1017. Return of the Phantom Phiddler Christmas Tree
another remnant from our old "Favorite Ornaments" series

Funny story on this one. It was originally a part of our old "Favorite Ornaments" series planted at Burlingame State Park in Charlestown, RI back around 2002, once for a short while the largest letterboxing series then existing in the US - a whole dozen boxes! Have to remember that this was a time of mostly walks or hikes for single boxes, and only a few "treks" for multiples, like our "Lil' Rhody Runaround for four boxes, so some folks thought having that many boxes on a mere walk was "cheapening" the letterboxing hobby and getting people "addicted to stamps" rather than enjoying the experience of letterboxing in and of itself. Just imagine what those folks might think about some of the infamous recent gatherings where "numbers stampers" could get hundreds of stamps in a mere matter of hours with very little effort at all! (We even heard stories of 50 or so stamps in one drive-by box that some people actually counted as that many individual "traditional" letterbox finds -LoL!)

Anyway, time and nature certainly took its toll on that old-style traditional letterbox series of ours, with red pines falling to disease, stumps rotting away and dense new growth making some of the old trails impenetrable. We finally went back a month ago to pull whatever boxes we could still manage to find, but could only get to half of them, even though we mostly remembered where we had planted them. So, imagine our surprise when someone anonymously listed them as having been found just a couple of weeks ago - after we had already pulled the remnants!

Well, we figured if anyone was that desperate to have these boxes listed as found in their box count, we had better get them back out somewhere that is at least currently safer and more accessible than that pretty devastated part of Burlingame! Most of December, however, we were far too busy with other things to plant any letterboxes, so we just decided at the last minute to put them out temporarily for friends in our backyard for Boxing Day before we take off down south again. So, this box with green ink pad can be found "day -only" on the west side of a sheltered nook in the south-facing portion of the tall hedge to the left of the cedar archway north of our back deck. But have no fear, if you didn't already find it when it was at Burlingame and still want it, we will try to make it available in another location once we get back north, or maybe next Christmas, if we are still around!

1018. New Trimmings for an Old Tree (3)
Bonus stamps we had to recarve, since we couldn't find any of the originals. Can be found hanging out in stockings near wherever The Phantom Fiddler's Tree happens to be.

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