Happy New Year! Best wishes for a healthy, happy and prosperous 2008. I hope you enjoyed your New Year's Eve and that the new year, already three days old, is going well.

The hustle and bustle of the Christmas and New Years holidays comes and leaves quickly. The building anticipation and all of the preparations make for a hectic and crazy time. The gatherings with friends and family, church and school programs, along with everyday life, make this time of year very stressful.

Stress is a strange thing. It can wear on you and make you seem as physically tired as if you did strenuous labor. It saps your strength, even to the point where your immune system is worn down and in jeopardy.

So, as is the case with many households, the holidays brought illness to our house. We were fortunate that it was only a cold, but I have co-workers and friends who have run the gamut from colds to the flu to even pneumonia.

Happy holidays, huh?

The conventional wisdom is that during this time of year, many of us spend much more time indoors. Being indoors and in close proximity to one another, germs and viruses are more easily spread. Attending public events while ill further spreads the "joy."

Households with children usually get about any and every virus that comes along, thanks to the interaction between children and their toys. Schools often welcome Christmas break as a "cooling down" time for viruses to run their course and for students to return to class healthy.

There is nothing worse that being sick during the holidays. You want to spend time with people you don't get to see very often, but depending on how ill you are, you may not get to see them at all. The holidays are about having fun, not spending time in bed with Vicks Vapo-Rub.

Ah...Vicks Vapo-Rub. They say that smell is a powerful trigger for memories, and there's nothing quite like the menthol blast of Vicks that can bring back memories of childhood colds and flu.

Remember as a child having Vicks lathered all over your chest and neck to help you get over a cold? How about the humidifiers that had the built-in reservoir for Vicks, so the warm, moist air could have a menthol kick to it? With cool mist humidifiers being in vogue now, looking back I'm amazed that the wallpaper stayed on some of the rooms as much as the humidifiers were used.

Wintertime was Vicks time

Not to get too disgusting here, but my late father would place the stuff on his upper lip and even in his nostrils before going to bed at night. The blue jar with the green label was a fixture, literally, in our bathroom medicine chest growing up. I'm not sure how many jars we went through, but with six children in the family, we used a lot.

One of the things that made having a cold a bit more bearable was getting to have Luden's Wild Cherry Cough Drops. I'm not sure if they had much, if any, impact on getting better, but they sure tasted good. I can recall having so many that my tongue became red and raw. Remember the wax paper inside the box that you had to carefully wrap so moisture couldn't get it?

The worse times were when the Ludens didn't cut it and you made the mistake of coughing in front of your parents. Time for cough syrup or worse yet -- Smith Brothers' Cough Drops. One taste of the awful lozenges and I understood why those guys had the Bolshevik beards -- to keep people away so they didn't get colds and coughs. Yeech!

With the children returning to school today, I wish everyone a healthy rest of the winter. Cover your mouth when you cough and wash your hands.

Trust me, you don't want the Smith Brothers to come and call.

As always, I welcome your comments. You can reach me by email at tstangl@lemarscomm.net, telephone 712-546-7031, x40 or toll free 1-800-728-0066 x40.

Thanks for reading, I'll keep in touch. Feel free to do the same.