(Roughly) Daily

Readers will be relieved to know that their Christmas and Hanukkah revels (and their immediate aftermath) will be undisturbed by intrusions from this quarter:  with this Christmas Eve missive, your correspondent is heading into his annual holiday hiatus.  Regular service will resume on or about January 2.

Prompted by reader SS, who sent along this remarkable playtime opportunity, the Titanic with iceberg inflatable slide…

source

your correspondent wandered back through the history of play– in the course of which, he found the particularly-seasonally-appropriate “The Top 50 Toys of the Last 100 Years” from Impact Lab:

click here for full infographic

As we shake our packages one last time before Christmas morning, we might recall that it was on this date in 1818 that “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” (“Silent Night”) was composed and premiered.  The poem that provides the lyrics was written two years earlier by an Austrian priest, Father Joseph Mohr; on Christmas Eve of 1818, Mohr took the verse to Franz Xaver Gruber, asking for a melody and guitar accompaniment.  The piece was performed that evening for the first time at Nikolaus-Kirche (Church of St. Nicholas) in Oberndorf, Austria.  (The English translation by which most readers probably know the carol was done in 1859 by John Freeman Young (second Bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Florida.)

click here for larger image at source