Monthly Archives: December 2017

Signs of the Season

I’m not in the mood to write a whole lot today, but I have a whole lot of pictures from the past few days and weeks that I want to post here, so here goes.

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Our tree and presents beneath the tree.

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These little birds live in this Snowball bush in the Summer, but it is only in the Winter when we can see them.

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This little bird bit off more than he/she could chew and spent quite a bit of time trying to get this piece of corn chewed up and swallowed.   I have been filling the feeders every day and every day the food is all gone within a few hours.  Time for another trip to Rural King.  We are having frigid temperatures here and they are going to stay around for a while.

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A few of the things I made people for Christmas. Through the year I knit socks and when I would get a pair completed I put them in a sack in a bedroom in a closet upstairs and forgot about them. When I got ready to wrap presents I found I had knitted thirty pairs of socks!Enough for almost everyone to receive one or two and in some cases, three pair for gifts.

That has not stopped me from knitting, however.

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Here is some new yarn I just received in the mail today alongside two more pair of socks I have knitted since Christmas. Maybe I will get fifty pair knitted this year.

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I really love this yarn.  I wanted to knit myself a pair of Christmas socks this year, but didn’t get it done.  That yarn on the right is going to be next year’s Christmas socks for me, myself and I.  I can’t wait to get started with it.

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This is my drink of choice during the holidays.

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A good cup of coffee with peppermint mocha cream.  This is only sold during Christmas and I wait for it all year long.

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David always gets me calendars for Christmas. Or rather, I pick them out and he pays for them.  I especially love this one, Reading Women.   I am a reading woman and this just caught my eye and the pictures inside are works of art with beautiful women reading books.  It will hang in my shop which I am renovating this Spring. New paint, curtains and a complete clean out and when the weather gets warm, I am having a huge garage sale for one day to try to get rid of a lot of things I really don’t need or want anymore. I am putting it on a date on my new calendars, circling it and will hold myself to getting this done. It will be a lot of work.  I really don’t like having garage sales, but it’s better people come and take stuff away rather than me having to haul it to Goodwill.

Christmas day was unusual this year and I didn’t have anyone here for dinner. The grandchildren came in the afternoon and opened their gifts. Besides the usual clothes and socks the boys got these.

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Hoverboards!    As soon as they opened them they were off sailing through the house. I was amazed how good they were on them.  Some had had practice, but others hadn’t.

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Our granddaughter didn’t get one as she got a lot of other things, but she was proficient on them, too, and I told her she needed one to get around college next year.

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David enjoyed playing Santa. He no longer has his beard as he shaves it off immediately after Christmas. I tell him he looks twenty years younger without a beard and he does.

I am looking forward to the new year when David and I will be celebrating our fiftieth wedding anniversary all year.  We have some vacations planned.  One to Oklahoma to visit Pioneer Woman’s mercantile store.  I can’t wait.

Happy New Year  and may it hold blessings overflowing for you. Bye.

 

 

 

Sleds and Santa

I am sitting here and it’s Christmas Eve remembering the wonderful Christmases I had when I was growing up. Christmas always centered around the Christ child. There was church and nativities and carols sung and candles glowing.  Packages under the tree.  Trips to the department store to see Santa.  How I wish I could relive those years again. They were the best of times.  I heard that some people don’t even think of Christmas as a Christian holiday anymore.  I don’t know what they think it is or what the word Christmas means to them, but for me, it always is about Jesus.    Years ago I wrote a story about Christmas and I will share it with you now.   It’s as true as I can remember it.  Most of it really happened and some may or may not, but that is for you to decide.

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A heavy blanket of snow covered Daddy’s Indiana farm.  Katie looked out the kitchen door and saw drifts of snow on the sidewalk and back porch.  Daddy came in the back door stamping his feet and  carrying an armload of wood to put in the big black iron stove that sat in the kitchen.  As Katie ate her breakfast of hot sweet tea and cinnamon toast, she felt warm and cozy.  Daddy sat at the head of the table and Mommy sat next to him.  They were discussing what needed to be done that day on the farm

Katie’s brother’s came down from the cold bedrooms upstairs.   The window in Katie’s room had had frost on the inside of it that morning and she had not wanted to leave her warm nest in her bed.

“Hey! Let’s go sledding this afternoon,” cried Andy. That sounded like a great idea to all the children, but first all the chores had to be done before play.  On a farm the livestock comes first and all the animals must be fed and watered before anything else.  The eggs must be gathered before they froze in their nests.  That was Katie’s job.  Soon they were all bundled up   to go outdoors to do their chores.

The cold wind whipped Katie’s face as she walked to the chicken house.  Inside it was warm and the chickens began to cluck.  Sometimes Katie would have to reach underneath a setting hen to take her eggs. The hen would not like this, but it had to be done.  Eggs were never left to be hatched in the henhouse.  Mommy used many of them in her baking each week ad the ones she didn’t use were carefully washed and crated and taken to the grocery store to be sold to the grocer for him to sell.   Mommy’s chicken eggs were especially good. They were fresh and the yolks were almost orange.  That was because the chickens were allowed to scratch and peck outdoors and to eat a lot of different things like juicy bugs and worms besides the ground corn Daddy fed them.  The grocer was always glad to get them.

After a good hot midday meal, Katie and her brothers dressed in several layers of clothes and snow boots and went out to Daddy’s workshop where the sleds were kept. They walked down the road to a hill owned by a neighbor, Mr. Bond.  They climbed over the fence and trudged through the deep snow to the top of the hill.  The first few times sledding down was not very good because the paths had to be made through the snow.  After a few rides down the hill, it became slicker and slicker until you were absolutely flying!  At the bottom of the hill was a little grove of tree that you had to steer your sled through.  It was dangerous, but fun at the same time. Sometimes the neighbor boys, the Clevengers, would join in the fun. The boys would throw snowballs at one another as they slid down the hill.

All too soon for Katie it was time to go back home.  She was chilled to the bone but hadn’t noticed while she was sledding.  Back in the warm house Mommy made hot chocolate and Daddy made popcorn balls.  After all the exercise, it all tasted so good!

Sometime in the winter,  Daddy and Mommy would begin whispering to one another and hiding things from the children.  It was Christmas time, one of the best times of the year for a child.  Soon after Thanksgiving, the tree would be put up and decorated and Mommy would put up the red plastic wreaths with the red candles in the windows.   A plastic Santa riding a white reindeer and that lit up was one of Katie’s favorite Christmas decorations.  The nativity that Daddy had built was put in a place of honor where Katie would look at it every day.  It had a blue lightbulb that gave the holy family a heavenly glow.

Soon it was Christmas Eve and the children were all excited about Santa’s coming visit.  The boys wanted Davy Crockett coonskin  hats and Katie wanted a doll.  Her older sister, Joanne, wanted new clothes.   Katie wanted to stay up and see if Santa really was the one who brought the toys each Christmas.  She begged Mommy to allow her to stay up if her sister stayed up with her  “You may stay up, but you will be asleep before Santa gets here,”  Mommy told her.

That night Katie and Joanne each picked a chair to sleep in. With pillows and blankets, they settled in and  prepared to stay up and see old St. Nick bring their presents.  Everyone else went to bed and the house settled down into a deep, dark quiet.  Not a thing was stirring.  Katie was so excited.   She waited and waited until her eyelids became heavier and heavier.  All at once there was a soft glow in the room.  Katie rubbed her eyes because she could not believe what she was seeing. Right in front of her, so close she could have touched him was a short, round little man in a beautiful red woolen suit with the whitest fur trim. He was bent over putting something under the tree.  It was Santa!   Katie was afraid that she might get in trouble for being there, but suddenly, the little man turned and looked right at her with his kind eyes and said, “Go back to sleep, honey.”   The next thing Katie knew she was waking up in her own bed. It was Christmas morning!

The children all had to wait until Mommy and Daddy said it was okay to come down the stairs.  When they did there was a mad dash to get to the Christmas tree and see what Santa had brought them.  Katie doesn’t remember what she got that year, but she does remember it was the year she saw the real Santa Claus.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.  Bye.

Christmases Past

Do you remember that scene in Christmas Vacation where Clark Griswald(Chevy Chase) was up in his attic  looking at old movies of his family when they were all younger?  Sitting there with tears running down his cheeks while he watched?

I just had the same experience looking through some old pictures of my growing family as we celebrated Christmas in the past.   I so miss those little children and my parents who made Christmas so special for me.   Those little children are middle aged now and my parents have gone on to live in Heaven.

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This is my mom and daddy.   I miss them.   They have been gone for decades, but you never really ever get use to being without your parents, no matter how old you get.

 

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This is how it was for many Christmases at our house on Christmas morning. The kids would come down the stairs, youngest first. Look at  those faces.  To have the joy of a child at Christmas again!

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One year our younger son played Santa Claus in his school Christmas play.

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Who is that handsome man and who are those babies?   I think this was taken in the Virgin Islands when we visited David’s mother there one Christmas.  Our daughter sits on his lap and her cousins are watching her open a gift. This was the trip where she fell into the swimming pool and was afraid of water for a long time afterward. It was even hard to get her in the bathtub.

 

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New pajamas?  I remember that sofa.  I really loved it for a long time. Now I think it’s kind of tacky.  LOL.   And it clashed so well with those drapes. An interior designer I was not at that time.   I still have that jug lamp only because my daddy made it for me.

 

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Someone got a new bicycle that year.  Snow didn’t stop the first ride.  We lived up a hill with a park right next door to us and we could walk down a path to a lake and to a playground where the children could play. I loved living in that house.

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And the Big Green Machine. Remember those?   This was a fun Christmas for those two boys. You can see the lake behind them. We use to go ice skating on it. There would be a big bonfire and lots of skaters and it was so much fun.  I wish I still had my skates, but I sold them in a garage sale before we moved to our present house.  I guess I knew my ice skating days were over.

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I made those coveralls my younger son is wearing.  I made a lot of their clothes back then. I believe I made the plaid shirt also.   I think they are adorable.

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David’s Grandma reading to the boys. I loved her. She was such a wonderful person and really loved her great-grandchildren.   And they loved her.

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The year our younger son had one of his first of several broken bones.  He was playing on a hill behind our neighbor’s house and jumped off a little hill and landed wrong, I guess, because he broke his leg.  I thought he had stepped on a nail and pulled off his shoe while he was screaming.  Probably didn’t help the break any.  I was so surprised when I learned he had broken his leg.   He got very proficient on those crutches.

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I use to bake so much at Christmas. Now with just David and me at home I don’t bake as much.  I use to make gingerbread houses all the time at Christmas, too.  Today I baked two cakes and some sugar cookies because the grandchildren are coming and like sweets.

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Really wish that I still had this little girl around.  But she grew up and so did the boys and life goes on.    Now with tears in my eyes I will close. Tomorrow I will write about the time I saw the “real” Santa.   Bye.

 

Scrambling

The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are always a blur to me.   It seems like when Autumn gets here I should put on my running shoes and take off with a bottle of water in my hand to keep me hydrated as I scramble through the days.

I am really not the busy, I don’t think.  I don’t have a job.  I don’t have children I have to ferry here, there and everywhere.  I don’t even have a very demanding husband who is always asking me to do things.  I’m just saying, the days seem to fly by like the wind and when a week is over David and I look at each other and say, “That week went fast.”  Maybe it’s our age and the space, time, continuum thing, but I can almost see the world turning, it’s going so fast. I also tell David I can hear God’s voice whispering to me constantly and I am wondering what He is telling me.

I don’t watch that much tv although I have gotten hooked on The Crown on Netflix and have been watching that.  Man, am I glad I was not born into royalty.  I would have hated all my time planned for me every day.  And not being able to leave your house without the media watching all the time would make me downright crazy.  And your privacy certainly is not private.  Poor Elizabeth and Phillip cannot even have an argument without someone noticing and reporting that their marriage is on the rocks. If David and I were watched like that, people would think we were getting a divorce all the time because we do argue a bit at times.   Don’t all couples?  But if you are royalty you are expected to be happy all the time and give a good show to the public. That is not for me.

We also finished watching Longmire on Netflix.  We always watch a show during our evening meal because that is the only time David and I watch anything together.   I really hated to see Longmire end and I won’t give anything away, but I was not happy about something that has bothered me the entire series and it bothered me at the end.  That is all I am saying.  I had kind of a crush on Longmire. That handsome, rugged, cowboy look set my heart to pitter pattering.  David, if you are reading this, you make my heart go pitter patter all the time.   And one other show I have been watching while I knit is the Roosevelts.    It’s  a Ken Burns documentary and I am learning a whole lot of history about our two Presidents Roosevelt and their lives and their families and the times during which they were presidents.    There is something about Teddy Roosevelt that reminds me of our current president.   In a good way, of course because I am not a Trump hater.

But back to time.  I have worked on Christmas gifts for weeks and finally today I am finished buying and making presents and next week David will wrap them.  I don’t like wrapping.  David does a great job and is very meticulous and his edges are crisp and he does not waste paper.  My wrapping looks like a two year old had a tantrum and had some paper and tape handy.

We have attended a couple of our grandchildren’s Christmas programs at their school.  That always gets me in the Christmas spirit.  I have been taking lots of pictures and one day soon I will put them on here when I have time.  There are some things I just cannot show right now because there are people who should not see things before Christmas if you know what I mean.

Hope your days are going well.  All of you all over the world who read this blog, I just want to tell you, I think about you and wonder about your lives and hope all is well in your part of the world. At this Christmas time I wish the world and our country could all come together for a few days of peace.  We all need it.   I like to think if all those who read my blog could get together, we would all like each other and have a great time getting to know each other.  Wouldn’t that be fun?     I’ll bake the cinnamon rolls. Hope you aren’t gluten free or carb free because my cinnamon rolls are to die for.  Bye.

It’s Beginning to Look…….

I have been slowly getting the Christmas decorations up.    I was going to go for a more streamlined look, but, as usual, when I started getting out all our decorations the house was soon overflowing with Christmas cheer.

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To put our tree on top of the old red table I bought at the last antique tour we attended,  involved sawing a fake tree limb to make it shorter so the tree would not touch the ceiling. Next year the tree is going back on the floor!  In fact, I’m thinking real tree next year. Something we have not done in decades.   But the tree is decorated and waiting for the presents that will go underneath.

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I love pulling out all the old decorations we have gathered through the years.  We got this Santa on a hot air balloon at Hershey Pennsylvania many years ago. I remember this vacation in particular because half way to Hershey our younger son rose up from the back seat and with a worried look on his face said, ”  I think I left the freezer door open.”   Well, there was discussion about going back and David said no and believe it or not, I didn’t think about it again until we were almost home and I began to wonder if we would have thawed food in the freezer. We had this huge standing freezer where I froze meat we got from my parents when they butchered a cow, frozen corn I would freeze in the Summer months and other frozen foods.  Having young children I was always having to tell them to close the freezer door, so I was worried about what we would find.  The freezer door was closed.  Why our son said that makes me think I had traumatized my children about leaving the freezer door open.  I was so glad when we got rid of that freezer.   The same thing about the iron.  I was always afraid of leaving the iron on when we went anywhere because I did a lot of ironing at that time.   That and the freezer were usually always checked before we went away.  Our younger son said that was one of his best vacations going to Hershey and I’m glad he enjoyed it.

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This Santa on a stork always goes on the tree.  When we were expecting our first child, David’s grandmother gave me this for Christmas and I have always loved it.   It’ almost fifty years old now and I cannot believe I have a child almost that old.

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This snowman is even older. When I was a little girl my grandfather had a few of these snowmen candles on his tree and I was blessed enough to get a couple of them. I always think of my grandpa when I put this on my tree.  He made the best popcorn balls.  We kids always looked forward to those at Christmas.  That and fifty cents was our present from him and that was enough for us.

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A tiny pillow I made.

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And a table runner.  I have made so many Christmas decorations from fabric in the past years that I cannot put them all out.

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Fabric gingerbread men I sewed when we had our fabric store.

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This was actually a tee shirt I found at Target years ago. I sewed up the bottom and the armholes and stuffed it and it makes a very comfortable pillow.

This time of year I love to bake and make sweets to eat. David and I are both sugarholics.

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I made a big batch of donut holes with sugar and cinnamon.  Yum.

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Those with a cup of coffee are wonderful in the morning. I am so glad I am not a diabetic or on a gluten free diet.  I think I would miss donuts more than anything. The author, Jan Karon, wrote in her cookbook about sitting with some famous people and asking them that if they were going to have their last meal of their life, what would they eat?  There were answers of steak or lobster or cake.  If I thought I was going to die and was allowed one last meal I would want two Krispy Crème Boston crème donuts with a really good cup of coffee with plenty of sweetener and cream.  I use to think ice cream was my favorite food, but in the last few years I have found I could take it or leave it unless it’s really, really good butter pecan ice cream.  I only eat it about three or four times a year because I really do not crave it, but I crave donuts. Anyway, these little donut holes are so good and so easy to make.  I only make them three or four times a year and usually at this time of year.

Speaking of sweet things, we went to see these last weekend.

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Golden Retriever puppies!

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How darling can an animal get?  I love puppies.  But it is dangerous for me to be around them because I always want one.

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Our grandsons are enjoying the cuteness, too.

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They are just like puppies. Growing up too fast.   I don’t know how my daughter can not keep one of the puppies, but they already have three Goldens, so these are all for sale.

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Our beautiful daughter. She is dog crazy like I am.  In fact, when she was a girl, she would scour the ads in the newspaper looking for free puppies and would beg to get one.  We got three dogs that way through the years. then she grew up and guess who was left with the dogs?  But I loved them too, so it was all good.  Now I scour the ads looking for Chocolate Labs.

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I’m in love, but I will resist.  I am holding out for another Chocolate Labrador Retriever. Maybe in another year.  This coming year is going to be busy as it’s our fiftieth wedding anniversary year and we have plans.

As we plan for Christmas day remember this…..

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Keep Christ in Christmas because that is really why we celebrate. The birth of our King and Savior.   With Christ out of Christmas, it’s just another day.

Here’s to Christmas and darling puppies.  May they both bring smiles to your face.  Bye.