SusieJ's Advent Calendar December 4, 2007

The recipe: Lebkuchen bars

Lebkuchen are often compared to gingerbread, but are much richer, moister and spicier. This bar recipe is easier to make than the fiddly Elisenlebkuchen/

The surprise: Animating your lights

Geeks will want to control their lights with a programmable logic controller. Christmas brings out the kid in geeks!

Multicolored!

What child doesn't love Christmas lights?

Driving home from some adult party, my parents would encourage me to shout out the colors of the lights of the houses we drove past. I was very small, and just learning my colors. In the early 70s we only had C7 and C9 bulbs, but they came in every color I knew.

We would see evergreens and shrubs wrapped with strings of lights and houses outlined like glowing cartoons. No nets, twinkling lights or icicles. If one bulb went out, the whole string went out.

"Green!" I'd proclaim. "Red! Blue! White! Yellow!"

But one innovation stumped me. Some houses had lights of every color.

Those were multicolored, my mother explained.

And multicolored became my first four-syllable word.