Participating in BLOGMAS helps get me in and keep me in the Christmas spirit. There is a new prompt for each day. It is a lot of fun to read about each other’s traditions and family recipes and pictures.
This year we are forgoing BIG gifts again and doing a research trip for our next home. We are still doing stockings though 😀
What I CANNOT live without in winter is many many things, but these are my top items! The one thing I am absolutely sure of is that if I have a sore throat, dry skin, cold feet or hands, cold food or catch a cold I am NOT happy.
I drink a cup of green tea every night and try to make very balanced comfort food meals to warm up my family from the inside out. Here are a few of our favorite soups and stews links for you.
Today’s category is an easy one for me. I start taping Christmas movies on Lifetime, Hallmark and INSP as soon as they air so I can watch all year long. I’m a sucker for a happy ending and let’s face it, Christmas movies have happy endings.
So this list could be reallllllllllly long, but I will just keep it to the top 5 MUST watch each and every year movies.
Now Home Alone is just silly, but it never fails to make me laugh!
I’m all over the place with Christmas music – depends on the day, the occasion, my mood, what food we’re eating – just sooooooooo many factors! BUT, I do like it to wait until at least the day after Thanksgiving!All this aside, I’m really ticked off that so many people are creating issues where they shouldn’t exist to begin with. The banning of BABY IT’S COLD OUTSIDE this year is ABSOLUTELY ridiculous! When the song was written in 1944, it was a different era. The world we live in is extra sensitive now, and people get easily offended, and in my opinion reading too much into something that at the time was innocent enough.
Here are the lyrics. You decide for yourself and remember the song was written 74 years ago! The song was written by Frank Loesser as a duet for him to sing with his wife at parties.
Christmas is the most important holiday to me and not because Santa comes, though that is pretty important to the kiddos, but more importantly, it’s a caring spirit, a sharing feeling, an attitude that I try to practice all year long. I truly feel good about giving – whether it’s the Angel tree gifts I select for kiddos, the reverse advent box I put together or the smile from the Salvation Army bell ringer as you put your money in their red bucket and wish them Merry Christmas.For 10 years I chaired an Angel Tree Program for FISH and I loved doing it! I prepared for it every year and I truly believe each year got better and better. The night before we distributed the gifts I would go shopping for the teenage girls. We were ALWAYS lacking in gifts for the teen girls no matter what we tried to boost things up for them. So now when I choose the angels from the trees in the community I seek out the teenage girls specifically.
Christmas means lots and lots of memories of family, some no longer with us, but always in my heart when I hang an ornament they made especially for me like my cousin Beth who we lost in 2014 or a recipe that they always prepared like my dad’s Oatnut Sourdough Herb Dressing or Gram’s Christmas box full of goodies picked out just for each one of us or…
One of the things I try to practice is to make at least one homemade gift each year – nothing extravagant, but just something that says “I MADE THIS with LOVE JUST FOR YOU“.
The years that I host Christmas include a lot of family recipes. But, most importantly, Christmas is the spirit of Love and Giving and it must be felt and shared. Christmas is a gift from above and each year as I grow older I realize more and more that Christmas is about Love, Peace, Sharing, Caring and just being together.
It all began because my husband Mike hated Christmas –oh, not the true meaning of Christmas, but the commercial aspects of it — the overspending, the frantic running around at the last minute to get a tie for Uncle Harry and the dusting powder for Grandma — the gifts given in desperation because you couldn’t think of anything else.
Knowing he felt this way, I decided one year to bypass the usual shirts, sweaters, ties, and so forth.. I reached for something special just for Mike. The inspiration came in an unusual way.. Our son Kevin, who was 12 that year, was wrestling at the junior level at the school he attended.
Shortly before Christmas, there was a non-league match against a team sponsored by an inner-city church.
These youngsters, dressed in sneakers so ragged that shoestrings seemed to be the only thing holding them together, presented a sharp contrast to our boys in their spiffy blue and gold uniforms and sparkling new wrestling shoes. As the match began, I was alarmed to see that the other team was wrestling without headgear, a kind of light helmet designed to protect a wrestler’s ears. It was a luxury the ragtag team obviously could not afford.
Well, we ended up walloping them. We took every weight class. And as each of their boys got up from the mat, he swaggered around in his tatters with false bravado, a kind of street pride that couldn’t acknowledge defeat.
Mike, seated beside me, shook his head sadly, ‘I wish just one of them could have won,’ he said. ‘They have a lot of potential, but losing like this could take the heart right out of them.’ Mike loved kids — all kids — and he knew them, having coached little league football, baseball, and lacrosse.
That’s when the idea for his present came. That afternoon, I went to a local sporting goods store and bought an assortment of wrestling headgear and shoes and sent them anonymously to the inner-city church. On Christmas Eve, I placed the envelope on the tree, the note inside telling Mike what I had done and that this was his gift from me. His smile was the brightest thing about Christmas that year and in succeeding years. For each Christmas, I followed the tradition –one year sending a group of mentally handicapped youngsters to a hockey game, another year a check to a pair of elderly brothers whose home had burned to the ground the week before Christmas, and on and on. The envelope became the highlight of our Christmas. It was always the last thing opened on Christmas morning, and our children, ignoring their new toys, would stand with wide-eyed anticipation as their dad lifted the envelope from the tree to reveal its contents.
As the children grew, the toys gave way to more practical presents, but the envelope never lost its allure. The story doesn’t end there. You see, we lost Mike last year due to cancer. When Christmas rolled around, I was still so wrapped in grief that I barely got the tree up. But Christmas Eve found me placing an envelope on the tree, and in the morning it was joined by three more. Each of our children, unbeknown to the others, had placed an envelope on the tree for their dad. The tradition has grown and someday will expand even further with our grandchildren standing around the tree with wide-eyed anticipation watching as their fathers take down the envelope. Mike’s giving spirit, like the Christmas spirit, will always be with us.
May we all remember Christ, who is the reason for the season, and the true Christmas spirit this year and always.
From 1558 until 1829, Roman Catholics in England were not permitted to practice their faith openly. Someone during that era wrote this carol as a catechism song for young Catholics.It has two levels of meaning: the surface meaning plus a hidden meaning known only to members of their church. Each element in the carol has a code word for a religious reality which the children could remember.
Merry (Twelve Days of) Christmas Everyone – and, remember, the Twelve Days of Christmas are the 12 days following December 25th. The Christmas Season runs until Epiphany, January 6.
THE HOLIDAY SEASON…
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| Looney Louise years before she made us our wreaths! |
Merry Christmas everyone!
How I decorate each year changes based on my mood, weather, etc… so it will never be the same twice! EXCEPT for the 1st picture the other pictures are Christmases past. The remodel is almost done and at least we have a FULL tree this year. As for us, we PREFER real trees, but last year we decided with the remodel to break down and buy an artificial tree. SHHH don’t tell hubby, but I really love this tree. Next year we’ll have a real tree again. We figure we actually saved money and can donate the tree to the women’s shelter too.
This is actually the back of the tree, but it was the only way I could get a picture of the whole tree with the star.
We made candle yule logs for Advent craft night at church one year and they were a HUGE success and soooooooo easy to do.
These are a few of my new favorites.
My cousin that passed away in 2014 made this ornament for me. From now it will always be hung by my shooting stars in her honor. That is after I get done being mad at her for leaving me this mess to deal with.
And our handmade ornament by the Design Chick.
When do you open presents? This category has changed a lot over the years. My family traditions of a BIG Christmas eve from when I was a kid carried on through college, but as we got older and got families of our own, parents passed on, blended families (with their own traditions) were formed, etc… getting together for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day became harder and harder to do. Eventually for me it became more and more Christmas morning only which is fine by me.
Thankfully, I’m not in the bottom picture, because I remember what I was wearing! But, I love my brother’s plaid pants and Monica’s floral blouse. If you don’t hear from me for a few days I’m Sure it’s because one them found me LOL.Then on Christmas Day we did Christmas morning and “Santa” with just the immediate family and then we would do a BIG turkey with all the trimmings including my dad’s stuffing and giblet gravy with ALL the family as well as extended family, which included crazy Aunt Louise (the corn flake wreath maker) and Uncle Herb who always brought us each a silver dollar.
I thought about this category a lot and decided that since we were still in transition in the HOUSE FROM HELL and our pictures from last year were less than stellar I decided to share the pictures from 2014 with you.
These pictures from the Festival of Lights we used to do each year is now over 20 years old and a great way to kick off the holiday season. It’s ALL Volunteer and NON-Profit. It began as a fundraiser sponsored by the Rotary Club to help get the city out of debt and then took on a life of its own and now helps with scholarships and special projects. The festival runs every night from Thanksgiving to New Years. You can drive your own car or take a horse drawn carriage ride through the displays. They have also coordinated a local radio station to listen to as you view the displays. The night we went through the fog was moving in early so a few of the pictures look a bit “smoky”.
As of 2014 they had the world’s tallest (41 feet, 16,000 pounds with working jaw) nutcracker built by a local company, 500,00 lights, 90 animated displays, 3D displays, horse drawn carriage rides through the displays and a Holiday Village with Santa, hot cider with a bake sale and a synchronized light show in the courtyard. The displays depict fairy tales, the military, patriotism, the local logging industry, local vineyards, local fishing and the traditional Christmas songs and scenes. People come from all over to see it. Unfortunately for locals, it doesn’t change much, but is still fun every few years.
Three of my favorite munchkins from next door were coincidentally there the same night we were so had to snap a few pictures of the discussions with Santa. I can’t believe how much they have grown! I miss them so much and sure wish we were there!
Even the lights with errors turned out cute. It was difficult to get great pictures or continuous pictures of the animated scenes since there were so many cars behind us.
This snowman is on a corner in our neighborhood hugging a light standard.