Dear Friends and Followers:
The new calendar year unfurls its checkerboard of days while the twelve months of yesteryear flutter away in a gust of passing breeze. For we who are situated on the grounds of the Franklin Fountain and Shane Confectionery, our dwelling and conduct is set in a century’s length removed from the present. For our confectioners, pastry chef team, candy clerks and soda jerks, the year of 1912 has just presented to us its trackless timescape. It is an exciting year, holding the promise of technological advancement in the way of aerial and nautical travel, as well as innovation in the literary field as well as the visual arts. Also, we can expect a roilsome four-way political race for the occupancy of the Presidential office. Yes, we can await these coming historical milestones as we conduct our culinary lives with directed energy mustered from our sense of independence and fiercely-set volition. We wish you all a Happy New Year– may it be lived with merriment and inexorable might, and may you find strong winds and well-compassed direction on your own personal voyage.
Speaking of voyages set forth, we have embarked on our own confectionery endeavors, finding results most pleasant and rewarding. Insofar as ice cream is concerned, we have three new flavors to debut. First, there is our “Cashew Butterscotch” ice cream, composed of salted and fire-roasted cashew nuts pureed into a paste which swirls throughout the ice cream base alongside fibrine threads of our house-made batch of amber-colored butterscotch. Its deliciousness halts passing thoughts to a screeching halt as your mind, body, and soul savors the rich complexity of flavor.
We also have a novel flavor called “Stephen Foster’s Banana Cake Ice Cream.” Stephen Foster is considered the father of American song-writing– he composed such musical gems as “Oh Susanna!” which was belted by pick-swinging prospectors in the northern California mountain ranges during the gold rush of ‘49, and he also composed the more elegant, gorilla-mollifying “Beautiful Dreamer.” It is not widely known that Mr. Foster was a Pennsylvanian, and it is even lesser 
known that “Oh Susanna!” was debuted in an ice cream saloon in Pittsburgh. So, we would like to honor Foster’s musical legacy and contributions to Americana with a melody of sweet flavor; delicious banana and rum based ice cream with rum buttercream cake twirling throughout it. We do think you will be pleased with this gustatory sing-a-long. We will also be featuring “Chocolate Filbert Nut” ice cream — house roasted and salted hazlenuts are added to our decadent base of chocolate ice cream. Its flavor is simple but remarkably effective in its pronounced “wowing” ability. Do order some up and taste it for yourself.
While speaking of tasteful orderliness, let us bring to your attention our featured monthly soda: “Frostie Sodas”, with their “Root Beer” line and their “Cherry Limeade”. Frostie Sodas were originally bottled by the Frostie Beverage Company in Catonsville, Maryland in 1931. Its taste is resplendent and is fit for a monarch. Each bottle achieves the 
carefully mixed craftwork of the most trained soda jerk. Please buy some to taste its sweetness that is as intricate and beautiful as the frost on a glass window pane.
While on the subject of the beautifully sweet and the sweetly beautiful, we have some new and old-time favorite confections for you at Shane Confectionery, including Cream Filbert Nuts, also known as “snowballs”, which are, simply said, hard white candy exteriors encapsulating creamy hazelnut paste richness inside. We would also like to highlight our seasonal truffle: Hazelnut Milk Chocolate, which is overpoweringly scrumptious.
Are you looking for something to warm you up? Why not purchase some of our Wilbur 
Cocoa Tins? This, sold along with our homemade vanilla marshmallows, offers you all the necessary ingredients for a steamy cup of hot cocoa to be slowly sipped by a crackling hearth-side, perhaps even while swaddled in a blanket and, perchance, with a purring kitten snugly set in your lap. It is meant in this way for home use, and is the perfect kit for wintertime relaxation. A warm cup of cocoa and a fireside snuggle is a great preventative measure to stave away seasonal illness.
Are you already stricken with a touch of the sniffles? Have you a bothersome cold? Well, fear not. You may purchase one of our specialty lozenges at Shane Confectionery to quell your symptoms, or an herbal hard candy remedy, including Lichen, which is known for its medicinal properties. Be sure to also stop by the Fountain if you are feeling under the weather, for we offer our seasonal Hot Violet Limeaides, which any soda jerk can rightly 
relay is the perfect medicine for the common cold. These hot and tart sweet drinks will rouse you from your symptoms in a jiffy, and they are provably beneficial for your throat and respiratory system. We also have available to you an arrayed selection of our Historic Teas, which are useful as a midday stimulant, or as a late afternoon cordial ritual between friends.
Well, we hope that this monthly correspondence was a warm and informative session of sorts between our burgeoning friendship. We do insist that though it is chilly outside, you may always find warmth both in our open invitation and in our physical structures. Stay out of the cold, and partake is our virtuously valued accommodations. And, as we say every year at this season’s time, brighter days are quite literally ahead. We wish you all a very happy new year, and hope that you’ll visit us in a very near future.
With lambent souls fluoresced by the love of humanity,
The Berley Brothers and Staff.