Christmas is over and even during these challenging economic times, a recent report reveals that a record amount of money was spent on toys this year. Color TVs and computers also had a banner year. To sum it up, we may talk about bad times but the fact is most of us enjoy a great life . . . especially when compared to our parents and grandparents’ generations.

Many of us talk about “hard times” but the fact is few of us have ever really experienced “hard times.” Our parents’ generation knew what “hard times” really were. As children growing up in the Great Depression they knew that jobs were scarce and many did without many of the things we now take for granted. In a book I received for Christmas called “Country

In a book I received for Christmas called “Country Wisdom”, Donnie Kingman writes about the Great Depression . . .

“‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.’ This was the way of life for my family during the Depression. My parents were dryland farmers in West Texas. In the midst of the Depression, they were hit with a devastating drought.

Many people were at the edge of hunger from 1929 until about 1935. The drought was widespread; the Depression was nationwide.

We were fortunate to live on a farm where we grew much of our food. We had cows for milk and chickens for meat & eggs. We had a garden, but it only grew when it rained.

We raised two black-and-white Hampshire pigs each year for meat. It was exciting when there was a little frost in the morning and the weather was cold enough so that we could butcher the pigs.

There’s an old Southern expression about butchering that my grandmother used: “We’ll save everything but the squeal.” We made sausage and rendered the fat outside in a big, black iron wash pot. My grandfather kept the fire going to render the fat. Then we had gallons of lard to store for another year. We hung the hams to cure, and salted the bacon down for the winter in the old meat box.

In the spring, after we had used all the meat, my mother cooked the meat skins with pinto beans or black-eyed peas. Sometimes she fried them in her old iron skillet and used the fat to make gravy. It tasted good over hot biscuits.

There didn’t seem to be a recipe for her gravy. She just used any kind of fat; the best was drippings from the bacon, ham or sausage. She put the drippings in an old black skillet on the wood-burning stove. When it was hot, she added a handful of flour, a bit of salt & pepper, and poured in the liquid-milk, part milk & part water or, when there was no milk, just water. Water gravy was the last resort for many people. There is a saying: “Gravy saved more lives during the Depression than penicillin saves today.”

Part of our food came from the wild game that lived in the canyon and on the hilly part of the farm. On cold, cloudy days, my father took the .22 caliber rifle and went hunting. Sometimes he brought back young rabbits and birds and prepared them for cooking. My mother cooked them on the old black wood-burning stove. We had fried rabbit or bird’s breast and gravy.

If there wasn’t enough to fry, she would make what she called Irish stew. She boiled the meat, and added onions, potatoes, salt & pepper. We ate it with cornbread made from homegrown, coarse-ground corn. We usually ate cornbread twice a day.

As the Depression worsened, so did the drought. It just wouldn’t rain. The only time I remember seeing my mother desperate and seeming to lose hope was on a cold, dreary day in the old, drafty farmhouse that let sand and wind in around the windows and doors. We had no milk; the cows had gone dry. Mother was crying. She had used water, what cocoa she had, and some sugar to make us some hot chocolate.

Sometimes during the Depression we had food to share. We did most of our socializing sitting around the big wooden table in a warm kitchen, sharing food and interesting conversation with relatives and friends.

The Dallas Semiweekly Farm News published pictures of men, women and children waiting in long soup lines with cups and pails. My mother and grandmother worried about so many people being hungry. We considered ourselves fortunate and were thankful to have food.

One Sunday we came home from church, hot and tired, in a wagon pulled by old Prince and Myrtle, our two big, red horses, (We had a Model-T, but no gas.) When we arrived and went inside, my mother said, “Someone has been here.”

She went into the kitchen and saw that someone had taken the cold biscuits and beans. “Oh well,” she said, “someone must have been hungry.”

She became upset, however, when she discovered that her little cut-glass bowl, a wedding present, was missing. It contained some special food, dried apricots. My grandfather ordered them from California and shared them with us. These were the first apricots we’d ever tasted. Later we found the bowl in the pasture where we kept the horses and cows; it was unbroken, with only a small chip on the bottom. Today, the bowl is part of our family history.

My mother used everything. She used the backs of worn-out overall legs to make pants for my brothers. The blue-and-white striped ones my grandfather gave her she made into overalls for the babies. My grandmother supplied flour and sugar sacks to make diapers and underwear. One of my favorite makeovers was a red coat and plaid skirt that my teacher, Mrs. Barker, gave my mother. I felt proud to wear it to church and school. My mother always wore the same old coat.

Sometimes my mother sold some old hens to buy us shoes, and they had to last all year. The year I was 9 years old, mine wore out in early spring and I had to go to school barefoot. My brothers were glad to discard their worn, outgrown shoes as soon as the weather turned warm, but I found it humiliating. Later on, when the spring chickens were big enough to sell, my mother bought me some black, patent leather Mary Jane shoes to wear to church.

The cotton crops provided a little money. We saved what we could for necessities and essential foods such as flour, sugar, salt and coffee. In this way we survived the Depression. We were never really hungry, although food was scarce at times.

We went to church and school and grew up with the values we learned during the Depression: to be thankful, to save, to share, and to have compassion for others. We learned to work hard and not give up when things went bad. The example set by our parents and grandparents helped us survive and cope with life.”

When those that grew up in the Depression hear us talk about hard times they must have a difficult time not laughing.

What is the best way to avoid getting a cold? According to a recent report, the best remedy may be walking.

A mile or two a day may well help keep the doctor away, says LiveScience. com. Researchers at Appalachian State University in North Carolina monitored the health of 1,000 people, ages 18 to 85, for three months in the fall and winter, and quizzed them on their health and fitness habits. The people with the fewest and least-severe colds, it turned out, were those who exercised five or more times a week: Their cold symptoms ended 43-percent to 46-percent sooner than those in people who worked out once a week or not at all, and the symptoms themselves felt 41 percent less severe.

“We looked at diet, we looked at mental stress, weight, education levels, gender, on and on,” says study author David Nieman. “The most powerful weapon someone has during cold season is to go out on a near-daily basis, and put in at least a 30-minute brisk walk.” More frequent exercise gets immune cells circulating and appears to put them on alert.

Speaking of exercise, Martha Bolton shares some of her thoughts on the subject . . .

“Exercise is important at any age, but it’s especially important for those of us who are over forty. Lucky for me, there’s a fully equipped state-of-the-art YMCA gym about a mile or so from my home. It has everything Ð rowing machines, exercise bicycles, an Olympic-size swimming pool, aerobic classes. I know this because I drive by it every night on my way to Baskin Robbins. I looked into joining it, but they suggested I wait until they opened their new Intensive Care Unit (I think that’s their code name for advanced classes).

Realizing the importance of exercise, I have managed to work some of it into my daily routine. Whenever possible, I take the stairs instead of the elevator, especially if I’m going down. And now I run to the ice cream truck instead of walking to it. It’s a good workout and easier to catch up to it that way.

Tennis doesn’t work as well for me. I find it too difficult to keep track of the ball, and it’s much too tempting to use the net as a hammock.

I’ve tried working out on various forms of exercise equipment, but they’re not my cup of sweat, either. The idea of lifting weights doesn’t appeal to me in the least. I figure carrying junk mail into the house every day and tossing it into the wastebasket gives my muscles all the workout they need.

My experience with a treadmill was less than beneficial. I had one for a while, and my cardiovascular system might have gotten a good workout on it, but my pillow kept getting stuck on the conveyor belt.

Since I don’t like traditional forms of exercise, someone once asked me if I’d ever thought about giving clogging a try. Other than my arteries, I had to say no. Clogging does appear to be a great workout, though, so I’ve ordered a couple of videotapes. I figure if it doesn’t get me into shape at least it’d be a fun way to strip the varnish from my hardwood floors.

Walking is still one of the safest and most effective forms of exercise for those of us over forty, so I try to do a little each day. My favorite place to walk is the airport. If you’ve never tried it, you should check it out sometime. It’s air-conditioned, you get to meet a lot of different people from all over the world, and if you walk on the moving sidewalks, you can do two miles in nothing flat.

Even though I don’t exhibit much energy on the outside, in my mind I’m a workout fool. There‘s absolutely no exercise I can’t picture myself doing. Mention aerobics and in my mind I’m Jane Fonda. Gymnastics? I’m Mary Lou Retton. Swimming? I’m one of the lifeguards on Baywatch. But that’s just in my head. In reality, I’m more like Aunt Bea, Grandma Moses, and one of the near-drowning victims on Baywatch.

One of the reasons I don’t exercise is because of a bad experience I once had. Someone told me a vibrator belt was good for shaking your body into shape. You just wrap it around yourself, turn it on, and let it shake you like a bowl of Jell-O. It sounded simple enough. Besides, they also said it would help get rid of my cellulite, so I decided to give it a try. I used it on my hips and my legs, continued Page 7 and when they suggested I try it on my arms, I gave those a good shaking, too. It worked, but not in the way I had imagined.

When I woke up the next morning, I looked in the mirror and noticed something odd, something very different from the firm image I expected. For some reason, all my upper arm fat had slid down to my elbows. There were huge indentations in my upper arms Ð sinkholes, if you will --- that dipped almost to the bone. I had fat-free upper arms and elbows, the size of swim floats. In short, I looked like Popeye. The cellulite didn’t go away, it just went south for the winter.

I made an appointment with Dr. Robert Root, my long time physician, who after a thorough examination explained that it was some sort of medical oddity. People have used vibrators belts for years and he had never seen anything like this.

After two years of stares, questions from curious people and, of course the Popeye references, I awoke one morning to discover that my upper arm fat has mysteriously returned to where it came from. It had been two long years, but now the fat was back in its rightful place, along with the cellulite, but this time I decided to leave well enough alone.

The rest of my body could still use some work, though. And since I’m in my forties, I figure it’s time to make those changes. It’s time to develop an exercise program and stick with it. It’s time to . . . I’ll get back to this later. I think I just heard the ice cream truck.”