After 97 years spent lounging in Copenhagen’s Langelinie Quay, this March she was shipped some 5,100 miles away to capture the hearts and, eventually, tourist dollars of millions of Chinese visiting the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China. She would be missed, and many Danes didn’t approve of her trip, but her voyage abroad proved to be a resounding success: over the course of her six-month assignment, Denmark’s most-famous resident was seen by more than 5.5 million people, or 30,000 a day, according to The Copenhagen Post.

The Little Mermaid, imagined by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837 and sculpted by Edvard Eriksen in 1913, had done her job well, and on a wintery Saturday afternoon in late-November she made her triumphant return home; hundreds of cheering, bundled-up Danes were there to greet her as a crane lowered her back into the harbour. A week later and like millions before me over the years, I was fortunate to see Denmark’s famous enchantress for myself in person.

The snow hadn’t let up since the moment our cramped flight on Iceland Air touched down at Copenhagen Airport two days earlier, and on the morning of our planned visit, biting-cold winds added to the unseasonably early winter fun. No matter: after filling up on our cozy hotel’s typically delicious European breakfast spread (strong cheeses, fresh bread, scrambled eggs, potatoes, pancakes, Nutella), we set a course due north, trekking along the iced-over sidewalks of Toldbadgade and through the slush-covered grounds of Amalienborg Palace.

My high-top sneakers were soaked through within minutes, and I thought about how Luke Skywalker must have felt stumbling through the snowy abyss of Hoth after escaping the wampa; unfortunately, nobody was around to shelter me in the warmth of Tauntaun guts. Undeterred by the elements, we pressed on up Amaliegade until we reached Churchillparken, located in the northeastern corner of Copenhagen.

I’ve been to Scandinavia once before, spending four nights in Oslo exactly seven years prior to my Denmark visit; November isn’t exactly the high-tourism season in Copenhagen, but obviously I don’t mind winter travel to wintery destinations. After all, lounging on a Caribbean beach in late November is just so cliché.

As we passed vacant St. Albans Church, built in 1885 and still the only Anglican chuch in the country, I forgot about the frostbite settling into my toes for a moment and was reminded why I find this time of the year so captivating. The blinding blizzard briefly turned to a gentle snowfall, the wind slowed from insufferable to tolerable, and all was suddenly quiet: save for a lone (and clearly insane) jogger carefully picking her way across the ice, we were alone in a postcard-perfect portrait of winter in Copenhagen.

We were getting close to the city’s “little leading lady”, walking along the shore of Copenhagen Harbour, laughably freezing winds blowing into our numbed-red faces, and snow coating us like white sprinkles on a frosted Christmas sugar cookie. Finally, there she was, the world’s most-famous mermaid and Denmark’s summer ambassador to China. I clambored down the rocks, cozied up as close to her as possible, and smiled for the camera.

My vow to simply travel to Albuquerque, visit a friend and not think about getting any blog material out of it lasted about, oh, four hours, until we hit spectacular Bandelier National Monument.  I couldn’t stand it; the camera and notebook came out.

Later on that day, after a pause at Valles Caldera, we stopped along the Jemez Mountain Trail Scenic Byway in the unexpectedly comfy, tucked-in-the mountains town of Jemez Springs (sort of reminiscent of artistic haven Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where one can still find the spirit of “live and let live.”)

There are places to eat in Jemez Springs and a few shops, but I mostly liked poking around in the Jemez Springs Bath House, which was built in the 1870s and is owned and operated by the town itself, offering mineral bath soaks, massages and herbal sweat wraps.

Prices are very reasonable because this isn’t a super-fancy place, but it’s clean and friendly. The full Jemez Package is US$105 and includes a 1/2 hour mineral bath soak, an herbal wrap AND a 60 minute massage.

The springs in the canyon have been used for centuries by Native Americans and then Spaniards; the Bath House spring is enclosed by a supporting structure that was built by the WPA during the Depression.

You’ll be happy to know that after all that mellowing, you can pour yourself into one of the rooms at the equally no-fuss Jemez Mountain Inn, right up the road from the baths.

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Harmony, Indiana, is a town of the imagination rather than a real place. Chances are, though, that once you’ve begun reading Philip Gulley’s novel Christmas in Harmony you’ll soon feel as though you’ve sat over coffee with regulars at The Coffee Cup and done a bit of last minute Christmas shopping at Kivett’s Five and Dime.

That’s not, exactly, because Gulley describes the locations so well. It’s rather that he creates characters that ring true and lets us see the places and happenings through their eyes.

The main character, Sam Gardner, is a small town Indiana boy grown to manhood and become pastor of the Quaker meeting in Harmony. In addition to handling the day to day foibles and idiosyncrasies of the members of his meeting and the challenges of being a husband and a father to two small kids, as the Christmas season unfolds Sam finds himself in the midst of plans of some in the meeting to stage a progressive live Nativity scene through the town. That’s only part of the interesting things that go on between those who want to keep things as they always have been in the meeting’s Christmas, and those who are looking for a little — or a lot — of change.

As I’ve never been intrigued with the work of Garrison Keillor, with whom Gulley is often compared, I was more than a bit skeptical when I started the book. I found it to be a good choice for holiday reading, though.

At just a bit over eighty pages, the story unfolds quickly but just at the right holiday pace. Gulley is himself a Quaker pastor and a native of Indiana, so he has the material to draw on to make Sam seem like someone you just might meet at The Coffee Cup. Not a small town person or a Quaker? No worries on that, you’ll recognize these characters and situations anywhere groups of people gather.

Through character and detail and plot, there’s a gentle sense of humor and an outright laugh or two to be had, along with, just very lightly but not at all casually, a touch of a theological idea or two, as well. Gentle humor, strong sense of place, and set of characters dealing with a Christmas pageant in small town Indiana: it all makes a good holiday story.

Call it a contradiction, call it hypocrisy, call it blasphemy, but there’s no getting around the inconvenient truth that the United States, a country founded on the principle of equal rights for all,  did not begin to provide equal rights for all people at its founding. While even the most casual students of American history are aware that many of the Founding Fathers were also slave holders, it’s not something that our major historic monuments tend to dwell on the subject in great detail — it’s such a patriotic buzz kill. *

But on December 15th, 2010  The President’s House,  in Philadelphia will open, steps away from The Liberty Bell.  It doesn’t duck the issue of slave-holding among the founders — it squarely addresses it, while commemorating the lives of the people who lived in bondage while their owners labored to create a “free” nation.

I got a peek at it last week, behind a chain link fence protecting the construction site.

What you see here is the site of the house where President George Washington and President John Adams lived and worked, from 1790 to 1800, when Philadelphia was the temporary capital of the United States.  After the capital moved to Washington D.C., the house became a hotel, and then divided into retail shops.

No one recognized the structure’s historical significance, and in 1951, its last remaining walls were demolished. It then became the site of a public restroom. It wasn’t until 1973 that the site was identified for what it was, and not until 2007 that an archaeological dig revealed the partial foundation and other artifacts.  Controversy accompanied the project at every turn.

The open-air exhibit that finally opens on December 15th focuses on the enslaved Africans that lived in Washington’s house. (John Adams had no slaves.)  By the time Washington arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania had passed a “Gradual Abolition Act”, which freed the children of female slaves and prohibited the separation of enslaved families, among other provisions. In order to ensure that his slaves did not receive these protections, Washington moved his slaves out of state every six months, so they would not acquire Pennsylvania residency.

While living in the house, Washington signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which made it legal to capture and return escaped slaves if they reached a free state, and also, in practice meant that many African Americans who were never slaves were captured in free states and sold into slavery. Washington also went to great lengths to recapture slaves that escaped, including Oney Judge, also known as Ona Judge — who lived in, and escaped from, the President’s House.

The President’s House site tells Oney’s story and others, through video monitors, glassed-in views of the archaeological site, and honors the names of the enslaved that lived with the nation’s first president.

Read the Philadelphia Inquirer’s excellent package on the evolution of The President’s House here. Plan your visit to The President’s House here, and details on the archaeological excavation.

_{For instance Mount Vernon’s website says that slave holding was common among men in Washington’s position, and that he was increasingly troubled by it as his life went on:}

_{“Washington could — and did — lead by example. In his will, he arranged for all of the slaves he owned to be freed after the death of his wife, Martha.”}

_{Which is better than nothing, I suppose. Although the history revealed at the President’s House makes me doubt that in this area, Washington was much of a leader at all.}

When a small watch museum opened recently in the garage of a house just a couple of blocks from where I live in a quiet tree lined suburb, my first thought was ‘why in the world would anyone open a watch museum?’

But that was before I read Hunter Davies book ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum of Baked Beans.’

Turns out that opening a ‘hobby‘ museum’ is pretty commonplace, with more and more collectors coming out of the closet, so to speak, and showcasing their collections to the public in privately owned museums.

An avid collector himself, Hunter Davies, a British author, journalist, and broadcaster probably best known for having written the only authorised biography of The Beatles, spent months traipsed around Britain searching for Britain’s most oddball and bizarre single topic museums.

Meeting with the collectors and curators of these museums, Davies sought to discover how they evolved from dream to reality, all the while mulling over the idea of opening his own museum to showcase his own collections.

The resulting book, Behind the Scenes at the Museum of Baked Beans, focuses on 18 of these museums, each of which features a truly oddball collection ranging from lawnmowers to baked beans, from pencils to packaging, from Laurel and Hardy to Cars of the Stars.

Davies, however, has only really scratched the surface of the various ‘mad’ museums out there.

Who knows,  there might even be one hidden in plain sight in your neighbourhood.