The end of the year is approaching and we tend to look at an overview of the year gone by and see if there’s a possibility of better times in the year ahead.

WW I finally ended in this year of 2009 for Britain. Last year in November, Harry Patch and two other World War I veterans, Henry Allingham and William Stone, aged 108, attended the annual Armistice Day ceremony in London. But Stone died Jan. 10 this year and Allingham aged 113 on July 18. Patch followed exactly one week later aged 111.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a song almost as likely to be heard this time of year as I’m dreaming of a White Christmas. Like all songs it has a little story and some trivia associated with it. Here is the modern story, and we’ll try and pull in some ancient stuff at the end to connect Rudolph with the far past.

An official statement from a Mayan religious body has said that they are sorry but they lost 200 years in their calculations. So the end of the world won’t happen in 2012 as we all hoped. It will take another couple of hundred years. And just as all the omens were looking good. Pollution, global warming, epidemics, genocide, famine, insane wars and all the other stuff.

So what can we do about it. We in this country obviously require some disaster to be afraid of or our lives are not complete. A replacement must be found.

Since I wrote about the way people deceive their children about Santa Claus in Part 2 we have had an article in the local paper giving people advice on how to tell their children about Santa. They are advised to tell their children that Santa is a nice guy so that they aren’t scared when they are plunked on his lap.

Instead of threatening that Santa will ignore them if they don’t do their little chores we are advised to tell them that not cleaning up their room will made Santa sad, and that they may not get any new toys if the old ones are left scattered all over the floor.