I hope Star Eagle readers enjoyed a good Christmas and welcomed the new year with open arms. The year of 2020 was a long one.
This year’s Christmas was a bit of an odd one. It was just immediate family for us this time around. But that wasn’t really a bad thing. It was a warm welcome to get together with just my siblings. The three of us don’t see each together very often. It felt like a distant memory, the three of us getting together, from our childhood.
I think this may mirror Bob’s running of words columns as I have random thoughts to talk about.
First I would like to thank Jerry Olson for calling and leaving a wonderful message on our answering machine. It was a very kind message, thanking us for including an article about the COVID-19 vaccine arriving in Rochester. I have a friend, who is a doctor for Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and he was the one who informed me about the vaccine arriving and it gave me the idea to run something covering the arrival. I make a point to put something in the paper roughly every other week about COVID-19.
Sharon Eckart made the point to me a long time ago that some people in our community rely on our paper for their main source of news. I read a lot of other news sources, so the thought kind of escaped me that not everyone else reads about certain news topics in other places. That said, not to go too much into detail, but the message on our machine mentioned that the local Rochester paper had no mention of the COVID-19 vaccine coming to Rochester. Maybe that paper mentioned it some other time, but I thought this was a good example of a Star Eagle reader consuming a news story they might not have otherwise read somewhere else.
My brother gifted me a new keyboard for Christmas this year. It was one of my favorite gifts, well, ever. It was very thoughtful of him.
Another great gift I received was a hand crocheted dice bag/pouch. I am kind of a big nerd in many respects. I will not bore you with the details of those games, other than to mention that they require dice. I have an assortment of different ways to transport my dice, but this new bag is now by far the most unique way for me to transport my dice. It was a very thoughtful gift.
Christmas is about more than gift giving. I do, however, enjoy the way a person can express themselves through gift giving. These two gifts had a lot of thought put into them, and I think that is what Christmas is about. Showing people who are important to you that you care about them is something special, and gift giving is just one more way a person can show how they are important to you.