasional cigar burn to the pain she has felt in her marriage.

As long as the cigar burns did not mar her beautiful ex-model face.

He may be worth a billion dollars, but Tiger Woods is an impoverished man. I don't feel sorry for him or Elin (well, maybe a little bit for Elin) -- they willingly made their choices -- but my heart aches for Samantha and Charlie.

They will always be rich but they will never have a whole and happy family.

They never had a dad who loved their mom enough to be faithful to the vows he took.

That old saying, that the greatest thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother?

It's true.

Andrew. Photo Jennifer Weber 2008Our son, Andrew, is flying to Nebraska on December 14th. For a week he will be the guest of Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, in connection with his duties in the Tennessee Air National Guard.

He's been home for a few days on Christmas break from Bible college, and we've been having a good time.

On Thursday evening he treated us to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants.

This morning he sang Zion's Hill in church, and our pastor asked him to preach for the evening service.

The title of his message was Five Things God Cannot Do.*

It was good.

Tonight as he was making last-minute preparations to catch his flight in the morning, he came to me with a dilemma.

Since he serves in a church while he's in Omaha (he spent six weeks there last summer), he needs a suit because that's what he wears to church. But a suit involves an overcoat, and he also wanted to pack his heavy Carhartt work coat for off hours spent in mufti, and he's required to wear Air Force-issued outerwear when in uniform.

He'll be wearing one coat and packing two more.

I counted three bulky coats, and so did he, and he didn't like that number -- even though, being a member of the military, the airlines' per-bag charge for luggage does not apply to him. In other words, there's no particular need to pack light.

His solution: reduce the number by leaving his dress overcoat at home, packing the other two coats, and flying into Omaha tomorrow afternoon wearing only a thin suit.

(He wants to travel in the suit -- with an open-collared dress shirt -- so that it won't get unduly wrinkled in his suitcase.)

"And I'll just be walking outside, like, to my car," he rationalized.

"Andrew. It's very cold in Omaha right now," I said. "What if you break down or something?

Andrew looked at me as though tutu-clad lobsters were executing perfect pirouettes on top of my head.

I forgot. The young never encounter unplanned emergencies; flat tires and broken water hoses -- not to mention fender benders or wipeouts on black ice -- only happen to old fogies.

TG spoke up. "Why don't you go look at the weather forecast on the Internet," he suggested.

Andrew and I trooped into the office to do just that.

High in Omaha for Monday: fourteen. Low: minus four.

Andrew paled. "I think I'll buy me some thermal underwear as soon as I get there," he thought out loud.

He'll be wearing one coat and packing two more.

God bless our troops! And keep them warm (or cool, as the case may be), and safe. Above all, safe.

* Lie; fail; remember our forgiven sin; bless disobedience; accept any other way of salvation besides His Son, Jesus Christ.

Winter roses.I didn't plant it.

Nor did I feed, water, or prune it -- or, for that matter, pay any attention to it whatsoever.

I have ignored it in spring, summer, fall, and winter ... for years.

It's just there -- along with several others very much like it except for their current uncompromising dormancy -- growing amidst a bed of evergreen groundcover in my front yard.

It is a rose bush, and right now it is in bloom with a fully opened pure white flower, a little bud just unfurling its creamy petals and adorned with its delicate spiky collar, and an even tinier, tighter bud still secluded in its pointy green pod.

Dead oak leaves are trapped within its prickly infrastructure, impaled on needle-sharp thorns.

The temperature today struggled to get above 44 degrees Fahrenheit.

Less than two weeks remain before the Big Day.

As I snapped these photos, it began to rain, and soon after that, grainy gray light briefly preceded suburban December darkness.

Tonight the roses have no choice but to shiver in an inky-black 35-degree ambience punctuated by more cold rain.

For all their pale incongruity against the drab winter landscape, they appear fresh, relaxed, and secure. They are a delight and a privilege to behold.

I've made a dent in my shopping so shallow, it's not even worth mentioning. Less than two weeks remain before the Big Day. There's not enough money, and there are other pressures as well.

Many people are suffering, not nearly as fortunate as I.

But it's Christmastime, and there are roses.

Patient, beautiful, simple, elegant, trusting, undemanding roses.

At least for today.

The vases were originally bought for our daughter's wedding in 2001, which sort of had a squarish theme.

Stephanie's engagement diamond is a square (princess) cut. Her invitations were large vellum squares. Her tiara design contained squares.

Her wedding cake tiers were -- wait for it, why don't you, if only to humor me -- square.

She and Joel even spent part of their honeymoon at the Rittenhouse Hotel on Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square.

I could go on and on.

The vases were part of the reception decor. Although extremely inexpensive (think dollar store kitsch), they sparkled beguilingly in candlelight.

Use what you have.

Now, years later, they've been hauled off the back of a dark storage shelf and polished to a brilliant shine in the damp soapy recesses of our dishwasher.

One holds Pearson's Mint Patties and the other holds Hershey's Almond Kisses ... all wrapped in Christmas red and green.

My twin candy towers remind me that life is as sweet as it is brief, and that Christmas is a beautifully shining time of year.

Also that I am lazy when it comes to cleaning and decorating.

Be that as it may, it's not a time to be sad and wistful for all we've lost, but to be happy and grateful for all we've got.

They also remind me of a fine piece of advice my mother once gave me regarding homemaking and decorating: "Use what you have."

I think the leftover wedding reception vases are happy to be glistening on a coffee table beside the twinkling tree and filled with Christmas goodies.

After all, it's so much better to be useful than to be forgotten.

They may remain and be filled with Valentine hearts after the full tide of festive Christmas decorations has inevitably ebbed. That would be lovely; don't you agree?

Merry Christmas!

She wrote my name!

Especially liberals.

Every book she writes is an instant bestseller.  She never fails to make an impression no matter what the occasion, medium, adversary, or cause.

Thank God for Ann Coulter.  If we didn't have her, we'd have to make her up ... and I'm not sure that would be so easy.

I had the privilege of hearing Ann speak in person last October. She was kind enough to sign my copy of Treason afterwards -- a singularly happy moment for me.

On December 8th Ann turned 48.  I hope it was a very enjoyable day for her, and that she'll have libs foaming at the mouth for many years to come.

She's a certifiable brainiac. Long may she wave.

If you're not in the habit of reading Ann's weekly column, there's no time like the present to begin. To help you find your way, here's a handy link.

But until you become a fan of Ann (or unless you don't), here are a few great Coulter quotes to tide you over:

Democrats couldn't care less if people in Indiana hate them. But if Europeans curl their lips, liberals can't look at themselves in the mirror.

If John Kerry had a dollar for every time he bragged about serving in Vietnam - oh wait, he does.

Liberal soccer moms are precisely as likely to receive anthrax in the mail as to develop a capacity for linear thinking.

Liberals are stalwart defenders of civil liberties - provided we're only talking about criminals.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

While the form of treachery varies slightly from case to case, liberals always manage to take the position that most undermines American security.

Yeah. She's a certifiable brainiac. God bless her and long may she wave.

Antebellum Grandeur.When the wet white stuff on the ground is not snow but rain-soaked leftover cotton from the harvest, you know you're in Dixie.

When you barely need a sweater for the quasi-chilly early mornings and late evenings, but can go comfortably bare-armed throughout the rest of the day even though it's nearly Christmas, you know you're in Dixie.

When there's a turkey in the oven and cranberry sauce on the table and yet flowers are blooming riotously everywhere you look, you know you're in Dixie.

And "charming" doesn't even begin to describe it.

This year we gathered for Thanksgiving at the beautiful Civil War-era house shared by our nephew, Dan, his lovely wife, Chelsey, and their four children.

One dog and four cats round out the gang. The puppy's name is Jenna but I didn't catch any of the (two indoor and two outdoor) cats' names. I just know that they seem to be everywhere at once. And that they're quick. And constantly tormented by kids.

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

We were enjoying perfect weather in South Carolina last week, which added to the treat of spending the holiday in Hartsville, a mere 80-minute drive from our home in Columbia.

The drive included a swing by Pearl Fryar's place to take a quick peek at his astounding topiary gardens. If you've never seen or heard of Pearl, you should click here and consider buying the DVD A Man Named Pearl.

You won't believe your eyes.

We almost couldn't believe ours when we first saw the antebellum manse recently acquired by our nephew's family. The one-story house sits on four acres surrounded by cotton fields, grape arbors, and more mature camellia bushes than I would have thought existed in all of Darlington County.

TG's parents were there from Ohio. Also present were TG's only brother and our sister-in-law, who live in the south ... of Michigan. Two of their four children, two daughters-in-law, and six of their fourteen grandchildren were there too. Three of our four kids were with us, and our son-in-law, and both of our granddaughters.

Thornton Wilder believed that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

As you can see from the pictures, our hearts were conscious of (and grateful for) our treasures on Thanksgiving. It was the kind of day when you hear posterity calling, and it knows you by name. It was a delightful, never-to-be-forgotten day in Dixie.

Family members may click here to see the entire album and purchase prints.