A January Miscellaney from earlier Gazette editions:

January is the perfect month to pull old books from shelves too high to reach at other times of the year. We came across a passage while reading the other night that set us to thinking about this first month of the new year. Most writers, we decided, find January something of a struggle, a month difficult to write about, especially when searching for a little light in the darkest part of the winter.

From Gazette editions of January, 1937:

News dispatches say that Hitler ordered all the German people to eat more fish. The implication is that Germans do not want to eat fish, but

From Gazette editions of January, 1962:

The latest addition to the Island’s intertown, fire-fighting brigade is the new maxim pumper, delivered a few days ago to the town of Oak Bluffs. This pumper has a 750 gallons per minute capacity, and carries a reserve water supply of 500 gallons. Voted by the annual town meeting, it replaces an older piece of apparatus of similar style and capacity.

From Gazette editions of January 1987: The Wintertide Coffeehouse reopens for its 1987 season on Saturday in a new location: the Manter Memorial Youth Hostel on the Edgartown Road.

New Year’s Greetings from the Past.

From the Gazette of Jan. 1, 1847:

“A Happy New Year.” These words fall like music upon the ear, and send a thrill of delight through our hearts. The most desponding and the most careworn of our race, as well as the rich and happy, shout forth in merry peals, “A Happy New Year.”

From Dorothy Cottle Poole’s Christmas at Sea:

In 1831, the Nile out of New Bedford, Capt. James Townsend, was in the South Atlantic off Patagonia. His logbook entry for Christmas Day reads