I was talking to an acquaintance a few days ago. He is a newspaper photographer and had just come from a devastating house fire where a young couple lost everything…with the exception of their lives. In general things are just things. If you are alive, you can always rebuild. Investigators weren’t sure if the home had working smoke detectors.

When we were talking, I had just finished replacing the smoke alarms in my house. And I don’t mean the batteries, but the entire smoke alarms. Did you know you were supposed to replace smoke alarms every 10 years? It was news to me.

Smoke alarms are electrical devices and as such they can fail. The likelihood that they will fail increases a little bit every year. So, you should test them regularly and then replace them after 10 years. Some new alarms come with 10-year long-life batteries. Instead of replacing batteries every six months (and forgetting) the alarms are sealed. When the alarm stops working, you replace the entire unit. This also helps avoid the temptation of pulling the batteries out of alarms to use in a child’s toy.

According to the National Fire Protection Association

• Three out of five home fire deaths result from fires in properties without working smoke alarms
• More than one-third (37 percent) of home fire deaths result from fires in which no smoke alarms are present.
• The risk of dying in a home fire is cut in half in homes with working smoke alarms.

A couple years ago, I wrote a column about the very first electric Christmas lights. As a publicity stunt, on December 22, Edward Johnson, then the vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company, strung 80 colored lights on a Christmas tree. Before that, house fires were common as people placed burning candles in the dried out branches. (That column is on my website: Christmas lights and December 22)

People aren’t hanging open flames in their trees any more (I hope!) but winter is still the season for fires in fireplaces, space heaters and other devices that can cause fires in homes. While we should do everything we can to prevent a house fire at all, please think about a Christmas gift for your home – replace your smoke alarms.

You can always rebuild after a fire, but not if you don’t make it out alive..

My stepdaughter works retail in the mall. She is already sick of “christmas”. (I intentionally used a lower case “c” there. She isn’t sick of Christmas, just the shopping and hype of it all.) They’ve had Christmas decorations up since before Halloween. In fact, she has a picture of kids trick-or-treating in the mall with holiday decorations in the background.

Stores are announcing their “Black Friday” sales that begin at 6 pm on Thanksgiving Day.

Six years ago, this country went through one of the worst recessions it has seen since the Great Depression. But for the last two years or so we’ve been hearing commercials telling us to get the credit “we deserve” so we can buy home latte machines or better cars that we “deserve”.

Have you ever seen someone trying so hard to have fun that they are miserable? That’s what it seems like we’re all doing right now. We want to convince ourselves that if we rush out and buy that extra television or coffee maker, we’ll be “happy”. And we have to start even earlier or be more desperate to get a “great deal” on something that was made in China. Because that is what “christmas” is all about. (Again, lower case “c”.)

I’ve always loved Thanksgiving and the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas can be a pretty magical with parties, decorations and time with family. In the last few weeks/months, I’ve had some family challenges…health issues and such. Most of it is just life, of course. But rather than worrying about those challenges, I want to focus on the positives.

Thanksgiving is for being thankful for what we have. It was created as a holiday to be thankful for a great harvest…back when we were farmers. Now it is a time to pause and think about the real things we have. And by real, I don’t mean flat screens and electronic gadgets. Some of that stuff only lasts a year or so and then it has to be upgraded or replaced. Real is a warm place to sleep, family, friends, enough to eat. The rest is just window dressing.

It is also a time to think about those who don’t have those basics. Take some of that money you are going to “save” on Black Thursday/Friday and buy a gift for a kid who wouldn’t get one. Or donate some food/money to a food bank.

Lastly, think about holding back some of that gift money you plan to spend and shopping at a local/privately owned store instead of standing in line to shop at a big box for a “deal” that was made in China. Buy something special and unique from an artist or craftsperson in your neighborhood. That money stays at home and helps a struggling business stay afloat. It also marks you as a sophisticated gift giver.

Take a moment to pause and be thankful for what you have.

Happy Thanksgiving..

A group of characters in the book/television series Game of Thrones that represent “the north” have the family catchphrase “Winter is coming.” They say it in context of “it might be nice now, but winter is coming.” They are pretty much the downers they sound like.

Winter is definitely coming around here and with it are the beautiful snows (they are always beautiful the first time) slick roads, car accidents, power outages, and French Toast panics at the grocery store (what else do you do with bread, milk and eggs that get stripped from store shelves when weather forecasters announce winter weather warnings?).

What winter also brings are the inevitable photos on social media of thermometers with sub-freezing temperatures and piles of snow with comments like “What global warming?” We heard a few similar comments like that during the election. “Sure, climate changes all the time. It is raining outside right now.”

Climate is not weather. My daughters learned the difference in their Seventh Grade science text books.

• Climate is the “Condition of the atmosphere at a particular location over a long period of time (from one month to many millions of years, but generally 30 years).”
• Weather is the “state of the air and atmosphere at a particular time and place: the temperature and other outside conditions (such as rain, cloudiness, etc.) at a particular time and place.”

If you take away nothing else from this column, I hope it is to avoid looking foolish by confusing the two.

A couple years ago, I met a man from Norway, who happens to have a home in the Eastern Panhandle. He told me his hometown has trouble staging their annual winter games for lack of snow. The last two winter Olympics had trouble with warm weather and missing snow. In the arctic, the sea ice that makes up the top of the world has retreated significantly over the last 30 years or so (climate) but the October averages show sea ice is on the increase compared to summer (weather).

I believe the earth’s climate is warming. I believe the pollution we’ve dumped into the atmosphere has played a role in that. That said, I don’t feel the need to “convince” anyone of anything. Frankly, I don’t think it’s possible. You’re going to believe what you want to believe. Most people search for information online and disregard what doesn’t say what they want to hear. They click on links that support their beliefs.

Right now, there is a $500,000 prize for someone who can prove, scientifically, that global warming is true. There is also a $30,000 prize, funded by a scientist for anyone who can prove it isn’t real. Neither has been claimed.

But please, stop dismissing people who disagree with you using with over-simplified arguments like, “It’s raining outside…”. It just makes you look silly and galvanizes the conversation, making discussion impossible.

Remember, winter is coming..