Happy Holidays! I hope you are enjoying a festive or peaceful holiday season. I know some enjoy the hustle and bustle of the holidays while others seek peace. My holidays are very quiet, and I enjoy the peace.

This is the season when I have time to write and indulge myself in a few hobbies. Of course, I also have plenty of work to do this time of year, but I do it on my schedule.

So far, our winter has been wet, windy and warm. The weather has not lured me outdoors for a hike, but I’m happy to have warm weather, even if it is stormy. When the weather is warm, we don’t have to worry about our water line freezing, and more importantly, we don’t have to watch the deer struggle to stay warm and finally die from exposure and starvation. Last winter was very cold, and approximately half the deer on the island died. When we returned from our vacation in March and hiked into the woods, we found deer carcasses everywhere. When it snows here, it is beautiful, but then I think about the deer, and I begin to worry about them.

We are gaining a few seconds of daylight each day again, but right now, it starts getting light at 10:00 am and dark again at 4:00 pm. Kodiak Island is in the southern part of Alaska, so we have more daylight than most of the state. I don’t mind the limited daylight, but what wears on me is even when it’s light in the middle of the day, we don’t see the sun because it is low on the horizon, and mountains surround us. I miss the sun, and I will be very happy when it returns in a few weeks.

A perfect Christmas day for me will be (weather permitting) a hike on the beach with Mike and our cats, followed by a Christmas dinner with our neighbor, Jim, and capped off by a hot-buttered rum in front of the woodstove.

Wherever you are and whatever you celebrate this time of year, I wish you joy, happiness, and peace.

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If you’d like to buy yourself a gift, my novel, The Fisherman’s Daughter, is now available for sale in both e-book and print formats. For a free gift to yourself, sign up below for my newsletter about true crime and  mysteries from Alaska.  You can check out this month’s newsletter about the ambush of two Alaska State Troopers by following this link:  Massacre in Tanana.