Instagramming right along.

Dear Farmdoc's Blog followers and readers

My holiday from blogging continues. I'm having trouble getting back to it. I don't know when, or even if, I'll make a comeback. Time will tell.

In the meantime, I'm starting out with Instagram - which, according to its blurb [1], is a 'fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures'.

I'll be posting at least one photo each day. (I loaded my first two earlier this morning.)

If you have a smartphone, you can download the free Instagram app and then search for Farmdoc to find my photos.

Or on your computer, click here for big pics (scroll left for the newest ones), or here for littlies (no scrolling required).

If you have trouble with any of this, please email me and I'll do my best to sort it out.

Finally I hope you have a happy holiday - whether it's Hanukah or Christmas or something else.

I'll be having one. That's for certain.

With love and best wishes

Farmdoc.

farmdoc's blog post number 249

Smart I thought I was. And Jewish I am. So I’ve never been able to bring myself to write the word Christmas. Rather I’ve always written it as Xmas. Whoever’s Christ Jesus was and is, he wasn’t and isn’t mine. To me as a Jew, Jesus has never been more than an edgy activist member of my tribe, albeit admittedly his parentage may have been uncertain. Therefore, smugly, I believed that substituting the X for the Christ in the name of the festival celebrating Jesus's birth, rendered the whole deal irreligious. Too clever I thought I was. By far. But how wrong. Wikipedia tells me the Xmas spelling has a religious origin, too. In Greek, the letter ‘chi’ is written as an X, and chi is the first letter of the Greek word for Christ. The Oxford English Dictionary shows that the first known English use of Xmas was in 1551. Whether religious or not, the word Xmas fits on signs better than does Christmas. And it saves on ink or paint. So I’m going to continue using it. That is, until a totally secular version of the work Christmas comes along. P.S. Contrast the December Jewish festival of Hannukah whose various spellings reflect only the different transliterations of the Hebrew word חנוכה whose English meaning has no religious connotation.