Sometime in 2012 an Icon viewer will "click" on The Icon - and it will register as click number one-half million.
That's correct. In 2011 The Bluffton Icon continued to rack up an impressive growth of total views and individual viewers, according to its owners Fred and Mary P. Steiner. During 2012 the Icon's total views will reach one-half million.
As of Dec. 31, The Icon has had 443,197 total views since it was launched in September 2009.
By Mary Pannabecker Steiner
A friend recently challenged everyone to admit what percentage of their 2011 resolutions they'd managed to meet. Problem was, I couldn't even remember what I might have resolved, so I had to backtrack through my blogs until I found my answer. I didn't make any. Well, technically, I didn't make any although there was a short list of resolutions I'd have made if I were a resolution maker. Oddly, I actually fulfilled a few of those non-resolutions.
Nostalgia is flowing over me in waves right now. As I write, my Grandma Suter is playing her favorite hymns on the piano. True, Grandma died in 1993, but thanks to a bit of foresight on my husband's part and a lot of technical work on the part of my oldest daughter, history is replaying itself on the CD player. For Christmas, Lindsay transferred all of our cassette recordings onto CDs. I'm grateful for the hours she spent doing this.
On the Christmas Eve episode of Splendid Table, British food writer Nigel Slater said that while many British cooks talk about trying something completely different for Christmas dinner, they usually resort to the traditional foods, mostly because they need something to carve.
This Christmas card from 1919 offers a political statement of the time. It reads: "I can't drink your health this Xmas with either bourbon or rye, for I'm living the life of a camel in a state that has gone bone-dry."
For more information about "states going dry" in 1919 click here.
This card and the card on the home page from the collection of Fred Steiner
Allow me to explain the photo. It was taken in the days when Truman was in the White House. The scene is from our family yard at 201 N. Lawn Avenue, at the corner of Lawn and Elm.
My brother, Rudolf, was born in 1943 or was it '42?. He was named after his great-grandfather, Rudolf Althaus. Well, everything was going along fine until Gene Autry recorded Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. That was in 1949, the year I was born.
