So.  We have the totally best Christmas programming ever for you this year!  I wish I could tell you that Hollywood had done a really superb family film for the holidays, but, as you probably know, I can’t.  Because they didn’t.  We do have some fun films for you, though.  We have Grudge Match, with DeNiro and Stallone and that looks honestly funny, but not something wee ones would care to see.  We have The Hobbit, again, a great film but not one for small children.  Anchorman 2, which I can’t wait to see, is always welcome in my house, but not if the kids are still awake.  And finally, Saving Mr. Banks, which Disney finally agreed to let us show, (thank you, Jeffrey, a thousand times!) looks to be a wonderful film, but once again, not one the  tiniest tots would understand.

     So we put our collective Dietrich heads together and decided that we would offer some morning movies, at a nominal price, that entire families might enjoy.  You know, the kind you really can bring kids to.  So, on the days between Christmas and the New Year, we are showing Miracle on 3th Street, Elf and Annie.  They are morning shows priced much less expensively than our regular movies and, yes, they are all in DVD, but you know that’s not the same as seeing them in the theater.  Plus, every morning during that week we will be showing A Christmas Candle, for those who didn’t get to see it for a variety of reasons but would still like to.  We so hope that between the first-run releases we will be showing and the extra films we have brought in, that we will have given you every possible choice to come to the movies with your families and have a pop-corny good time!

     Still in Minneapolis, having such a wonderful time!  Shannon and I haven’t stopped chattering away since I arrived!  It’s quite a beautiful set of cities (she actually lives in St. Paul), very  ethnically mixed which gives it color and style.  I think if I were going to comment on the most outstanding thing about the Twin Cities, however, it would be the weather.  It is totally interesting!  It is the coldest place I have ever been in, and by cold I do mean cold!

     Even an inch or two of snow here can create problems, because it simply doesn’t melt.  Snow upon snow upon snow, as the old carol goes.  When the average temperature hovers around zero the outdoors becomes both threatening and exquisite.  They have snowflakes that are completely different – they appear to be tiny stars falling from the heavens. (Their actual name is Fernlike Stellar Dendrite – how’s that for  cool????)

     Yesterday we left the city to get a Christmas tree.  Shannon had never been to the tree farm and we had no idea what to expect.  So we drove under moonlit skies, snowy fields lined with great towering pines gliding by as we traveled on.   The roads were slick from newly fallen snow, (point of interest: rock salt doesn’t work unless the temperature is above fifteen degrees, and the temp. here had been hovering in the low teens and single digits for a couple of days).  And then, in this Currier and Ives scene of fields and trees and snow, the tree farm appeared.  Part of The Nature Conservancy, the trees  gave mute  testimony to the constancy of nature and the beauty of the season.  Small white lights lit the young evergreens as warm cider bubbled on the stove.  “Merry Christmas!” the owner said as he came out smiling and welcoming us to his small piece of  perfection. “Nice and cold,” he said, “very Christmassy.”

     A woman came out of the shop and saw us smiling at the landscape surrounding us.  “Some,” she said seriously, “have face-painting and clowns and such.  We don’t do any of that.  We just do the trees.  It’s enough.”

     Bless you all, dear friends, and may you have the loveliest Christmas ever!  And may you be surrounded by family and friends, by love and laughter and the joy of just being alive in God’s beautiful world!  And may this years’ tree be the best ever! For, as the lady said, “it’s enough.”

     See you at the Dietrich.