I was going to put this into another tread like the Secret Santa one, but what the heck. To me this is important. This is what I put into my holiday card for my friends this year, and I just realized that I tell alot of people about this place, so it must be important to me, so here's my holiday wish to you: ______________________________________

In the winter of 1884 a terrible fire broke out in the business district of Orlando. Starting in Delaney's Grocery at 5 am., it quickly spread through the pine-frame buildings in one of the boom-town's most densely-packed blocks. By the time the alarm was sounded, every store on the block was involved. Orlando had no fire department, but its citizens acted quickly and prevented the spread of the fire by demolishing several buildings with dynamite. When the fire was over, 15 businesses were completly razed including Delaney's Grocery and the Orange County Reporter. Like nearly all of the owners, James Delaney was insured, but Mahlon Gore, the publisher of the Reporter was not.

Gore had moved to Orlando 3 years earlier and had bought the Reporter. He was a newspaperman as well as the first homesteader of the Dakota Territory. Now, because of the fire, he was nearly ruined. But Gore was not the kind of person to give up. Within 5 days, he had arranged for the Sanford Journal to print a special "fire edition" and when he returned to Orlando, the townspeople met him at the rail depot. They presented him with a collection of $1200 and $300 in new subscriptions. A few weeks later, when he returned from Cincinnati with a new press, his friends walked him to the new home of the Reporter - for they had also given him a building on Orange Avenue.

The Reporter would go on to be a success, eventually becoming the Orlando Sentinel. Gore would be elected mayor of Orlando in the 1890s, oversee the planting of many of Orlando?s famous oak trees, and in 1912, he would help found the First Unitarian Church of Orlando along with his wife Caroline. Mahlon Gore was a man with fortitude and determination, but his success was partly due to his friends.

We succeed because we preserver, but we preserver because of the support of our friends.

"There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone." Ellen Glasgow, 1923

"True friends are those who really know you but love you anyway." - Edna Buchanan, 1995

"Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything." - Willa Cather, 1931

Thank you all for being a friend.

pax yall