Dear Santa --

I know this is late -- I was distracted by the ice storm and subsequent snow -- but since I'm asking for miracles, not package delivery, maybe that's all right.

If you have up your sleeve for me a line on the Matthews-Berkeley edition of the Diary of Samuel Pepys, offered at a knockdown price by an academic widow who can't wait to get rid of all those books so she can have a sewing room for her quilting club -- if you really have arranged this, please disregard the rest of this letter. I promise I'll give more money than I can afford to Rosie's Place, or that shelter in Cambridge for homeless women and children that our church activists have been beating the drums for.

If not -- I'm afraid this will sound ungrateful. I don't mean it that way. It's just that from principle and long habit, I'm not big on wanting things. Sure, I could use a food mill, even though the large ones don't seem to exist any more and the small ones cost $100. I'll probably get around to springing for one one of these weeks, hopefully before all those apples in the woodshed begin to soften and develop spots. But the food mill can easily retreat to the back burner where such things live in my life. I certainly don't need for you to provide it.

What I would like you to do for me is this: Please take whatever you have in mind for me and apply it to someone else's account. Find a single mother in failing health with a little kid or two and an ex-husband who's making all the trouble for her that he can. Give her a lead on a job that she can live on, that won't demand her whole life in exchange. A lead on an affordable but decent place to live would be nice, too. A single mothers' commune would be ideal -- I stumbled on one or two such things in the early 1980s, so they may still exist. (While you're at it, you might provide a high-paying job for the ex, in Alaska, maybe, unless he's really seeing the kids when he's supposed to. If he's being even that much use, distract him with the girl of his dreams instead.)

Please don't try to solve this mother's problems by sending her romance and a second husband, unless there's no alternative. Romance fed by desperation so often winds up out of the frying pan back into the divorce court, with another set of kids in tow.

That's all for now. I'll go back to looking around on line for that Diary. I hope you had a very merry Christmas yourself.

Your old friend,


Aunt Stanbury