A Gulf Coast mixture of seasonal stories, a very Texas take on the holiday, and an album that brings in the bittersweet and the joyous sides of the Christmas season. Each contains fs songs which consider and celebrate the season, and which you may not have heard before. Give a listen.

Del Suggs makes what he calls saltwater music, a sort of Jimmy Buffet meets James Taylor meets Brad Paisley sort of style that suits the musician’s north Florida Gulf Coast origins. For a good few years now Suggs has been gathering friends including Pierce Pettis, Mimi Hearn, and Danica Winter for a country, folk, jazz, blues, saltwater style north Florida Christmas concert in Tallahassee. Now, they’ve also gathered up that spirit to put it on record. The album is called Almost Christmas.

Tish Hinojosa brings her Mexican American heritage to her album From Texas for a Christmas Night.There are songs in English and in Spanish, from tradtional sources and contemporary, and from Hinojosa’s own pen as well. A favorite at her holiday concerts worldwide and especially in her longtime hometown of Austin is Arbolito, a funny story of her yearly chats with her Christmas tree, which she sings, as she does on this recording, in both English and Spanish versions. In a Christmas Dream and Milagro are gentle and joyous celebrations of the hope and goodness of the season. Building #9 finds Hinojosa imagining a different turn to the Christmas story. Hanukia, as its tile suggests, is a song about Hanukkah sung in Spanish, while A La Nanita Nana is the story of Mary and Joseph looking for a place to rest, and is often sung during posadas re enacting that search in Hispanic communities at the holiday season.

On Northern Lights, Gretchen Peters offers a collection that may be just the thing if you’ve had a little too much holiday elevator music and plastic candy canes. The Nashville based songwriter knows that the season of Christmas encompasses reflection, loneliness, and the need to reach out for others as much as it does joy, connection, and hope. She brings these ideas together in a masterful selection of songs, including the carol In the Bleak Midwinter. Gordon Lightfoot’s many faceted look at being alone on Christmas Song for a Winter’s Night, and her own thought reflection weaving the hope of the first Christmas into the hope of Christmas present in Waitin’ on Mary. Hope and joy are present too, along with a dash of humor, just like real holiday celebrations, and like many real holiday celebrations, the album winds to a thoughtful close with Silent Night.

It’s been one of those weeks; started out pretty mellow, not that much going on, then went bonkers.

The kind of week when you thought you had life under control, but by Thursday you cannot imagine hanging on until the weekend.

The weekend that will be totally stuffed with holiday festivities that are ALL scheduled on the same Saturday. Shoot me now.

Or put me on a plane to Kauai ….

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Sight, taste, sound, scent, and imagination: food engages all of these. A walk through a market, sharing a cup of tea, checking out the brands on grocery shelves half way across the world — or even halfway across the country or halfway across town — becomes both a taste of food and a taste of culture. That’s the idea that underpins the writing and photography in National Geographic’s Food Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 Extraordinary Places to Eat Around the Globe. If you like to cook or like to eat, if you stay close to home or travel widely, there’ s likely to be something to intrigue.

There are nine sections, including Ingredients, Outstanding Markets, Seasonal Delights, and Great Food Towns. Within each section — they are thirty to forty pages long — each idea, place or event gets an individual page, with a photograph, a few paragraphs of narrative, a short sidebar on something related, and a brief practical section on travel suggestions about where and when to go for the best experience, and web sites to consult.

It is a varied journey, with, for example, entries on home eating in Cuba, the best modern cuisine in Edinburgh, California’s artisanal cheeses, and Cairo’s Khan el Khalili market. There are also occasional ten best list pages, such as ten best national dishes, ten best cheese tours of France, ten best historic food shops, and the like. Given that all this information is gathered from the resources of National Geographic, the standard of writing and photography is high; given that it is that sort of project, some articles and photographs work better than others. That said, you want to keep turning the pages to see what comesnext. Both the writing and the photography are likely to inspire travels on the road, travels to the kitchen, and sharing memories about great food experiences..

The Wellner who is interested in all things automobile is not this one.

It’s my husband Phil, whose first word was “car”, who races cars, and who is an encyclopedia of all things auto.  I always miss him when I’m traveling, but I was especially bummed that he wasn’t with me the other day, when I toured the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, near Detroit.

There were all sorts of interesting four-wheeled things to gawk at, from Kennedy’s limo (yes, the very one he was shot in) to the Oscar Mayer Weiner Mobile.

But what caught my eye the most were the displays on the evolution of the American way of travel. Automobiles weren’t just a way to get from point A to point B, they influenced the development of guidebooks (brought to you by automobile clubs and tire companies),  created the modern hotel,  the fast food industry…

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…and, of course, single-handedly invented a mode of travel I’ve never quite cottoned to, RVing.

And check out what I spotted in this guidebook display!  On the lower left, it’s a copy of the Negro Motorist’s Green Book — which I’d written about here previously.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.
It’s easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

- All You Need is Love by The Beatles

The random discover of this graffiti on a sea wall found during a recent wine tasting trip to New Zealand’s Waiheke Island had us singing Beatles songs for the rest of the day. Of course, the more wine we tasted, the louder and possibly more off key we became. It was, you could say, our little tribute to the memory of the first superstar band and to John Lennon, who, sadly, was killed thirty years ago on December 8th, 1980.

Thirty years ago, on December 8th, I was on a plane flying from New Zealand to Los Angeles, my very first solo trip away from home. Back then, planes stopped in Honolulu for refuelling, so there was plenty of time to wander around the airport and see the newspaper headlines screaming out the news that  ‘John Lennon had been shot.’

Can you remember where you were when you heard about Lennon’s death?