Welcome to the Virtual Advent Calendar Tour

Correction posted December 4, 2016: I incorrectly stated yesterday that Nan is the name of the blog owner of Sprite Writes. Nan is the blog owner of Letters from a Hill Farm (see "Blogs of Substance" sidebar), and she is the blogger from whom I learned about the Virtual Advent Calendar Tour.

At long last, I am alerting all of you to the Virtual Advent Calendar Tour hosted by  Sprite Writes. I believe there are still days available for new bloggers to sign up.
So, what is the Virtual Advent Calendar Tour?
Individual bloggers sign up to host one or more days from December 1st to December 25th to blog about something seasonally related.
 Nan, at Sprite Writes, connects readers each day with a link to the blogger hosting the Virtual Advent Calendar Tour for that day. Very, very cool. I learned all about Sprite Write's tour, thanks to Letters from a Hill Farm (see "Blogs of Substance" Sidebar.)

I am the Friday, December 7th host of the Virtual Advent Calendar Tour. December 7th is the birthday of two family members who influenced my reading the most. My mother Lois and her oldest sister Ruth powerfully influenced my reading, as lots of regular readers of this blog already know. Lois and Ruth shared the same birthday, though they were 12 years apart. My December 7th blog post will not be about them, but it will be dedicated to them.
My Plans for December 7: To highlight my favorite, not commonly known, Christmas reads of all time.
So even though I love Dickens's A Christmas Carol, it will NOT be featured in my December 7th
post.

In other news:
I finished A Christmas Return by Anne Perry late this afternoon (liked it very much), while sipping a cup of tea from the Sikkim area of India, just south of the Darjeeling region. It's been so difficult to obtain quality Darjeeling tea for quite a while now, due to the successive crop failures year after year, all because of widespread drought. For years now, the news about the Darjeeling tea crop has been very sad. Yes, I'm a devotee of Darjeeling tea. What to do? My petty sadness is so trivial, compared to the losses of those in the Darjeeling region of India, in the foothills of the Himalayas.