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Highlands Today

Easier Christmas Shopping Found Later

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By Raleigh Whiteman | Highlands Today

Published: November 29, 2007

We were in Sebring Sunday evening, mistakenly thinking the stores stayed open until 9 p.m., but we were wrong, it was Sunday and they close at 8 p.m. We checked out very fast with no other customers in line. As much as I dislike shopping I have learned one thing by that experience and it's to shop after 6 p.m. on Sundays and not have to wait in line.

With that in mind, I will write down a list of gifts to get on the next four Sundays shortly before the stores close. It could save my sanity by not having to cope with the super long lines and crowds that will surely be around every other day until after Christmas.

The 20th Century In Brief

There are not too many of us who can remember the decade of 1900-1910, so I can't ask anyone I know what that decade was called, as in the '20s or '40s or '60s of the 20th Century.

Researching back I have found some interesting things of that era, like corsets, super-thin waists and women wearing really big hats. The men wore derbys or Homberg hats or the very formal stiff top hat, men's coats were long and came down to the knee.

In 1900 the South was Democratic and the north was Republican with the same red and blue respectively, denoting those states electoral decisions. William McKinley with running mate Theodore Rosevelt won the election of 1900, running against William Jennings Bryant and Adlia Stevenson, who later became vice president under Grover Cleveland, Democrat. Stevenson was the father of Adlia Stevenson II who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1952 and 1956.

With that bit of history I will go back to the decades that some can recall, like the flappers of the '20s, the gloomy economy of the '30s, the wars of the '40s and the atomic bomb, the upswing music of the '50s, the rebellion and rise of the hippies in the '60s; perhaps the most important years of that century because of the changes in segregation and equal rights. The '70s had its own music with disco parties and dancing all night long with lots of sexual freedoms being exercised because of the "pill," and bra burnings. The '80s can best be remembered with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War with Russia, whites and blacks were beginning to get along much better and mixed race marriages began to be accepted. Computers began coming into play with the first Macintosh being made.

In the '90s, middle-class folks started owning computers, the Soviet Union became Russia. The United States got into the war against Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the Gulf War, chasing them back to Baghdad.

The New Century

Now we are in the first era of the 21st Century, which I will assume will be called the '00s. It will go down in history as the era that the United States entered into battle against Saddam Hussein and then after finding him and getting him executed continued with the unending war to end terrorism.

This era may also be remembered as the years the people of the United States had to put down all their bigotries and prejudices and decide upon the candidates running for president. A female or a black man on the Democratic side and a Mormon, and a divorced ex-governor on the Republican side will likely be our choices.

At any rate it will be an end to a very interesting and possibly changing decade.

Raleigh Whiteman, of Lake Placid, can be contacted on the Internet at rwwhiteman@comcast.net

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