Opinion

Christmas traditions vary from household to household.

Growing up, Santa delivered his gifts directly to our bedroom ... and he never wrapped.

When my sisters and I would leap out of bed in the dead of night, it was like a toy store exploded in our bedrooms.

My parents worked long hours, maintained a Christmas Club account and sacrificed year round for the joy that the holiday brings.

Of course as kids, we had little appreciation of their efforts. We were consumed by our greed.

I usually don’t comment on a lot of things and I enjoy the The LaRue County Herald News. But the article on Mr. (Mac) Trumbo was a bit unfair.

Maybe we should take another look at Mr. Trumbo, the one most of you know. This is a man that would not think twice about stopping to help someone with car trouble, who would not think anything of it to help someone that didn’t have enough to feed their family, who greets people in the store with a great smile and you know that he actually does care. He is a man that hates to see someone sad and tries to make you smile.

The title? That’s a quote from one of my favorite short stories – “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” by Stephen King.

Re-reading that story, combined with something I saw at the side of the road brought back a few memories.

It was a pair of tire tracks in the ditch beside the intersection of Old E’town Road and Phillips Lane. Someone did some fancy driving to avoid rear-ending another vehicle.

And that reminded me of my dad.

With the winter months upon us, many people will be confronted with difficult choices such as paying for food and paying for utilities or heating fuel. More than 49 million Americans are food insecure; meaning they lack consistent access to enough food at some point during the year.

Feeding America, Kentucky’s Heartland, a member of Feeding America, has been serving Central Kentucky for 27 years, helping 63,000 people every year.

I’m sure everyone is aware that some people want to remove God from our lives. They want to remove “under God,” from the pledge, remove the Ten Commandments, have no prayer in school and the list goes on.

Why are we letting these people take away what this nation was founded under? We put contact information in the paper regularly so you can write to the politicians and tell them what you think. If these politicians that we elected don’t work for “we the people” then “we the people” need to remove them.

I’ve just returned to work after taking a few weeks vacation. I needed some quiet time as the date Nov. 2 loomed. This was the one-year anniversary of the death of my 22-year-old son and if I could have crawled in a cave somewhere and avoided any pain associated with that date, that would have been fine with me.

But that isn’t the way it works.

If you try to hide from it, it waits for a chance to jump out and knock you down when you’re not expecting it.

I may be dating myself in age, but some of the earliest memories I have of Presidents and First Families were the Fords and Carters. It seems of the two, I especially recall President Jimmy Carter, his wife Rosalynn, and daughter Amy. I remember watching them on television, hearing his speeches and watching them as a family. Even back then President Carter and the First Lady seemed very genuine and humble.

Sincerity and enthusiasm are an irresistible combination.

Standing in the entry lobby at the Lincoln Museum on Friday, a series of speakers celebrated the selection one week earlier of U.S. 31E and U.S. 150 from Hodgenville to Danville as a National Scenic Byway.

The designation reaffirms our local heritage, including the connection to Abraham Lincoln. In fact, the selected section of roadway will be known as the Lincoln Heritage Highway.

Veterans Day was originally called Armistice Day and was originally set as a U.S. legal holiday to honor the end of World War I. In 1954, the name Armistice was replaced with the word Veterans. Over the years politicians argued as to when it should be held until finally in 1968, President Gerald R. Ford singed a law to return the annual observance of Veterans Day to the original date of Nov. 11 beginning in 1978.

If you have never had any military ties, it’s probably hard for you to understand the importance of honoring these men and women.