Sen. Sam Graves’s report

by State Senator Sam Graves

The holiday season is many things to many people. For a lot of folks, especially those of us fortunate enough to live in the country where traditional values are still strong, the holidays bring our families even closer together. While some parts of our nation seem to have gotten closer to the commercial sales side of Christmas, people in our part of the state still remember — and still value — what this holiday is really all about.

Frankly, I wouldn’t trade watching one single Christmas play in a country church for all the glitter in New York. During this season, our families come together to exchange gifts and share holiday meals and enjoy some time just to be together. Every Christmas is special, creating memories as well as recalling earlier holidays, and those who we wished could be with us once again. Christmas is a time for such things, and helps us keep alive the memories of those special

people who have touched our lives.

In our part of the state, families pull together to get by. Many of the farms are, or at one time have been, family farms built up over the years by hard work and passed on from father to son, generation to generation. That puts a lot more value in the land than acreage price or the cost of replacing buildings — the kind of value you can’t really put a dollar figure on. The holiday season brings to a close one year and gets us started on another.

While a lot of the country has had a real good year economically, that prosperity hasn’t been there for the agricultural community. We’ll all be hoping and praying that the new year will be a better one for farmers than the year we’re finishing up.

Our communities are a lot like families. We grow, and we survive, by working together and helping each other out when help is needed. Family farms don’t just need families, it takes some help from the neighbors, too. This special season also is a time for appreciating our neighbors and other folks who help make up our communities. They are sort of family, too, and you can’t really appreciate good friends and neighbors too much.

Over this last year, I’ve received a lot of good advice and a lot of help from the many friends and neighbors who make up the 150,000 folks who live in our Senatorial district. Like farming, it would be impossible to get the work done without a lot of help from your friends and neighbors.

As we move into the holidays, I would like to take this opportunity, from my family to yours, to wish everyone a very merry Christmas and the best possible New Year.