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Since I was a child, Christmas has meant putting up a real tree. A Christmas tree’s smell transforms the house. I like to fun my fingers through the needles and feel the sap and rough bark when I hold the tree while my husband tightens the screws.

Unpacking and hanging the ornaments takes me back in time to when a good friend or relative gave me a particular ornament. Or when my husband and I picked out ornaments together. And then there are my Woolworth’s painted wooden ornaments that I bought when I had very little money. I saved those ornaments to remind me of harder times, although I no longer tie crayons on the branches with bright red bows or drape garlands of hand strung cranberries on the branches. Now I have more ornaments than I can hang on a six- or seven-foot tree.

The lights and the lighted angel on top are what turns each year’s Christmas tree into a magical symbol of the holiday. So when we packed up the ornaments and pulled down the lights and angel yesterday, I was sad that Christmas has ended. The magic for this year is over.

But the today I did something I have not done before. I sawed off the balsam tree’s branches and spread them throughout my garden in our backyard. Now a tree will nourish the garden for the spring. Except for the trunk, the tree was not wasted. Somehow that makes the magic of Christmas last several months longer.

Raymond Chandler turned pulp fiction into art with his novels about murders and gumshoe Philip Marlowe. His writing was descriptive, graceful, and, at moments, even sublime. His best novels captured a world where murders took place, but the people he created were believable. Sometimes Chandler’s plots were a little contrived, but his characters made it easy to overlook the flaws. Philip Marlowe made Los Angelos a real place apart from its movie star mystique.

A new year has promise written all over it. While it’s not a blank slate,the new year offers the chance for change. So what do I want to change about what I do and who I am?

1. Be healthier and stronger, which means more exercise, including strength training (not my favorite) and more consistently eating healthy food.

2. Write more outside of my job, which means fewer distractions like movies from Netflix in the evenings and on weekends.

3. Design a garden up at the cabin for the hill, which means studying garden design and native plant books in the winter months.

If I can stick to these three resolutions, that’s enough until I come up with more for 2013.

Losing the characters in “All My Children” is like the death of longtime friends. These were the best kinds of friends: always there when you needed them but not demanding when you were absent.

Through the 41 years of “All My Children,” I was an intermittent, not a regular, watcher. My viewing started in high school because other kids watched the soap opera. To be accepted, I needed to know what was going on.

Initially, I was sort of horrified that high schoolers would be interested in a soap opera. My mother was allergic soap operas, and I had thought they were for lonely housewives. Yet I was surprised at how easy I became involved in the stories of the families of the mythic Pine Valley: Erica and her many husbands and lovers, her mother, and later her children; the cunning, manipulative Phoebe; the escapades of Tad; the romance of Nina and Cliff; and the nasty maneuvers of Adam, to name a few.

At the center of “All My Children,” Erica Kane was a late 20th-, early 21st-century version of Scarlett O’Hara. She was manipulative, selfish, and extraordinarily competitive, but Erica was also beautiful, sometimes generous, and occasionally kind. Despite everything, she was fun to watch and never boring.

The people around Erica were related by blood, many marriages, and rivalries. Brooke was the rational counterpart for Erica. She could stand up to her and come out a winner, at least sometimes.

The continuity in the many of the families made it easy to go away for many years, and then return and figure out what was going on easily. That’s what happened with me. After high school, I didn’t watch “All My Children” again until I was unemployed for a few months during the recession of 1991.

In 2006 and 2007, I returned again when I worked out at gym during lunch. If I could, I would switch one of three TVs to “All My Children,” which was much more entertaining than watching a sports program on ESPN. Because I love stories. And although some of the story lines were absurd, other stories were moving and dramatic. I could take my mind off my pain, and think about something else.

So I am very sad to see these wonderful characters leave the airwaves. Somehow, their stories made life at tough times a little more bearable, fun, and dramatic. And since “All My Children” had actors of all ages, the glimpse into other lives was more comprehensive than soap operas that only focus on the young and beautiful. I watched Erica, Tad, Brooke, and Dixie grow up and get older, although not always wiser.

I can only hope that “All My Children” gets picked up somewhere else, so viewers can find these friends when they need them.

Now I know why so many women left the farms. Making preserves is hard work. Somehow even though I made plum jam last year, I thought this year would be easier. Last year, I did the jam over two nights during the week–agonizing over when the plums would turn into the right consistency. This year I was making it on the weekend. It had to be better, right?!

Yesterday, I cut seven and one-half pounds of Italian plums into quarters, removing the pits. I added one cup of raw cane sugar per pound, a little sea salt, and the juice from one lemon. So far, the task was pretty easy. I loaded up an oversized saucepan for the sugar to do its magic overnight in the refrigerator.

This morning about 7:20 a.m., I pulled the juicy plums and sugar in the saucepan from the refrigerator onto the burner. I stirred, I read, stirred again, again, and again. I sat in the kitchen–watching my plums do a slow boil and slowly thicken–for hours. The plums still needed more cooking. (I did make one error; for the first three hours, the lid was on.) At 6 p.m., the plums were finally the right consistency to spoon into sterilized jars, add sterilized tops  and bands, and load into the boiling water of the canner.

This year, I made 10 small jars of plum jam that smelled and tasted heavenly versus nine last year. And it took one of my precious weekend days. Maybe the two weekday nights was better. That will be my plan for 2012 Christmas gifts. Waiting for plum jam isn’t as long as Waiting for Godet, but it sure seemed like a long Sunday.

For the July issue of Critical Values focused on leadership, Sara Patterson wrote an in-depth feature of C. Bruce Alexander, MD, FASCP, who spearheads the pathology residency program at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and who is currently the President-Elect for the American Society for Clinical Pathology. She interviewed author Carl Schoonover about his book, Portraits of the Mind: Visually the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century, which takes complicated scientific discoveries about the brain and makes them understandable for lay readers. Pathologists, physicians, and patients are learning more about personalized treatments for melanoma, the deadly skin cancer, by sharing information online and collaborating, Ms. Patterson reports. In this issue of the magazine, she served as managing editor and used InDesign copy editing software to work collaboratively with the design team and streamlined production.      

It’s rare that I see a movie twice in the theater. That’s precisely what I did for “Super 8,” acting like a teenage boy that movie theaters seek to attract. So why did I break my rules for this exceptional film? First, the central characters of 12 year olds reach great ensemble acting rarely seen among adult actors and bring fun, passion, and true feelings to their characters, particularly Elle Fanning. Second, this film moves back to the suburbs of 1979, a simpler time, without nostalgia but with realism. Third, Steven Spielberg returns to his roots and goes one better than “E.T.” or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” through this more imaginative movie. (I know Mr. Spielberg was the producer, not the director, but his fingerprints are all over it.)

So without revealing too much of the intriguing plot, once the kids start their film at midnight at the local train station to its touching conclusion, you’re in for a great two hours. I’d recommend this film to anyone with imagination from five to 95.

Leaning forward crounching on my kneepad while rose thorns dig into my back and arms to pull weeds under the three rose rosegula bushes, this morning I realized gardening isn’t for sissies. You may think gardening involves tossing in some flowers in the ground and watching them grow. How I wish it were that easy.

In my yard, gardening is a full combat sport. My opponents are weeds in all sorts of pesky varieties; ferns (at least in my city garden); and bugs–from slugs that attack the hostas to Asian beetles that assail the rose bushes. If I could use chemical pesticides like my mother-in-law, the battle would be more one-sided. But trying to combat these pests organically is much more lopsided. I am David fighting these three Goliaths.

Weeds are perverted flowers like the Orcs compared to the Elfs–a perversion of the species. Weeds were created to destroy flowers. If you want the flowers to live, you have to kill the weeds. If you ignore them for a while, the weeds get mighty.

Ferns are fine in the woods but not in an urban garden. If you don’t catch them early, their roots grow to the size of basketballs and send out “runners” that create more ferns in every direction. Digging out their roots can involve shovels, sweat, and falling backwards to tug out the root and kill the mother fern and her smaller children.

And finally, there are the bugs. I use sprays that stink more than 100 of the smelliest feet imaginable for roses, which have to be applied at least weekly or after every rain. For slugs, I tried filling submerged containers with beers at strategic spots. That failed last year because I had to do it every day. This year, I am trying to crush eggshells and throw them underneath the hostas. The summer is young, and I’m still optimistic. I just need to eat more eggs.

Promoted to Managing Editor of Critical Values, Sara Patterson wrote a profile of pathologist Kathryn Rizzo, MD, FASCP, who determined in eighth grade that she would become a doctor and then followed those steps to become a doctor, as well as edited and summarized an interview of artist Laura Ferguson who creates an inside-out anatomy of the human body in her artwork. To fit with the April issue’s focus on “Data Deluge,” she interviewed several laboratory professional members of the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) who earned the ASCP Board of Certification qualification in laboratory informatics about how it improved their career opportunities and fit into the data revolution for health care

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Critical Values, April 2011 Issue