Happy Holidays, everybody!

Hope you don't mind that I took a few days off from the blog, to enjoy Christmas with the family and finish working on the feature article on coach Jim Boylen that appeared in the newspaper today.

But we're back on the case (having happily beaten the oncoming storm home), and as often happens with big articles like the one I wrote today, I still have piles of great material from Boylen that still did not fit in the article. So I'll try to drop some of those tidbits in here along the way, just because so many of them were so interesting and amusing.

One of the most touching, in the spirit of the season, came from Helen Boylen -- the wonderfully friendly mother of the coach back in Michigan. She was describing the tough times the family endured after her husband abandoned them when coach Boylen was a boy, and remembered one Christmas when she only had about $10 in her purse.

So she gave the boys -- Boylen and his two brothers -- a choice. They could buy a Christmas tree or order a pizza.

Any guesses?

Yeah, they chose the pizza. Another year, they could not afford a tree but received a poinsettia as a gift from the father of a girl that Boylen had been dating.

"We called that our Charlie Brown Christmas tree," Helen recalled. "But you know what? That's the Christmas that all of the boys remember the most. The year we had our Charlie Brown Christmas tree that was only a poinsettia."