Christmas Eve: Stop Reading Blogs and Spend Time With Your Family Edition

Just a few notes before I go enjoy a busy day of Christmas festivities, church, Christmas pageant, and big ham supper tonight.

• You know who really tried to get the Christ out of Christmas?  Hitler! 
• How can you make prison worse? Privatize the food.  Too bad for anybody locked up by mistake, eh?
• The Mexican Mint has run out of gold coins to sell. Hmm ... for all that investors hate gold, somebody is sure busy buying up the physical.
• The Oxford Club is re-running my story about the old-time commodities: Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh
• We need a pretty chart, so here's state-by-state economic growth (from the Philly Fed) ...

Hooray, Florida is finally leading the nation in something to be proud of!

• One more chart -- Sure, the Fed is "tapering" its QE program by $10 billion.  Let's put that in perpective, courtesy of Sprott analyst David Franklin, who posted this chart of the Fed's balance sheet ...

(source)

• What Was the Star of Bethlehem, Really?  My money is on a comet, but I'm not opposed to a nova or distant supernova. 

If you want to read the other, competing ideas about what the star could have been, here you go.

Finally, since I'm not going to get around to it tomorrow, Merry Christmas to Jesse, IWNATTOS, Otto, Josh, Barry,  Bonddad, Bill, and all the other blogs I read on a regular basis. Keep up the good work, and I look forward to more great things from you in 2014.

Merry Christmas to all -- God bless us every one.