After shopping Christmas Eve-day, when it had been snowing and raining, so rather sloppy, along with wind, I visited neighbours and their children/grandchildren for their big dinner and gifting.

They gave me a pail (like a kid's sandpail), " ... for picking my raspberries ....", as I've been talking of planting raspberries for two or three years. Also some candy, an LED flashlight ... that had a level ... and a six-sided hole just under the light: then we found slot and Phillips screwdriver heads in the cap on the other end.

There was a tuque (which they said that I am to carry in the car, in case of getting storm-stayed). And a red and green baseball cap, with "Merry Christmas" embroidered above the peak. I wore it (with cap I'd worn on arrival) when I left to go to Christmas Communion ...

... and when I got home, there was a cold, strong wind like in a wind-tunnel, between the garage and the house ... that lifted my "Merry Christmas" hat off of my head in a hurry!

I took the parcels into the house, then took the flashlight (which throws quite a strong light) out to the field to walk back and forth in the snow, looking for the hat ... expecting it to be half a mile away by that time, and a mile away by morning. I thought that I'd alert the sod farmers, who might find it sometime next summer, so bedraggled that I couldn't wear it (except to the garden).

No dice.

In the morning, while looking out of the kitchen window, I thought that I saw a dark object in one of the tractor tracks that my landlord had left while pushing snow along the lane and yard - twice on Tues. and Wed. It was the hat ... and the night before, when it blew into the track, there was water there, which had changed characteristics in the meantime, such that it was unwilling to have me lift the hat!

En route to the barn to get a shovel, I stepped on a sloping piece of ice in the tractor track ... and promptly felldown on my ass!

After chopping out the hat, I set it on the concrete pad outside the back door. As there'd been water on the bottom ... when I went out to take it with me to Christmas supper later ... it was frozen to the concrete ... requiring more shovel work!

I took it in to show the neighbours ... and we all had a good laugh over the condition of the hat, jauntily carrying a couple of chunks of ice! They had to take a couple of pictures of it, of course!

There was a chunk of snow pushed up by the snow plough near my friend's place, and about 6" of unshovelled snow on the parking place, which I'd driven through when it was mushy, the day before, and I drove in there again ... now with the snow frozen.

When I left the driver's door to go around back to open the hatch, where I'd placed the ice-loaded hat, there was a sheet of ice on the sidewalk ... and my feet went out from under me, as quick as a flash ...with me falling heavily, square on my back, knocking the wind out of me!

A young man delivering flyers to mail boxes checked to see that I was all right ... and I was (apart from damage to my dignity).

My friend the carny guy got a kick out of the ice-encrusted hat, as well ... and later he knocked the ice off and hung it on the fan to dry.

I'm beginning to wonder whether that hat is jinxed (or me, when I'm near it)!

I'm hoping that the hat won't be associated with any more trouble!

ole joyful