Jill, that is so precious....Amber sure has grown and is just as pretty as ever. Thanks for sharing these special photos with us and I hope you and your family have a wonderful Christmas. Jan

Well, I don't want to speak badly of my family, friends, coworkers, or Santa Claus, but I didn't get a new compost bin, any new magazine subscriptions (except for the Organic Gardening subscription that I can't get them to cancel in spite of my numerous requests as a result of their increase in price), gift certificates to any catalogs or gardening stores, set of hand trucks, rolls of green velcro, packages of rooting hormone, expensive seed catalogs, home-raked pine straw, compost or manure, and I certainly didn't get a truck. However, one night I arrived home from work to find a very large bag of freshly collected pecans hanging on the gate. I live in a neighborhood where you wouldn't really expect a gift bag to still be there if someone left it outside your house, so this little surprise was doubly exciting. It came from a fellow gardener in our new community garden. And then a couple of days after Christmas I got a late present in the mail from my sons. It was a book, The FeederWatcher's Guide to Bird Feeding, which has turned out to be a very lovely book that has given me all sorts of new ideas about attracting birds to my yard. I guess I vaguely, on some level, knew that someone was counting birds, but apparently every year on certain days the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and several other major groups of bird lovers like the Audubon Society and others coordinate their efforts with birdwatchers and birdfeeders all over the continent to identify and count birds. This book draws from the personal experience of all those people to provide firsthand advice about the best practices of birdfeeding. I have learned so much in such a short time by reading this book, and even just by looking at the pictures I've gotten so many ideas. (To tell the truth, looking at some of the pictures makes me feel sort of stupid that I didn't think of some of those ideas myself. Some of the birdfeeder plans seem so darned obvious!) Anyway, immediately after reading this book, I went out into my neighborhood and started collecting discarded Christmas trees (I'm up to 7 now - of course IF I HAD A TRUCK I could have many more) and leaned them against the trunks of my oak and sweetgum and dogwood trees because I didn't have any conifers in my yard and the book said most birds really love conifers. Would you believe that within a couple of hours my yard was filled with birds, including the first woodpeckers I've seen this season - three of them at once? It was amazing. That convinced me I needed to plant some conifers, so I went shopping at Habersham Gardens, where much to my surprise they were having their annual Boxing Day sale which I never knew about before now - everything in the store was on sale, some things up to 75 percent off, and I got some incredible deals including two beautiful shrubs, a juniper salicicola 'Brodie' and a cypress "laredo cadelabra' both of which are supposed to be columnar in habit which is necessary for my small yard. The birds seem to like them already. I also went up to Hastings where they were having a good sale and found a very pretty little eucalyptus whose tag was half broken off but which I think I have finally been able to identify as eucalyptus gunnii. The birds have been landing on it, too, although it's still in its pot as I haven't decided yet whether it's ok to dig up my entire front yard to make an herb garden with this little tree as its centerpiece (I realize it won't remain "little" for long unless I keep cutting it back). And I splurged on a Black Beauty elderberry - also for the birds, I keep telling myself. And I found lots of cabbage and cauliflower and broccoli and rutabaga plants, all of which seemed still to be viable, for pennies, for our community garden, as well as a really healthy-looking thornless blackberry bush for the same place. In any event, I feel like the sale prices I found at Habersham and Hastings were wonderful Christmas presents, and the book my sons sent was a great gardening gift. So although Santa didn't leave me exactly what I wanted, it was still a very good Christmas.

James, Glad to hear my seeds arrived, sorry to hear about your neighbor/computer troubles!! Lori

Awwwwwwww that Grant is the handsomest Santa I've ever seen! And next year Santa will have a little elf to help him! I agree with Eliza Ann, you know how you don't think a good thing can improve with age, but by golly our Grant does! He's too sweet for words...will you be making Christmas cards this year with your Santa Stephanie?