Around the middle of each December, PA SHPO staff get together for a few hours in the afternoon for our holiday party. It is a time to laugh, get to know our colleagues better, overindulge in too much good food, and pass down traditions from older staff to new.

By way of tradition, our newest staffers, aka the Party Planning Committee, organized a fun event and our creative Environmental Review Division Manager hosted our annual round of Jeopardy!, the Pennsylvania version. We also enjoyed a creative array of food and drinks representing every letter of the alphabet and a gift exchange that featured way too many puzzles for one Community Preservation Coordinator.

For the party activity this year, we organized into 3 groups to create PA SHPO versions of the popular holiday song “The 12 Days of Christmas.” I’ve combined the lists in this post as a lighthearted way to close out 2022. (I’ll spare you the agony of reciting all the lyrics and jumped ahead to start with 12.)

I hope our “12 Days of PA SHPO” parody makes you laugh, too.

On the 12th day of the holiday, Pennsylvania sent to us…

12 Help Desk emails

11 Certified Rehabs

10 PennDOT work plan projects

9 Metal truss bridges

8 ER reviewers

7 SHPO blog posts

6 Archaeologists

5 Missing marker covers

4 Working printers

3 Context Studies

2 National Register reviewers

and a

a Preservation outcome for you!

Thank you!

I will sign off this final blog post of 2022 as I have the past few years… with a very heartfelt “thank you.” 

We here at PA SHPO appreciate our blog readers, writers, and contributors, as well as everyone who likes our posts on social media, reads the newsletters, shares their thoughts and knowledge in comments or emails, and provide all sorts of support, logistical and otherwise, throughout the year. We certainly couldn’t do this without you.

Best wishes for a happy and healthy 2023 – and definitely more than one preservation outcome in the year ahead!