Christmas in "The Office"

Coming as I do from a good Scranton family, I have to admit that "The Office" is one of my guilty pleasures.

Tonight, as my office gears up for tbe annual Christmas party (featuring a round-robin gift-swap event), Michael and the gang will be going through the same drill at Dunder-Mifflin. I know it's a rerun, but I'm looking forward to it anyhow.

Meanwhile, Scranton is getting hit with snow. I ought to call my cousins in Moscow (a few miles south of Scranton), who belong to the Elmhurst County Club, where Michael was bound when he drove into Lake Scranton. The road around Lake Scranton is closed to vehicles these days, but it's still a nice place to walk, and there was a wedding there when I was visiting the area in October.

There is no Dunder-Mifflin paper company in Scranton, but there is a Mifflin Avenue, and I believe part of the opening sequence was filmed while driving along said street, with the camera looking across the river at houses on the hillside.

Here's a bonus for real trivia buffs -- to get from Lake Scranton into Scranton, you drive north on 307 and down the treacherously steep Moosic Street Hill, made famous by Harry Chapin in his song about the truck that lost its brakes thereabouts and spilled its load of 30,000 pounds of bananas. Yes, things like that really have happened on Moosic Street.