The White House Library  "Tubs Buckets and a variety of Lumber" cluttered Room 17 of the basement in February 1801, according to the first official White House inventory.  The room served mainly as a laundry area until Theodore Roosevelt's renovation of the ground floor in 1902, when it became a servants' locker room.  In 1935, it was remodeled as a library, and in 1961 a committee was appointed to select works representative of a full spectrum of American thought and tradition for the use of the President, his family, and his staff.  This wide-ranging collection is still being augmented with Presidential papers.  The Library is furnished in the style of the late Federal period (1800-1820) with most of the pieces attributed to the New York cabinetmaker Duncan Phyfe.  This room is not quite 27 feet by 23 feet.  On the west wall you see a neoclassical mantel that came from a house in Salem, Massachusetts.  It dates from the early 19th century and is decorated with grape-leaf swags and bellflower pendants.  On the mantel rests a pair of English silver-plate Argand lamps, a gift of the Marquis de Lafayette to Gen. Henry Knox, Secretary of War in Washington's Cabinet.  Such lamps, named after their Swiss inventor, Aime Argand, were a major innovation; George Washington ordered some in 1790, noting that by report they "consume their own smoke . . . give more light, and are cheaper than candles".  One of the many Athenaeum portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart hangs over the mantel.  Stuart painted three portraits of Washington from life, including the full-length Lansdowne portrait of 1796, owned by the Earl of Rosebery and on loan to the National Portrait Gallery.  Stuart also made copies of the Lansdowne portrait, one of which hangs in the East Room.  Portraits of Native Americans by Charles Bird King flank the east door, and a fifth hangs over the entrance to the corridor.  The Library was completely redecorated in 1962 as a "painted" room typical of the early 1800s and was refurbished again in 1976.  See many pictures at http://www.whitehousemuseum.org/floor0/library.htm

Russian bon bons  http://www.grouprecipes.com/45214/russian-bon-bons.html

musette  noun  1.  a. A small French bagpipe operated with a bellows and having a soft sound. b.  A soft pastoral air that imitates bagpipe music.  2.  A small canvas or leather bag with a shoulder strap, as one used by soldiers or travelers.  Also called musette bag.  American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

musette  noun  1.  (Instruments) a type of bagpipe with a bellows popular in France during the 17th and 18th centuries.  2.  (Dancing) a dance, with a drone bass originally played by a musette.

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003  http://www.thefreedictionary.com/musette

Four-time defending overall World Cup slalom ski champion Marcel Hirscher was extremely lucky to avoid being hit by a camera drone that crashed just behind him as he was racing on an Alpine course in Italy on December 22, 2015.  The international ski federation, known as FIS, took swift action December 23, banning drones from World Cup races “as long as I am responsible … because they are a bad thing for safety,” men's race director Markus Waldner told the Associated Press.  Chuck Schilken  http://www.latimes.com/sports/sportsnow/la-sp-sn-drones-banned-world-cup-skiing-20151223-story.html

20 Beautiful Christmas Poems  https://osr.org/blog/tips-gifts/20-beautiful-christmas-poems/

Clement Clark Moore (1779-1863) was born in a large mansion, on his parents' Chelsea estate that encompassed the area that is now 18^th to 24^th Streets between Eighth and Tenth Avenues in Manhattan.  The house itself was located at what is now Eighth Avenue and West 23^rd Street.  He was the only child of heiress Charity Clarke and Dr. Benjamin Moore, Episcopal Bishop of New York, Rector of Trinity Church, and President of Columbia College.  Moore was educated at home in his early youth and graduated first in his class from Columbia in 1798.  He became a well-known and respected scholar and, typical for an educated person of his period, Moore's publications related to a wide variety of topics such as religion, languages, politics, and poetry. When he wrote A Visit from St. Nicholas in 1822, Moore was a Professor of Oriental and Greek Literature, as well as Divinity and Biblical Learning, at the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church.  Located on land donated by the "Bard of Chelsea" himself, the seminary still stands today on Ninth Avenue between 20^th and 21^st Streets, in an area known as Chelsea Square.  At the age of thirty, he compiled a Hebrew lexicon, the first work of its kind in America.  He was forty-three when he wrote A Visit from St. Nicholas, but it was not until he was sixty-five, in 1844, that he first acknowledged that he was the author of the famous verses by including the poem in a small book of his poetry entitled Poems, which he had published at the request of his children.  He translated Juvenal, edited his father's sermons, wrote treatises and political pamphlets, including his well-known 1804 attack on our third president in Observations Upon Certain Passages in Mr. Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Which Appear to Have a Tendency to Subvert Religion and Establish a False Philosophy, and was often a contributor to the editorial pages of local newspapers.  He also wrote George Castriot, Surnamed Scanderbeg, King of Albania, which appeared in 1852 and was highly commended at the time.  Despite this scholarship, it was the simple but magical poem about the mysterious Christmas Eve visitor that has kept the memory of Clement Clarke Moore alive.  Although he was embarrassed for most of his life that his scholarly works were overshadowed by what he publicly considered a frivolous poem, Moore will forever be remembered as the person who truly gave St. Nicholas to the world.  Along with members of his family, he is buried in the Washington Heights area of New York City, in Trinity Cemetery at the Church of the Intercession on Upper Broadway at 155^th Street.

http://www.nightbeforechristmas.biz/moore.htm  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Clarke_Moore

For the Time Being:  A Christmas Oratorio, is a long poem by W. H. Auden, written 1941-42, and first published in 1944.  It was one of two long poems included in Auden's book also titled For the Time Being, published in 1944; the other poem included in the book was "The Sea and the Mirror".  The poem is a series of dramatic monologues spoken by the characters in the Christmas story and by choruses and a narrator.  The characters all speak in modern diction, and the events of the story are portrayed as if they occurred in the contemporary world.  Auden wrote the poem to be set to music by Benjamin Britten, but it was far too long for this purpose, and Britten set only two fragments, including one ("Shepherd's Carol") that Auden dropped before the work was published.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Time_Being  For the Time Being:  A Christmas Oratorio by W.H. Auden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFDrptw28yY  1:27:33  Performance starts at 3:28

Where's the cat?  Like the panda drawing by Gergely Dudás released in December 2015, the owls (and lone cat) "Where's Wally" style drawing contains references to the upcoming holiday with some of the birds wearing festive hats and sporting cheerful bowties.  Rose Troup Buchanan  See both puzzles at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/wheres-the-cat-hungarian-artist-post-follow-up-wheres-wally-style-puzzle-a6785281.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1398  December 24, 2015  On this date in 1777, Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island, was discovered by James Cook.  On this date in 1818, the first performance of "Silent Night" took place in the church of St. Nikolaus in Oberndorf, Austria.