When I was a kid, I used to countdown the days before Christmas. Every year around the first of October the Christmas sales brochures would start arriving and I would start counting down the days. Now that I am much older, I have started a new Christmas countdown. You see I am now 71 years old, so I realize that I may not have a lot of Christmases left. Please don’t misunderstand, I am not on some death watch, it is just that statistically I know my Christmases are run...