Month of Good Will and Winter Holidays

December, month of good will and winter holidays. December makes it appearance as the grand climax of the year, the most awaited season of festivities with joy and good will! It represents a bonanza for article writers. The rush of buying or making gifts for family and friends, the delight of putting up a Christmas tree and spreading cheer with decorations, remembering the birth of Jesus, and the singing of carols. Writers can distill into timely features of our different customs and culture, religious and otherwise, that surround the season highlighted by Santa Claus' visits on Christmas eve and the celebration of Christmas day. December introduces the winter season, along with the wide variety of winter/snow sports, and snowfalls and ice storms can transform cities and farms into the fabled winter wonderland, a continual wave of activities that fairly beg for feature treatment. Then on the new years eve families assemble for a fond farewell to the old year and a toast of anticipation to the new. As for writers, you and I, we make open resolutions to write and sell more stories.

While Christmas dominates December, special days begin with Pan American Health Day, set by presidential proclamation, and proceed through the month with such observances as Heart Transplant Day, Pearl Harbor Day, Human Rights Day, Boston Tea Party Day, Wright Brothers Day, Forefathers' Day, International Arbor Day, and Louisiana Purchase Day. A number of states, including Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Iowa, Texas, Delaware, and Mississippi observe Admission Day, in recognition of gaining statehood. December brings the birth anniversaries of Presidents Martin Van Buren, Andrew Johnson, and Woodrow Wilson. In the literary world Noel Coward, Maxwell Anderson, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, Joyce Kilmer, Jane Austen, John Greenleaf Whittier, John Milton, and Rudyard Kipling were born in December. Other notables with December birthdays have been Admiral George Dewey, George Armstrong Custer, George C. Marshall, Kit Carson, and Billy Mitchell of fighting fame; Louis Pasteur, Eli Whitney, Charles Goodyear, and Harvey S. Firestone, contributors of scientific progress; and also James Oglethorpe, Joseph Smith, Edwin W. Staunton, Ludwig van Beethoven, Gilbert Stuart, and Clara Barton, the "angel of the battlefield."

From the arrival of the Pilgrims on the New Continent to the birth of powered flight on the sand dunes of North Carolina and the utilization of atomic energy for electricity, the December chart of historical events abounds in a wide variety of article subjects:

1. Pilgrims stepped ashore at Plymouth Rock, 1620
2. Colonists staged Boston Tea Party, 1773
3. George Washington troops won Battle of Trenton, 1776
4. George Washington died at Mount Vernon at the age of sixty seven, 1799
5. France sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States, 1803
6. War of 1812 ended with signing of the Treaty of Ghent, 1814
7. President James Monroe gave the world the Monroe Doctrine, 1823
8. Wooden golf tree invented in Boston, Massachusetts, 1899
9. Wright Brothers opened Age of Aviation with first heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk, 1903
10. Nobel Prize awarded President Theodore Roosevelt, 1906
11. Jerusalem fell to British, 1917
12. Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed prohibition, added to constitution, 1933
13. Fire at Iroquois Theater in Chicago took 639 lives, 1933
14. Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor on day that will "live in infamy," 1941
15. United States produced electricity from atomic energy for first time, at Reactor Testing Station in Idaho, 1951.
In conclusion, even if it is an old news from our archives, it will still be a very good and much sought after topics of articles.