Yule Countdown Is Great--but No Milkmaids, Please

--Christmas had become ho-ho-hum for Mary and Laurens Moore, what with their children being married and gone. But that all changed for the Gaffney, S. C., couple on Dec. 14, when the Moores answered a knock at their door to discover a tree about eight inches tall with a bird perched on top. The unsigned card attached read, “On the first day of Christmas . . . .” The next night, the Moores found two Christmas tree ornaments. The third day, it was three chocolate kisses, and so on. “It has made such a difference in Christmas this year. I’ve had something to look forward to every night. It’s a lovely idea,” Mrs. Moore said. They expect to receive the 12th gift today. “It’s not the original ’12 Days of Christmas,’ ” she said. “Thank God, because I don’t know what I’d do with 10 milking maids.”

--Family reunions are almost as common as gift-giving during the Christmas season. But, Mark Wolf’s reunion is different from most--he found the father he hadn’t seen since he was 8 years old. And he didn’t have to look far because the two had been working in the same Manhattan post office, on different shifts, for a year. Mark Wolf, 28, tracked down his 57-year-old father, Phillip, after his mother mentioned that her ex-husband had once worked in the Morgan General Post Office. The post office, which employs 6,000 people, is one of the largest in Manhattan. Mark found that his father still worked there, and decided to meet him. “I pulled out my ID card and showed it to him, and he nearly had a heart attack,” Mark recalled. He said he plans to buy New York Mets season tickets for himself and his father, adding that he wants to “do some of the things that we should have done when I was a kid, that we missed out on.”

--Proving that he’s not a Scrooge after all, a British traffic officer who once cited a hearse for illegal parking during a funeral left Christmas cards this week instead of tickets on windshields. The cards were a farewell from Les Brockwell, who is retiring after more than 20 years of handing out tickets in the southwest England holiday resort of Teignmouth. Brockwell was unrepentant about the hearse episode, however, saying he had only been doing his job when he wrote up the vehicle and mourners’ cars because they were parked on double yellow lines.