Santa Arrives Quotes

Mum looks like someone has told her that Santa will be shortly arriving with that guy from Pride and Prejudice in tow.

Her hands tightened on him. “I mean it,” she said. “We’re not doing this.” “Define this.” “We’re not going to be friends.” “Deal,” he said. “We’re not going to even like each other.” “Obviously.” She stared into his eyes, hers turbulent and heated. “And no more kissing—” He swallowed her words with his mouth, delving deeply, groaning at the taste of her. He heard her answering moan, and then her arms wound tight around his neck. And for the first time since his arrival back in Santa Rey, they were on the same page.

We arrived at Council Bluffs at dawn; I looked out. All winter I’d been reading of the great wagon parties that held council there before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails; and of course now it was only cute suburban cottages of one damn kind and another,

At Durango the old Mexican prelate there had, after some delay, delivered to him the documents that defined his Vicarate, and Father Latour rode back the fifteen hundred miles to Santa Fé through the sunny days of early winter. On his arrival he found amity instead of enmity awaiting him. Father Vaillant had already endeared himself to the people.

According to the L.A. news, the explosion at the Santa Monica beach had been caused when a crazy kidnapper fired a shotgun at a police car. He accidentally hit a gas main that had ruptured during the earthquake. This crazy kidnapper (a.k.a. Ares) was the same man who had abducted me and two other adolescents in New York and brought us across country on a ten-day odyssey of terror. Poor little Percy Jackson wasn’t an international criminal after all. He’d caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterward, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus—“Why didn’t I remember him before?”). The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St. Louis Arch. After all, no kid could’ve done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo, and notified the police. Finally, brave Percy Jackson (I was beginning to like this kid) had stolen a gun from his captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach. Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson and his two friends were safely in police custody.

December 16, 1846, the fifteen composing the "Forlorn Hope," left Donner Lake. January 17, 1847, as they reached Johnson's ranch; and February 5th Capt. Tucker's party started to the assistance of the emigrants. This first relief arrived February 19th at the cabins; the second relief, or Reed's party, arrived March 1st; the third, or Foster's, about the middle of March; and the fourth, or Fallon's, on the seventeenth of April. Upon the arrival of Capt. Fallon's company, the sight presented at the cabins beggars all description. Capt. R. P. Tucker, now of Goleta, Santa Barbara County, Cal., endeavors, in his correspondence, to give a slight idea of the scene.

When Leonardo was painting The Last Supper (fig. 74), spectators would visit and sit quietly just so they could watch him work. The creation of art, like the discussion of science, had become at times a public event. According to the account of a priest, Leonardo would “come here in the early hours of the morning and mount the scaffolding,” and then “remain there brush in hand from sunrise to sunset, forgetting to eat or drink, painting continually.” On other days, however, nothing would be painted. “He would remain in front of it for one or two hours and contemplate it in solitude, examining and criticizing to himself the figures he had created.” Then there were dramatic days that combined his obsessiveness and his penchant for procrastination. As if caught by whim or passion, he would arrive suddenly in the middle of the day, “climb the scaffolding, seize a brush, apply a brush stroke or two to one of the figures, and suddenly depart.”1 Leonardo’s quirky work habits may have fascinated the public, but they eventually began to worry Ludovico Sforza. Upon the death of his nephew, he had become the official Duke of Milan in early 1494, and he set about enhancing his stature in a time-honored way, through art patronage and public commissions. He also wanted to create a holy mausoleum for himself and his family, choosing a small but elegant church and monastery in the heart of Milan, Santa Maria delle Grazie, which he had Leonardo’s friend Donato Bramante reconstruct. For the north wall of the new dining hall, or refectory, he had commissioned Leonardo to paint a Last Supper, one of the most popular scenes in religious art. At first Leonardo’s procrastination led to amusing tales, such as the time the church prior became frustrated and complained to Ludovico. “He wanted him never to lay down his brush, as if he were a laborer hoeing the Prior’s garden,” Vasari wrote. When Leonardo was summoned by the duke, they ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate, Leonardo explained. Intuition needs nurturing. “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he told the duke, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

Completed circa 1593, this early self-portrait depicts the artist as Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. According to Caravaggio’s first biographer, Giovanni Baglione, the work was a cabinet piece created with the aid of a mirror. It dates from Caravaggio’s first years in Rome, after his arrival from his native Milan in 1592. Sources tend to agree that at one point the artist fell ill and spent six months in the hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione, possibly suffering an ailment like malaria, which would explain the jaundiced appearance of the skin and the icterus in the eyes, as portrayed in Bacchus.

One of those was Gary Bradski, an expert in machine vision at Intel Labs in Santa Clara. The company was the world’s largest chipmaker and had developed a manufacturing strategy called “copy exact,” a way of developing next-generation manufacturing techniques to make ever-smaller chips. Intel would develop a new technology at a prototype facility and then export that process to wherever it planned to produce the denser chips in volume. It was a system that required discipline, and Bradski was a bit of a “Wild Duck”—a term that IBM originally used to describe employees who refused to fly in formation—compared to typical engineers in Intel’s regimented semiconductor manufacturing culture. A refugee from the high-flying finance world of “quants” on the East Coast, Bradski arrived at Intel in 1996 and was forced to spend a year doing boring grunt work, like developing an image-processing software library for factory automation applications. After paying his dues, he was moved to the chipmaker’s research laboratory and started researching interesting projects. Bradski had grown up in Palo Alto before leaving to study physics and artificial intelligence at Berkeley and Boston University. He returned because he had been bitten by the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial bug.

Unfortunately, on Christmas morning 1492 the Santa María ran aground on the northern coast of what is now Haiti. Not having any way to refloat her, the crew off-loaded the provisions and equipment from the ship before she broke up. For protection they then built a flimsy fortification on the beach, calling it “La Navidad.” With the consent of the local Indian Chief, Columbus left behind 39 men with orders to establish a settlement, and appointed Diego de Arana, a cousin of his mistress Beatriz, as the Governor. On January 16, 1493, Columbus left Navidad and sailed for Portugal and Spain on the Niña. Everything went well until the two remaining ships, the Niña and the Pinta, became separated from each other. Columbus was convinced that the captain of the faster Pinta would get back to Spain first, thereby garnering all the glory by telling lies about him and his discoveries. On March 4th, a violent storm off the Azores forced him to take refuge in Lisbon. Both ships, amazingly enough, arrived there safely. A week later, Columbus continued on to Palos, Spain, on the Gulf of Cádiz, from whence he had started. Finally, on March 15th, he arrived in Barcelona. It seems that all’s well that ends well, because he was hailed a hero and news of his discovery of new lands spread throughout Europe like wildfire.

Pots hung from the ceiling beams, between the festoons of braided garlic, the hams, the salsicce, bunches of mountain herbs for medicine, strings of dried porcini, necklaces of dried apple rings in winter, chains of dried figs. The smell of onions, of hot lard and smoldering oak wood, of cinnamon and pepper, always seemed to hang in the air. The larder was full of meat at all times, needless to say: not small pieces, but huge joints and sides of beef and lamb, which Mamma and Carenza could never hope to use just for our household, and which were quietly passed on to the monks of Santa Croce so that they could feed the poor. Carenza made salami with fennel seeds and garlic, prosciutto, pancetta. Sometimes the air in the larder was so salty that it stung your nostrils, and sometimes it reeked of spoiled blood from the garlands of hares, rabbits, quail, thrushes and countless other creatures that would arrive, bloody and limp, from Papa's personal game dealer. Next to the larder, a door led out to our courtyard, which Mamma had kept filled with herbs. An ancient rosemary bush took up most of one side, and the air in summer was always full of bees. Sage, thyme, various kinds of mint, oregano, rocket, hyssop, lovage and basil grew in Mamma's collection of old terra-cotta pots. A fig tree was slowly pulling down the wall, and a tenacious, knotted olive tree had been struggling for years in the sunniest corner.

Stupidity is using a rule where adding more data doesn’t improve your chances of getting [a problem] right. In fact, it makes it more likely you’ll get it wrong. Intelligence, on the other hand, is using a rule that allows you to solve complex problems with simple, elegant solutions. Stupidity is a very interesting class of phenomena in human history, and it has to do with rule systems that have made it harder for us to arrive at the truth. It’s an interesting fact that, whilst there are numerous individuals who study intelligence—there are whole departments that are interested in it—if you were to ask yourself what’s the greatest problem facing the world today, I would say it would be stupidity. So we should have professors of stupidity—it would just be embarrassing to be called the stupid professor.” - David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute

Some 310,000 Indians lived within the boundaries of the present state in 1769. Approximately 60,000 lived in the coastal region between San Diego and San Francisco where Serra hoped to establish a series of missions.84 The Luiseño and then the Acjachemen resided to the immediate north of the Kumeyaay. The Gabrielino occupied the coastal plain of Los Angeles, the Chumash inhabited an expanse from Malibu to San Luis Obispo, the Yokuts lived in the Central Valley, and the Salinan and Ohlone settled the central coast between Santa Barbara and the Golden Gate. The Pomo, Coast Miwok, Wappo, Patwin, and Eastern Miwok lived in the regions immediately north and east of the San Francisco Bay Area.85 Although Alta California successfully supported a large human population, it was hardly disease-free. Even before the Spaniards arrived, a wide variety of infections were common, all of which led to high mortality

Since the British now ruled what had been Dutch colonies, English became the official language there and the Dutch had to learn to speak it. This wasn’t easy. They had trouble pronouncing certain words in the new language. So when they earnestly began to tell the Christmas stories to their newly arrived English neighbors, they couldn’t quite say “Saint Nicholas” clearly. What the English listeners heard was “Sintnicklus” and walked away thinking the gift-giver was “Sinta Klass,” which they soon pronounced in a more traditional English way. For the first time in America, some children began believing that their Christmas presents were delivered by “Santa Claus.

Just after a krampus that people had spotted in the area.” That got my attention. “A krampus? You’re sure?” Petra nodded. “I saw it walking down the road, swinging its chains around. Those fucking horrific bell things were making noise. You can’t really mistake a krampus for anything else.” In mythology, a krampus was a sort of anti-Santa. It would spirit away the naughty boys and girls to its lair. What it did with them is open to interpretation; some say it drowned the children and ate them, while some suggested it just kept them until they behaved and then brought them back. In most instances the truth is quite far removed from reality, but in the case of the krampus, truth and reality weren’t all that dissimilar. Krampus don’t care one way or the other about the behavior of the children they steal. They take children back to their lairs and feast on their souls, tossing the corpse of the child into a nearby stream or river when they finish. Unlike animals that need to hibernate during the winter, krampus only feed during the coldest months of the year, before vanishing once spring arrives. Before the tenth century, there were hundreds of the bastards running around, although nearly all of them were killed after it was made illegal to create them. Like most of the truly horrific creations in the world, krampus were made using dark blood magic. At one point, they’d been human, although once the magic had finished with them, any glimmer of humanity had been extinguished. They were considered a crime against magic, and their creation was punishable by death. Apparently, someone was unconcerned about the possibility of such things, if he or she had taken the time and effort to make a krampus and unleash it on the town of Mittenwald.

A beautiful young woman wants to meet Santa Claus, so she puts on a robe and stays up late on Christmas Eve. Santa arrives, climbs down the chimney, and begins filling the stockings. He is about to move on to the next house when the gorgeous redhead says in a sexy voice, “Oh, Santa, please stay. Keep the chill away.” Santa replies, “HO HO HO, gotta go, gotta go. Gotta get the presents to the children, you know.” The girl drops her robe to reveal a sexy bra and panties, and says in her most flirtatious tone, “Oh, Santa, don’t run a mile; just stay for a while...” Santa begins to sweat but replies, “HO HO HO, gotta go, gotta go. Gotta get the presents to the children, you know.” The girl takes off her bra and says, “Oh, Santa... please... stay.” Santa wipes his brow but replies, “HO HO HO, gotta go, gotta go. Gotta get the presents to the children, you know.” She loses the panties and says, “Oh, Santa... please... stay....” Santa, trembling, says, “HEY HEY HEY, gotta stay, gotta stay! Can’t get up the chimney with my pecker this way!!!

I don’t mean to nitpick, but there are a few questions that come to mind about this scientific explanation of the law of attraction. How, exactly, does sending out thought frequencies make something materialize in our lives? Let’s say I have my heart set on a new wide-screen TV that is sitting in the showroom of my local electronics dealer. I ask the universe for the TV, believe that I will get it, and receive positive thoughts and feelings about it. My positive thought frequencies zoom out of my head and into the showroom, and because they are magnetic, the TV moves closer to me. But wait a minute—does it actually inch closer each day? Won’t the store personnel be a little suspicious when they arrive in the morning and find that the TV has moved to the loading dock? And how exactly does the TV get into my living room? Does it swoop in through the chimney like Santa delivering presents on Christmas Eve? Aren’t there a few unresolved questions here?

Faced with the enormous insult of his burial in Rome, the citizens of Florence finally realized their cultural and spiritual debt to Buonarroti. They hurriedly collected public donations to hire the services of Florence’s best burglars. The two thieves rode to Rome in an oxcart. After sundown, they broke into the church, stole the famous artist’s body, rolled it up with cords, and disguised it as a bale of rags. They put it in the back of the cart and rode like blazes back to Florence, arriving at dawn. The joyous Florentines immediately entombed their Michelangelo inside the Basilica of Santa Croce, where his tomb can still be seen today.

Although this may have been just another lie, his luck held out and two days later in the early hours of October 12, 1492, Juan Rodríguez Bermeo, the lookout on the Pinta, spotted a light and alerted the other ships by firing the signal cannon. Captain-General Juan de la Cosa, the owner of the Santa Maria, woke Columbus to notify him of this sighting. Rubbing his eyes, Columbus stated that he had seen the light a few hours earlier, thereby claiming in a rather unethical way, a lifetime pension for being the first man to sight land. When they went ashore later that day, Columbus named the island San Salvador. He mistakenly thought that he had arrived in the “Indies,” an early name for Asia, and thus named the indigenous natives “Indians.” Anthropologists believe that the first natives Columbus encountered on the island were Lucayan-Arawak Indians. In Columbus’ logbook, he noted that they had little knowledge of fighting and that they did not wear clothes. Apparently, they were exceptionally clean and washed themselves frequently. Although leery of Columbus and the scruffy newcomers with him, they were very polite and perhaps somewhat fearful of them. It was noted that the women stayed in the background and did most of the work around the village, whereas the men did the fishing. In contrast to these polite people, the members of Columbus’ crew were a rough and crass lot.

Me? I felt like I was going to throw up just because the bill had arrived at a Santa Monica sushi restaurant.

arrived that the Christmas lights had already been switched on. In daylight they were off, of course, but they still looked festive. She would usually spend Christmas with Harry and Jean and of course more lately, just with Harry. Her father gave her presents on Christmas Eve and then, duty done, kissed her goodbye until the festivities were over. It was a relief on both parts. Her dad had no idea how to do Christmas. Lauren knew he’d spend most of it drunk with various women in various nightclubs or in various casinos. It always amazed her that however much he drank, he still had this incredibly acute awareness of what was going on around him. It was something that was quite scary about him. That even when he lost control, he seemed to be kind of in control about losing it. She crossed the road alongside groups of families, chattering teens and excited kids who were going to see Father Christmas. A bit early for that, Lauren thought. When her mum had been alive and Lauren had been a little thing, they’d gone to see Santa Claus in one of the big department stores

Robert Oppenheimer moved to Santa Fe with a small team of aides on March 15, 1943, brisk early spring. Scientists and their families arrived by automobile and train during the next four weeks. Not much was ready on the mesa, which they began to call the Hill.

Christmas hadn’t just arrived at Four Roses Farm. It had been here all along, waiting for her to discover it.

Ferran was not as mad the next day; he even cracked a smile and seemed to be normal. Nice to Martina. He had brought a pair of glasses for Adam, made in Israel, and asked me to make sure that I gave them into his hands. He said he would not be able to see without them. I wish I had known that I was supposed to break those glasses. Interestingly, Ferran also handed me Adam's brand new Israeli passport, although Adam had not been in Israel for over 10 years. The signature in Adam Maraudin's Israeli passport was the same signature as the letter “L” in Tom Titelany's French passport, which I had photocopy of. How did they do that without Adam entering Israel or sitting in a jail in Israel? It must be: “Magic.” Martina was reading a book, George Orwell's 1984, in the store. One of my favorite books of all time. One of my favorite authors of all time. The strange thing was only that Martina should have read it before in high school. In Hungary, it was part of the curriculum, being a crucial piece. To recognize the Evil and terror in all its forms and shapes. She was so cute, reading in wintertime Barcelona, in Urgell, that I couldn’t just watch her; I had to interrupt her and kiss her from time to time, as I checked up on her while working in the office and the storage during the day when I stopped by. Poor baby, she was bored. Somehow like Sabrina had been, arriving in the same rhythm at the end of summer, with not much to do in wintertime Barcelona. But. Drugs. And. For. Some. Reason. In. Secret. Behind. My. Back. With. Strangers. I didn't consider how it would sound when I told Martina Sabrina's story - how she had fallen so low, becoming unemployed, sleeping with strangers, and indulging in drugs and alcohol. It didn't come across as a success story at all. I thought. “The Dream of Venus” by Salvador Dali. Also, Martina had come from the Southern hemisphere at the end of winter there, and had arrived in the Northern hemisphere when winter started here. She was in the middle of her personal year-long winter, reading so cutely with her cute glasses in the dark Urgell store upstairs with Pinto cat. Martina was wearing glasses for reading only; they had a cute frame. She seemed like she was just waiting for something to happen, almost as if she was waiting for Santa Claus to arrive. And I should have been listening to my instincts, because that was precisely what was happening, what she was doing - waiting for Santa to appear.

At a key point in the letter James told his readers: “You do not have because you do not ask God” (4:2). Prayer makes a difference. Your prayer makes a difference. “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” (5:16). One of the most successful advertising campaigns of recent years came from a regional airline in the US during the run-up to Christmas. They set up a “virtual Santa” in the departure lounge of a domestic flight. Passengers would scan their boarding pass, activating a screen featuring Santa (located somewhere else and with access to their flight details), who would then ask them what they wanted for Christmas before sending them on their way. Unbeknownst to the passengers, employees from the airline then went out to local malls to purchase and wrap the very things the passengers had asked for—everything from new socks to a widescreen TV. When the passengers arrived at their destination, their gifts arrived along with their luggage at the baggage belt. Many stood in disbelief when they realised what had happened. Needless to say, the video recording their reactions went viral, providing the airline with way more publicity and goodwill than a standard commercial would have generated. But after the warm glow from watching it subsided, I had one thought in my mind: The guy who only asked for socks must be kicking himself. Once he’d realised what had happened, surrounded by people with expensive cameras and tablets, he must have felt a little foolish clutching a pair of socks. If only he had known. If only he had asked. James does not want us to make the same mistake. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. It is real. Things actually happen. God answers. How foolish we are not to pray far more than we do. How foolish, at the end of the day, aware of all that we could have had, to be left clutching the equivalent of a pair of socks that we never even realised we would get. Not every Christian can be a great theologian, preacher, missionary or evangelist. But every Christian can be a great and effective pray-er.

were fighting to the death over a soggy pizza crust. “Doesn’t look that impressive,” Mike observed. We all hopped out of the cab and hurried through a light drizzle to the employee entrance. There was a small foyer where another guard was on duty, controlling a second set of secure, alarmed doors. The guard observed the arrival of our wet, improperly dressed group with concern until Catherine breezed through the door. Then her face lit up as though she were a small child who had just found Santa Claus coming down the chimney. “My stars, Mrs. Hale! It’s been far too long since you’ve graced this entrance.” “It certainly has, Lizette,” Catherine agreed. “My work in the States has taken

n the tropical climates of the Caribbean and the temperate climes of South America, where Christmas falls smack in the middle of summer, there is no Santa arriving on a sleigh, no jingle bells in the snow, no stockings hung on the mantel with care. it's a holiday for family, for grown-ups as well as children, celebrated with plenty of traditional food, drink, music, and dance. Nochebuena, Christmas Eve, is the night for la misa del gullo, “the rooster's mass," which begins at midnight.

Ever since Spain and Mexico began to settle this part of the Southwest over the course of three hundred years, those people and those communities had protection and respect from both Mexico and Spain. Those governments never stole the land from their people. It was with the arrival of the United States, "the democratic government of the United States, the leader of the free world," that we began to have problems and violations of our land rights. Spain and Mexico have valiantly guarded the archives that document the ownership rights, but people such as members of the Santa Fe Ring have destroyed those records. So I would ask, "Who has caused this problem with the land, Reies or the Anglos?" And every day I would hit on that theme as best I could.

The night constructs lustrous indoctrinations in somnolence or naps, as the snow drifts around many trees at vesper. It is like God's miscellaneous keepsakes that are being shared. People come together in the exchange and felicitation of cheerfulness, fun, and smiles, lovingly subduing their requests; every room is decorated. Someone is going to buy a dress, diamonds, silver, and gold jewelry, along with elegant clothing and various fragrances of perfume; it's time for lots of selfies. The celebration of joy about to mark Santa's arrival at home will be signified by ringing the bell amidst a spread of treats, without any paradox, accompanied by entertainment. "There is noise, cacophony, and the screams of joy in the moonlight, with many balloons, as well as the preparation of pancakes, chocolates, and desserts with a taste for love." It is the day of extravagant holidays of sustainable practice.