Free Republic

Why is the connection between snow and Christmas so strong? Experts say it’s because songs, stories and images come back year after year and have created the tradition of an idealized white Christmas holiday. Christmas tales and carols have long since invoked images of silver bells, horse-drawn sleighs, and, of course, snow. The association of snow with the holiday and its yuletide charm, for those celebrating across the United States, is not due to a consistent white winter wonderland, however. In fact, nearly half of the contiguous U.S. historically has had a 50% chance or less of actually seeing a...

Television can be something of a wasteland without much for us to celebrate, so it makes us even more thankful for the shows that portray a conservative message. It's nice to see our values represented, and we are grateful to these shows for making that happen, even if they're not always all that friendly. As Thanksgiving approaches, here are 4 shows that conservatives can be thankful for from this fall season. Bull First up, we have Bull, which had a storyline showing exposing some harsh truths about abortion. When character Chunk's college-aged daughter Anna gets pregnant as a big opportunity...

Police were called to the scene from a concerned family member who was said Lewis was in the process of separating from his wife and was behaving erratically. Lewis, a member of the National Guard, was in possession of a rifle, and during the course of the barricade he allegedly opened fire at police officers who were both inside and outside of a SWAT vehicle. Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan says, a SWAT negotiator eventually talked the man into surrendering nine hours later by singing "White Christmas." East Vincent Police Chief Matt Williams, who also is the leader of...

‘…During the lecture, titled "Coconut Oil and other Nutritional Errors," Karin Michels has made herself very clear with regard to dietary recommendations, and underlined that coconut oil is not healthy. Its superfood status had already come under scrutiny last year after the American Heart Association (AHA) updated its guidelines, which recommended that people avoid the saturated fatty acids found in coconut oil. Michels went a step further than to recommend avoiding the foodstuff, saying "coconut oil is pure poison" and "is one of the worst foods you can eat." There's no study showing significant health benefits to coconut-oil consumption. And,...

The good news for many in the Northeast and Midwest was that it was a white Christmas. The bad news was that a blizzard swept into parts of New England and bitter cold enveloped much of the Midwest. Erie, Pa., recieved a record 34 inches of snow. NWS Cleveland ✔ @NWSCLE Erie, PA received 34" of snow on Christmas Day! This is a new all-time daily snowfall record. The previous record was 20" set on 11/22/56. For reference, the greatest 3-day snowfall in Erie was 30.2" (12/29-31/2002), greatest 7-day snowfall is 39.8" (12/27/01-1/2/2002) #pawx 1:26 AM - Dec 26, 2017...

Pardon the vanity, but White Christmas is coming up on AMC in a few minutes. One of the best Christmas movies.

Authorities in Granite Quarry are looking for the people responsible for littering several locations with Ku Klux Klan notes. Granite Quarry-Faith Joint Police Authority Chief Mark Cook told WBTV that someone dropped the fliers in various locations sometime before noon on Monday. The fliers, which start off with "Merry Christmas," go on to read "Join the Klan today and preserved the white Christian ways." Fliers without the Christmas message that read "Join The Klan And Save Our Land" were also reportedly dropped off at several places in Iredell County. The fliers are from the East Coast Knights of the True...

Irving Berlin, 1906. Photo from Wikimedia Commons Late in 1940, so the story goes, Irving Berlin found himself in Los Angeles writing songs for the movie "Holiday Inn," starring two of the biggest stars of the moment, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.  The challenge Berlin had set himself was enormous: to capture the spirit of major holidays in popular song.  And the Christmas song had to be the best of all.  Nothing about Los Angeles, where he found himself, reminded him of the Christmases he'd known as a young boy back in New York City. The snow, the cold...

Bette Midler tweet: “Dec. 22, 2015, 63 degrees in NYC. I would like to thank the ignorant selfish climate deniers for all their goodwill toward the planet.”

White Christmas (1954) has been part of family Christmases for as long as I can remember. Bing Crosby’s voice is wonderful, but his middle-age-man-playing-hip hasn’t worn well over the years. Danny Kaye’s cracked-voice nervousness, his silly humor, and his surprisingly skillful dancing still work. Like all musicals, the film is thin on plot. It’s schmaltzy, light entertainment, a mid-century Hollywood specialtyIrving Berlin’s songs are catchy, sometimes clever. The title song had already won an Academy Award (for Holiday Inn, 1942). Wikipedia cites that other great authoritative text, Guinness, in support of the claim that it’s the best-settling single of all time, and...

So Darius Rucker sings "White Christmas" during NBC's Rockerfeller Center tree lighting show and (probably most likely liberal) ignorance strikes again."Surreal," "ironic," "awkward," "total fail," are just a few of the words used in tweets (from the Twitchy link above) describing the performance.Perhaps it's inevitable that the further away we get from certain pop culture iconography the more out of touch the current generation becomes with it. That must be the case here...it has to be. (for the sake of my sanity I'm just going to keep telling myself this)One of the most famous disasters in history, the sinking of the...

Social media lit up Wednesday evening with complaints about former Hootie & the Blowfish lead singer Darius Rucker performing "White Christmas" at the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony at New York City's Rockefeller Square. Some activists had threatened to attack the ceremony after a grand jury declined to indict a New York police officer in the death of unarmed Eric Garner during a confrontation over cigarette sales in July.

A White Christmas...First for me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzKRdPStAF8 The Christmas season is the inspiration for this week's feature. "Holiday Inn", the film that introduced the world to the perennial classic song "White Christmas". Easily one of the best musical films of the 1940s. Enjoy.

A Winter Storm Warning has been issued for all of the Midlands until late Sunday night. We will see some snow during the last few hours of Christmas day and overnight into Sunday morning.

If you've never seen the 1954 holiday classic "White Christmas," you really won't have an excuse any longer: AMC will be airing the movie seven times in a row, starting at 7 a.m. on Christmas Eve. In case you've been buried under a snowdrift, for, oh, half a century or so, the movie features Irving Berlin's music and concerns two former Army buddies (Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye) who put on a show with a sister act (Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen) to save their general's Vermont hotel. Here are five things you may not have known about "White Christmas." The...

(Dec. 11) -- The weather might seem complex, but the recipe for snow isn't as complicated as the recipe for Grandma's fruitcake. All that's needed is cold air and precipitation, and both look potentially abundant throughout the rest of the month, leading to the possibility of a more widespread white Christmas in 2009 than in recent years. The likelihood of a white Christmas is always high -- greater than 75 percent -- in the northern tier of the country and in the mountains of the West. However, the presence of an El Niño and the threat of colder-than-normal weather will...

Winter Weather Warning In Effect For Our Area Today It happens on average every four years in the City of Houston. It happened last year briefly, and in 2004 it happened on Christmas Eve: That foreign, frigid white stuff falls from the sky delighting children of all ages and closing freeway overpasses. Snow!

The sun is in the pits of a very deep solar minimum. Many researchers thought the sunspot cycle had hit bottom in 2008 when the sun was blank 73% of the time. Not so. 2009 is on the verge of going even lower. So far this year, the sun has been blank 75% of the time, and only a serious outbreak of sunspots over the next few weeks will prevent 2009 from becoming the quietest year in a century.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A massive winter storm blanketed the US West Coast with snow, sleet and ice early Monday while blizzards and snow squalls struck the Northeast and Midwest, killing at least four people and making travel dangerous. The storm snarled holiday air traffic across the country, with delays at major airports in San Francisco; Houston, Texas; Boston, Massachusetts; New Jersey and New York, officials said. The fierce weather was blamed for the death of two people in a single-vehicle crash on Interstate Highway 80 east of Des Moines, Iowa. Another weather-related fatality was reported in northwest Iowa when a...