Opinion

The Year in Review: 2022 Just what was 2022? Like many years that came before it, 2022 was also a year. But 2022 was different in that it was new.

When my kids were young, they were fortunate enough to have their own personal Santa. Back then, Lee Eiler, of Wood Lake was well into his years of being Santa Claus at all of the local events, and he enlisted me to help with some of those.

HAPPY FIRST DAY OF WINTER! and HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Tis the season on a couple of counts: welcoming back old man winter and the jolly old elf himself, St. Nick, as we head into what will probably be yet another memorable cold season here in Minnesota, especially out here on the prairies.

I don’t know how many of you are Viking football fans. I’m not one of them. But the way the Vikings came back to win their game on Saturday was nothing short of sensational. I didn’t even turn it on at home until the overtime. I’m sure Jon taped the whole thing since he had to work today and would miss the game. What a comeback. The last score I saw when I checked on them was 33-7 in favor of the Colts. Good game, Vikes.

Rob’s Advent Calendar © Every year around this time, some well-meaning aunt sends my children an advent calendar. Not one of the cool, new, weird advent calendars.

7:15PM. The center atrium at the mall. A large, temporary structure houses “The North Pole”, an ad-hoc collection of holiday lights and fake snow. Rob weaves his way past a “Closed” sign, through the short maze where a line usually forms, and pokes his head behind the curtain.

While my son was deployed in the Middle East, I wrote about my grandma’s great cookie mission. Each week she would bake and send box after box of cookies and then, once they arrived, my son would go around base and hand them out to all of his fellow soldiers that were around at distribution time.

When my last name is recognized anywhere, it’s usually because people knew my grandpa Stan Stölen. Besides having owned the Stölen Foods grocery store in Hanley Falls for a number of years with my grandma, he was also a gun dealer, did chainsaw sharpening and repair, had a construction business, an antique store, and drove for Medi-Van. Mostly people recall having dealt with him on construction projects, and his penchant for striking up a conversation that would inevitably only end with the longest of long Norwegian goodbyes.

In America, every four years the word “football” is surprisingly unclear. Americans know the word “football” to mean a sport played with an oblong ball and very little foot. In the rest of the world, the word “football” refers to a sport that is played almost exclusively with a foot. Hence the name of the sport. Why do Americans refer to this sport as soccer? Because the word football was already taken by a sport largely independent of the foot. Go figure.