Most people associate the winter holidays with warmth and light; hard-bitten journalists have the same association but, sadly, we see that warmth and light coming (too often) from house fires.
It isn’t just our perception. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) website says that the top three days of the year for household fires started by candles are Christmas, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s day. 

I was surprised when I went to the produce department of three local grocery stores and couldn’t find lettuce mixes in bags or boxes. 
It should not have been a surprise. I knew that romaine lettuce had been cleared off of store shelves because of an E. coli outbreak. I realized that of course those lettuce mixes have some romaine in them.
I had assumed, though, that heads of romaine were the most dangerous; but in fact, according to an article in the Washington Post, it was the pre-cut lettuce mixes that sickened so many people.

This is a sad story. I found a recipe for an interesting cake in the Denver Post Sunday magazine. I lived there from 1955 to 1959. I don’t have a date written on the recipe. It looks complicated, but isn’t. You make a two-layer cake and when you put it together you put the bottom layer upside down, put a simple frosting in the middle and top with the second layer.

In the summer of 1964, my then husband, who was a naval aviator, received orders to report to the Naval Auxiliary Air Station near Meridian, Miss. 
I was nervous about moving there as the three civil rights workers had been murdered in the area in June. However, we drove from California and arrived in Meridian in August.