An Extended Holiday

There are two theories how the Christmas Mountains in Texas got their name. One says that the peaks resembled a line of Christmas trees. The other rests upon a local legend that really should involve cannibalism.

Local folklore has it that an area ranch family decided to spend the Thanksgiving holidays camping in the mountains and got smacked by a freak blizzard that prevented the family from escaping until Christmas.

The property officially shows up as "Christmas Mountains" in the 1918 Corps of Engineers U.S. Army topographic map and also on the 1904 University of Texas Mineral Survey Map completed by Hill and Udden, according to General Land Office officials.

The land commissioner believes "the family story sounds more plausible than the Christmas trees from a distance story." Christmas trees weren't even introduced to Texas until the middle 1800s, and they didn't become common until the 1920s, he said. [Link]

Buried Far From Home

An airship crashed into a windmill in Aurora, Wise County, Texas, the morning of April 17, 1897. An article in the Dallas Morning News reported that its place of origin was extraterrestrial.

The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one on board, and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.

The article closed with, "The pilot's funeral will take place at noon to-morrow." I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at that funeral.

Some years later, the Texas Historical Commission placed a marker at the entrance to the town cemetery, which mentioned that "This site is also well-known because of the legend that a spaceship crashed nearby in 1897 and the pilot, killed in the crash, was buried here." According to this page, the alien was buried beneath a round rock (since stolen) under the limb of an oak tree.

It Was a Spur-of-the-Moment Idea

Lone Stars of David is a collection of essays about the Jewish presence in Texas, but gives handy baking tips as well.

Consider Helena Landa, matriarch of the only Jewish family in New Braunfels in the early 1850s. She used a spur – the kind that make horses go fast – to put air holes in matzo she baked for a Passover Seder. [Link]

Where Did the Second Shooter Sleep?

Patricia Puckett Hall has fond memories of her grandmother's rooming house in Dallas. Like the time in November 1963 when a nice young man named Lee Harvey Oswald rented a room.

For days afterward, the Dallas police and the FBI pored over every sliver of the small room where Oswald slept. Ms. Hall laughs at how her grandmother never forgave the authorities for taking the bedsheets – sheets that belonged to her.

"They never paid for them, and she never got them back," says Ms. Hall.

"Her problem was, she could have used those sheets. It wasn't the historical significance. She kept saying, 'Those were my sheets! They took my sheets! And sheets aren't cheap!' [Link]