The Maryland branch of our family recently suggested dinner at Cafe “Hun”. Visions of Attila in the kitchen entered my mind.

It turns out that the “Hun” in this Baltimore eatery is spelled “Hon” which every Baltimore resident knows is short for honey as in, “Hey, hon, how’s it going?”

We decided to visit The Cafe Hon on a Saturday night and the potential customers were spilling out the doors. While waiting for our table, we studied the decor. A flamingo theme held sway starting with a two story pink bird on the front of the building. The dining rooms had more, including the piece de resistance, an amazing circular chandelier made out of pink flamingo lawn ornaments alternately glued right side up and down.

A life size plastic Elvis held court in the main dining room, his fingers poised to twang his guitar. Unfortunately, the guitar was missing.

Perhaps my favorite part of the interior design was an entire wall of collage portraits done by third graders of women that appeared to be straight out of the musical Hairspray.

When we were finally seated, the waitress grabbed all the dirty dishes from the previous diners and fled to the kitchen leaving her table cleaning rag behind. I picked it up and washed both our tables: these young workers were clearly in over their heads and needed all the help they could get.

The Cafe Hon is one of those rare eateries that features both real milkshakes and malts alongside beers and wines. The menu was Eastern seafood shack meets classic diner. I can report that all the diverse items we ordered were more than satisfactory with the exception of the chili that had no liquid and I mistook for salsa.

The most lasting memories of this dining adventure were some incredible statements from our waitress. I will quote them verbatim:

When we ordered a sandwich on one of the breads listed on the menu-
“Cheese toast no longer exists”.

When asked if the coleslaw was creamy-
“I don’t know, they change it every day”.

When delivering our dinners-
“We’re low on forks tonight”.

And before our dessert order was taken-
“We are out of a lot of dessert”.

We rose to the occasion and had the remaining sweets, hot fudge and caramel sundaes.

Well, hons, I can tell you that every one in our family would pay a return visit to this wacky restaurant. When in Baltimore, you will have to decide for yourself if you are ready for The Cafe Hon experience. Bear in mind that “diner” and “gourmet” are not synonyms.

Even the bird experts at Cornell University succumb to using the word “cute” when referring to black-capped chickadees: “A bird universally considered ‘cute’ thanks to its oversize round head, tiny body and curiosity about everything, including humans.”

We are the fortunate hosts to a bustling flock of chickadees in our feeders this winter. In summer, the chickadee diet is mostly insects; now it is mostly seeds. The birds usually feed one bird at a time as the flocks have a pecking order. The most dominant bird goes first, grabs one seed and flies off to eat or cache its treasure. The subordinates follow one by one. Striped sunflower seeds and suet are favorites on their menus. The bird books say chickadees like peanuts, but our peanut offerings have been completely shunned.

Chickadees have an amazing trick to remember where their cached seeds are hidden. Their brain neurons with old information regularly die and are replaced with new neurons to process new information, thus insuring adaptation to changes in their flocks and environments. Chickadees from Alaska have the most brain power. Harsher winters mean they have to eat more and remember more hiding places. They are up to it.

Ever the winter wimp, I marvel at how a half ounce bird survives subzero nights. But chickadees have several adaptations to stay toasty including dense winter coats, winter roost cavities, cached food and regulated hypothermia. The latter means that on frigid winter nights the birds can drop their body temperature 12 to 15 degrees below their daytime temperature thus saving huge amounts of energy. Chickadees accomplish this regulated hypothermia by reducing the amount of shivering they do.

The chickadee call is their name, “chick a dee dee dee”. Extra “dees” in the call indicates serious danger. I’ve heard this deeing frenzy and realized that one of our indoor cats had snuck out. Thanks, chickadees, for the cat alert.

Perhaps my favorite feature of chickadees is their fearlessness. Stand quietly next to the feeders and they fly within inches. Stay extremely still with birdseed in a hand or hat brim and you may become a bird feeder!

Let the New Year begin with brevity, clarity and light.

In the course of last year’s reading, I came across two elegant statements from two brilliant writers.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the The Hayden Planetarium in New York City, explains cosmic reality:

Want to know what we are made of? Again, the cosmic perspective offers a bigger answer than you might expect. The chemical elements of the universe are forged in the fires of high-mass stars that end their lives in stupendous explosions, enriching their host galaxies with the chemical arsenal of life as we know it. The result? The four most common chemically active elements in the universe – hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen – are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.

Michael Perry, a Wisconsin author, poet, farmer, paramedic and chicken-raiser, shares this observation on our situation:

The frozen air is bell-jar still. The sky is deep black, the stars pressing down brilliantly all around, and I am reminded that we are not beneath the constellations, but among them.

So we are simultaneously the stuff of stars and amongst the stars……a good thing to remember as we embark on this year’s journey around our own star, a.k.a. the sun.

Their house never had running water. Heat came from a cast iron cook stove and a wood stove in the parlor. One winter the stove was stoked with wooden hairbrush seconds (minus the bristles) from a nearby woodworking factory. The heat never made it upstairs: the boys got to sleep upstairs in the frosty rooms.

An electric line ran to the farmhouse, but all the cooking was done on the wood burning stove. Hot water was dipped from the stove’s reservoir. Water was pumped at the kitchen sink.

Walking into my husband’s grandparent’s home was like falling into a Little House on the Prairie book, only the time was the 1960s and the setting was northern Wisconsin. We had many memorable meals in that farmhouse kitchen, but my husband speaks most often of the “panycakes” and “Hard Times Cookies”. I have the recipe for these big, fat sugar cookies and they taste delicious despite the frugality of the ingredients.

We have only one memento from that weathered, wood farmhouse on Lonesome Road, and it graces our home every Christmas. Well over sixty years ago, my husband’s grandmother recycled her old kerosene lamp into a Christmas decoration. Nothing was ever wasted or unused in that household.

Grandma put Christmas ornaments in the glass base of the lamp and then replaced the chimney. Those ornaments, put there by her hands, have remained ever since. The first ritual of our Christmas season is to unwrap the old lamp with great care and place it on the kitchen buffet where it is in constant view.

Holidays aren’t about the new and the glittery, they are about our ties to the past. We are lucky to have a direct link.

The best Christmas decorations in the world start with ordinary brown paper lunch bags. Take a bag, fill the bottom with sand and stick in a candle. You have created a farolito. Then repeat the process 100 or more times.

The farolito is Northern New Mexico’s traditional Christmas decoration. When darkness descends on December 24, all the candles are lighted and the homes, neighborhoods, plazas and roadsides become magical. One college campus is adorned with 4,000 of these little lanterns.

The high desert is cold in December, so bonfires are lighted  in yards and roadsides  to defy the darkness and warm up the folks who are outside viewing the farolitos. The flickering lights combined with the ever present scent of burning pinon logs create a feast for the senses that could move the heart of Scrooge. Note that outside of Northern New Mexico the paper bag lights are called luminarias and the building of bonfires in the streets is frowned upon!

Many of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere are lighting up lights as well. The yearning for the light to return is an ancient and instinctual response crossing all religious and cultural boundaries. We may laugh at the thought of the Druids lighting fires on the hills to inveigle the sun to return and make the days longer, but we are still doing the same thing, lighting the darkness at the winter solstice.

So bring on the lights and drink a toast to the soon-to-return sun. Hope lives.