Winter washes over the sky tonight, even though it is warm enough that some of my ferny flowers were blooming, it is December, don't they know? I won't complain about the warm weather, and I can kiaa it goodbye as I expect a cold, wet front coming in tomorrow. I walk around the pond near my house, looking at the sun through smokey fire. I love the detail in the tree branches as they frame the sun. The contrast of dark barren winter tree against the hopeful promise of the warm yellow summer sun.

"The Twelve Days of Christmas" is an English Christmas carol that enumerates in the manner of a cumulative song a series of increasingly numerous gifts given on each of the twelve days of Christmas (the twelve days that make up the Christmas season, starting with Christmas Day).[1][2] The carol, whose words were first published in England in the late eighteenth century, has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 68. A large number of different melodies have been associated with the song, of which the best known is derived from a 1909 arrangement of a traditional folk melody by English composer Frederic Austin source

On the fourth day of Christmas
My true love gave to me
Four calling birds
Three french hens
Two turtle doves and
A partridge in a pear tree

The line four calling birds is an Americanization of the traditional English wording four colly birds, and in some places, such as Australia, the variation "calling" is replacing the original. Colly is a dialect word meaning black and refers to the European blackbird, Turdus merula.

The line four calling birds in some versions are four coiled birds. I ask you, does anyone know what a coiled bird is? Do tell.

Religiously, The “four calling birds” are the Evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John or their Gospels. So, God bless you.

I only have one bird in the picture and it's not black. Such is life.

All I have are my words, armed in my mind, written in pen, stand by stand. Oh, yes. Still by hand. It has a different feel. Altered not by keys, backspace, and delete, I write, erase, tear it to pieces and start all over again. And again.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost