Here are a few more.

I have been informed that the late Adrian Edmonds, Keene Valley resident for more generations than you can shake a stick at, liked to use the expression “heavier than a dead minister.” It does sound good, but why a dead minister? I don’t know.

Last week, I neglected to mention one of Grandma Allen’s best euphemisms. It said so much, while at the same time leaving Grandma blameless of indiscretion. In speaking of a woman, a fellow member of her Presbyterian congregation who had “taken up” with a married man (and one never “takes up” with anyone appropriate), Grandma said that the woman, while a regular churchgoer, “was no better than she should be.”

My sister and I still use the term “a double dose of Dinkins,” which we took from a story told by my Southern grandmother Rose, who gleaned it from a conversation on a train ride. Like the phrase “no better than she should be,” “a double dose of Dinkins” says more than it is strictly polite to spell out in nice company.

Rose was a school teacher in Brownsville, Texas, during the school year, and she took the train to New York City to study art in the summer. She was very enterprising for a Texas girl of her era, but then she remained single until she was technically a spinster, according to her contemporary norms. Born in 1884, she didn’t marry until my Grandpa Fred–also an artist, but from the Chicago school–returned home from France after World War I.

Rose was a natural storyteller, the kind of person people sit down next to on a train and then, unprompted, somehow unable to stop themselves, commence to pour out their life story. To make the long Dinkins story short, a woman plopped herself down next to Rose and told her, apparently not without a certain degree of pride, “My mother was a Dinkins and my father was a Dinkins. I have a double dose of Dinkins!”

For my sister and me, a double dose of Dinkins is any kind of repetition, from incest to using twice as much cinnamon as called for in a recipe.

More likely incest, though. The beauty of it is that we can say “a double dose of Dinkins,” and no one else knows what we’re talking about.

Talking about old-timey traditions, some are saying that this coming Christmas may be of necessity an old-fashioned one, due to the pile-up of container ships bearing gift items, presumably from China, that threatens to delay delivery of seasonal merchandise. We might have to get more personal, maybe make things from scratch, and who has time? Also, who wants the things we would make?

A thoughtful DIY gift to make at home for that certain someone: a wineglass snood to keep fruit flies out of your pinot, and a fine sieve to remove those intrepid drosophila that managed to get in anyway.

Don’t be fooled by so-called fruit fly prevention products now on the market that attract and subsequently drown fruit flies. Don’t throw your money down a rat hole. Anyone can attract a fruit fly; it’s not that hard. No doubt you have everything you need around the house right now. Fruit flies should almost certainly be gone by Christmastime anyway, due to their life cycle, but there is always next year, and it’s good to be prepared. At this writing, I still have one or two committing hari-kari in my zinfandel.

Do not attempt to learn how to crochet at this point in time; don’t start a project even if you are experienced. To do so will lead inexorably to holiday anxiety.

Perhaps, in order to cope with this COVID-Halloween-Christmas season, you are turning to bland and unalarming television programming, like reruns of the PBS show, “This Old House.” Did you know that years ago writers were struggling to come up with a concept for the series?

First, there was “This Old Blouse: What, this Old Rag?”

“This Old Louse,” or “This Old Spouse,” follows a woman’s journey in putting up with some guy she married years earlier because of his looks.

“This Old Mouse:” An elderly church mouse offers words of wisdom to the younger generation.

An affable drunkard’s zany escapades lead to confusion in “This Old Souse.”

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the News for more than 20 years.)