It’s Christmas Eve. The gifts have all been purchased and wrapped, the house is relatively clean (enough for Santa Claus), and we have enough food for a casual Christmas dinner. The kids and I will take a few gifts out to friends today. Tonight, we’ll attend a candlelight service and drive around to look at the house lights. I’ll probably watch It's A Wonderful Life, and maybe I’ll even get the kids interested this year (but I won’t count on it). Getting them to sleep tonight will be a chore as it always is. I hope you are enjoying a relaxing holiday with family and friends. For a whole slew of Christmas videos, links, and full-length films, check the Christmas posts at Miss C Recommends. Here, I’ve got just a few lighthearted links and a great story for you today. Merry Christmas, everyone!

The Night Before Christmas

It’s an Edison film from 1905! Here's the IMDb link. (Thanks, Wilford!)

Make a Christmas ecard with a personalized animated message on your Christmas tree! (via Dump Trumpet)

Peter’s Holiday Poem for his Blogging Friends.

Ashland University always has beautiful interactive Christmas ecards.

Auggie Wren's Christmas Story. I certainly enjoyed this one. (via Metafilter)

The computers at Whole Foods in West Hartford, Connecticut went down during a snowstorm with plenty of customers waiting in line. What did they do? They gave the food away free.

A modern-day Good Samaritan.

THE POLAR EXPRESS

Mangesh Hattikudur, co-founder of mental_floss magazine (and blog), included this story in the mental_floss newsletter a couple of weeks ago. 

I figured I’d share a little story that reminds me of why I love the holidays. Last year around this time, my 4-year old niece was going through chemo for leukemia. She was having a rough time. She’d lost her hair, and while she was all smiles, she was too weak and sick to go to school, and didn’t have much interaction with other kids. Plus, like other children in the same condition, she was asked not to travel. But here’s the sweet part: a group of retired pilots arranged this big Christmas party at a New York airport, where all these young kids with leukemia were invited and told that they were finally going to go on a trip. So the kids were giddy. They and their parents were all given tickets, and herded onto a plane. Then the shutters were closed and the aircraft just taxied around while the kids sang carols and drank punch. And when they finally pulled up to a different terminal, which was decorated in snowflakes and candy canes, and filled with Christmas trees, the kids were told they’d arrived at the North Pole. When the party was over, they hopped on another plane and traveled back to New York.

I saw my niece a week later and she couldn’t stop chattering about her trip to the Arctic. Seeing Mrs. Claus, shaking hands with elves, and armed with the evidence of having been on a real live moving plane, she knew she’d traveled to Santa’s abode. And I know it made her miserable year so much better. I love the idea that something so small- driving an aircraft from one side of a runway to the other, was dreamed up into something so much more magical. I’d love to thank those pilots for organizing such a wonderful event, and bringing so many smiles to so many sick kids. I guess it just renews my faith in people when I hear that men and women are spending their spare time dreaming up events like these, and I hope you’re witnessing similar acts of goodness in your part of the globe.

You can read another account of a fantasy flight to the North Pole. And another. They do it in San Jose, California, also. And in Cleveland. The Navy is involved, too -see a video here. And here is a slideshow of images from one such flight.

You can sign up for the mental_floss newsletter at the site, and get a subscription to the magazine here.

I’ll Be Home for Christmas

Previously at Miss Cellania: It's A Wonderful Life, Christmas Treats, and Christmas at War.

Thought for today: I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.  ~Charles Dickens

humor jokes video funny Christmas holiday peace joy blessing