Happy New Year!

image from OldTimeClipArt.com
"Before the Christmas holiday was popularized, New Year's Day was the celebrated mid-winter festival, and New Year greetings originated in Europe around 1466, hundreds of years earlier than the first Christmas cards." -- from _Christmas Past_ by Barbara Hallman Kissinger.

Winter
Bread and milk for breakfast,
And woolen frocks to wear,
And a crumb for robin redbreast
On the cold days of the year.
-- Christina Rossetti

The Frost Spirit
He comes, he comes, the Frost Spirit comes! You may trace his footsteps now
On the naked woods and the blasted fields and the brown hill's withered brow.
He has smitten the leaves of the gray old trees where their pleasant green came forth,
And the winds, which follow wherever he goes, have shaken them down to earth.
-- John Greenleaf Whittier