The tradition of bringing greens indoors comes from Europe and Scandinavia. The winters were long, and bringing greens in the house gave hope that spring would soon be coming. It must have worked, as we still do it today.

If your evergreens are overgrown, now is the time to prune them back into shape and use the greens for decorations. Don’t be afraid to take the pruners and whack those evergreens.

Edmund and Lucy (Skandar Keynes and Georgie Henley: the prior two Narnia movies) are feeling pretty miserable. While the rest of the Pevensie family is off in America, these two are hunkered down with insufferable cousin Eustace (Will Poulter: Son of Rambow) — a know-it-all, curmudgeonly, 10-year-old —  in wartime Oxford....

“It’s all about the presentation,” my mother told me. So she taught me how to wrap a gift. How to center a box on the paper, how to make sure the edges were even and no tape was visible. She used miles of ribbon. She taught me how to tie a proper bow. Those pre-made self-stick bows were, in her opinion, the epitome of laziness.

It was meticulous work.

On Christmas morning, it took seconds to destroy it all.

Dear Bay Weekly:

Had to write with kudos on the Season’s Bounty: 41,000 words … Wow!

I of course enjoyed Ellen Moyer’s trail article in the same issue, Go Outside and Play [http://bayweekly.com/articles/good-living/article/go-outside-and-play].

–Dave Linthicum, Jug Bay