Welcome Twenty Ten

Or is it Two Thousand Ten? Myself, I'm going with the former. And we welcome the new year's austerity after a couple of weeks of major excess. The box pictured above is a Two Pound Box of Mrs. Rheb's chocolates - a local Baltimore favorite - which we happily received from my brother and promptly devoured a good portion of the top (two layers!) layer. Yum. Then we adultly put the rest in the freezer and resumed our new regime, as are hundreds of others, I presume, across the county. Not new, so much as a return to the prior lifestyle, pre-Thanksgiving 2009. We will see this reflected in business as well - fewer deserts, less wine, more salads, not to mention lower cover counts altogether as last month's credit card bills arrive in the mail box. We won't be caught off guard, as we have seen this January phenomenon many, many years. As a matter of fact, that is partially why - back in the very early Ironstone days - we originally took January as our vacation month. However, it wasn't long before we realized there were still some pretty good weekends in the winter - Presidents', MLK's, Valentine's - and we changed the time off to late February into March. I don't think we've closed in January for about 20 years...but somehow that ancient time schedule persists in the minds of our customers. This year - after last year's dismal January, with people coming in in February and asking me how our vacation was - I am doing everything I can do to fight this misconception: I even have our late winter closing already announced on the answering machine. Hopefully the correct word will get out...