Day 5: December 25, 2017
Merry Christmas

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Today did not go at all as planned. That's OK but it requires some explanation. While on Saturday's Jekyll Island tour, I learned that a trolley tour was available on Saint Simons. There's just one a day and by the time I looked into it yesterday, it was too late. However, the tour was available on Monday and I successfully booked it. With Monday being Christmas I was a little surprised but not shocked. Tourist dependent businesses need to operate when the tourists are around and that could easily mean Christmas. I knew that at least a couple of nearby restaurants planned to be open on Monday and had actually avoided one in order to save it for after my tour. On Christmas, my phone rang on the way to the tour. It was from an unfamiliar number and I didn't answer under the assumption that legitimate callers leave messages. She was and she did. The Christmas tour availability was a mistake. It was to have been removed from the website weeks ago. Apparently I was the only one who was dumb enough to think it might be legit. Rather than hang around Saint Simons, which I had already puttered around quite a bit on Sunday, I decided to head over to Jekyll Island. My time there on Friday had been at or after twilight and I'd since learned of a quite old piece of Jekyll Island history I had not seen. That piece of history is this tabby house that William Horton built around 1743.

When I decided to leave Saint Simons for Jekyll, I assumed I would find a replacement for that restaurant I was skipping for the second time. That was a bad assumption. The one restaurant I found open offered only a very upscale buffet that had taken over what was normally the bar so that there wasn't even the option of sipping a beer while contemplating my situation. I did find a place that would open at 4:00 with "Christmas dinner and all the trimmings". The dining room at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel may have also had something going but anything there seemed likely to be even more upscale (and outside my comfort zone) than what I'd already seen. In the end I headed back to Saint Simons and the restaurant I'd been trying to replace.

And that's how I came to be sitting down to a normal Christmas dinner of crab cake, grits, and broccoli when these four lads came by singing Christmas songs. That's Matthew on the left, then Mark, Luke, and Ringo. Together they're called the Jinjers. Dumb name. Funny spelling. It could work.


This year's musical selection is a song from 1953. Cincinnatians are either sick and tired of it or can't get enough. Others will probably quickly join one side or the other. If you'd like to know more about the original recording, here is a 2010 interview with the little girl who made it.

Today's background is this tree in a small park in the historic district of Brunswick, Georgia.


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