Monongah always knows how to have a good time, even during a spooky Halloween party that rainy weather couldn’t dampen.

Mary “Kitty” Ahouse Morrison, Class of 1968, when she isn’t gallivanting around the country, keeps busy creating her famous baskets for sale to raise money for the Christmas Lights Committee to pay for the electric bill for those 26 street lights that brighten up Monongah’s Christmas season.

Barbara Marsh, Class of 1964, the Monongah News columnist, wrote about Kitty in the Fairmont Times, with a photo of Kitty and her creative baskets, which were won in the drawings by Susan Sanders and Linda McCullough.

This is the third year in a row that The Charge of the Lights Brigade has hosted the Halloween party for Monongah’s children under the direction of Susan Staron Sanders, Class of 1971, the queen of Thomas Street where I once lived with my parents and sister in a Consol rental house with a two-holer outhouse (COLD in winter to venture to THAT potty!).

More than 100 in attendance, including 75 children, ranged from a few months to older than 70. Fun has no age limits.

About $500 was raised for the Christmas lights electric bill.

If you want to add your moola to keep the lights brightening up Monongah’s holiday, address your donation to

Monongah Christmas Light Fund

PO box 9051

Monongah WV 26554

It will light up the town and crank up your heartlight so bright that it will rival the sun.

That is SO the Monongah I remember from my childhood on Church Street, right next to the pearl in a seashell Christmas street light that I purchased as payback for the way Monongah lit up my childhood.