Things on Thursday: Christmas Decor

A couple weeks ago, I found this fab winter-lodge-themed Advent calendar at Target (on sale...yippy!) and had to get it. Santa will fill the cubby behind #25, but I filled the others with tootsie rolls. My boys are loving it!

Obviously, very few other decorations are out in my house this year, but of course my nativity scene, painted by my mother years ago, stands on the center of my mantle.

Another returning decoration is the Elf on the Shelf. Ours is named Chris. Jack loves tracking him down each morning as he finds new places to hang out, like when he hung upside down from the breakfast room light fixture or in a glass in the cupboard.

What new Christmas decoration have you added to your collection this year? What older piece holds special meaning for you?

Contemplating Hope in the Holidays

Our Stephen Ministry distributed Mustard Seed ornaments this weekend during all three services at our church.

The front of each card has a Christmas star with a mustard seed glued to the center:

The back looks like this:

Our purpose in making and giving these ornaments was to draw attention to those who quietly suffer through the holidays. Those who have lost loved ones, jobs, friends, marriages, homes, independence, or health often cannot summon even an ounce of joy or hope during the holidays. In fact, everyone else's happiness can make their sadness and pain worse.

That's where the mustard seed comes in.

Jesus teaches that the kingdom of God starts with a tiny mustard seed of faith. Our hope at times may be very small, like that mustard seed, but hand that seed over to God, and He will grow it. It won't become a big tree in the kingdom overnight; that takes time. But if you can trust Him, even just a little bit, your seed of faith will grow into a kingdom of hope.

At Christmas, we celebrate the birth of Christ, a tiny baby who grew into a man. His birth brought hope into the world, a hope of infinite power and promise. But when he was tiny, his family didn't have a room in the inn, was forced to flee from Herod, and lived in exile for a while to protect that tiny hope.

When our own hope is small, we can call to mind that tiny baby and know that hope in Christ isn't small at all. We don't have to pretend to be happy or feel guilty that our feelings aren't in tune with the season. We just have to think about that mustard seed and trust that God's got it covered.

Because He does.

Gratitude Journal #115

Today, I am grateful for Christmas trees, lights, nativity scenes, and reindeer landing lights. Most of all, I'm grateful for the Reason for the Season: Jesus Christ.

Today, I am grateful for skilled labor and the amazing things people can do with their hands.

Today, I am grateful for this picture from Pinterest.

The maker of this fabulous project even used a semicolon properly, for which I am thankful.

Blessings to you all.

What are you grateful for today?

House Update

We're closing on the new house December 28th and moving our personal belongings (not furniture, though) to the new house the next day. Our furniture will stay in the old house until it sells, but we're shopping for a few new pieces of furniture that we would have eventually bought anyway to get us through until we can get fully moved.

We're also shopping for a fridge. I think we've settled on a stainless steel model with freezer on bottom and double doors on top. Many thanks to all of you who shared your fridge experiences with us.

We have our first showing of the old house today, and hopefully it sells soon. If not, the builder of our new house will buy it...a sweet deal for us and one that made this whole move possible in the first place.

We visited the house yesterday to measure for area rugs, and the builder has done so much work to get it ready! It was exciting to see the door pulls on all the cabinets, the cooktop and wall ovens installed, the door hardware on the front and back doors, and the bottom, stone portion of the front porch column built.

At one point, Jack asked me to go with him to the back bedroom. He asked, "Is this going to be my room?" I replied that it would be, and his face lit up. "Thank you, mommy, for giving me a room with such a beautiful view!"

I guess he'll handle the change pretty well!

After fretting and hemming and hawwing over whether to get a real tree, I finally decided that it just wasn't practical. But because everyone in the family enjoys the experience of going to Big Tree Plantation, we're still going to take Daisy and go, donate a tree to the family of a deployed soldier, take a horse-drawn hay ride, visit Santa and a few of his reindeer, drink hot cider, and each buy an ornament to commemorate the year we moved into our new house.

Last year, when Daisy saw the horses, she didn't know what to make of them. Hopefully, this year, she is a bit braver and more mature. Not likely, though. She's still a big goofball.

The kids and I decorated our dinky little fake tree with pretty dark red and gold ornaments, most of George's grandmother's vintage glass ornaments, glass icicles, cotton boll angels, and our White House ornaments, given to us by military friends stationed in DC.

As several of you recommended, we put it on a box to elevate it a bit, and that helped so much! The tree looks so pretty and festive, but is totally impersonal as befits a staged house. All the personal ornaments--the handmade ones and ones that have been given to us and the ones we've collected as we've moved around the country-- are still packed away.

Love these handpainted ornaments I bought at KMart years ago.

Next year's tree will have nothing but our more personal ornaments on it, including--on top--the large construction-paper-and-glitter-star Jack made years ago in preschool. After all, we'll be in our very own new house and won't that be something to celebrate!

The rest of the Christmas decorations I have put up are understated but festive (mostly garland), and I decorated the mantle with our nativity set (handpainted by my mom) and two pinecone "trees" I bought at Target a few years ago. (Will share pictures later of them later). Hopefully, strangers wandering through our house will appreciate the decor and will want to buy our house.

May this, the second Sunday in Advent, prepare you for the spirit of Hope, Joy, and Love that is the reason for the season.

Weekly Giggle: Check These Out

I found this link on Dooce...Heather Armstrong's blog and it almost made me spit coffee onto my computer. You have been warned.

Carli Davidson Photography

You're welcome.

Words, Words, Words for Those Who Are Hurting

Use these words when you don't know what to say. They work.

Guilty Pleasures

Have you ever experienced stress so mind-blowingly busy that your higher cognitive functions shut down and all you want to do is curl up in a fetal position, suck your thumb, and occasionally wail "Mommy!" in pathos and defeat?

Yes. I'm melodramatic. Surprised? If so, you must be new here.

However much you want to curl up and wail, you're not allowed, and neither am I. This is one of the most unfair things about adulthood and wifehood and motherhood and service to humanity in the name of the Holy Spirit or whatever it is you choose to call your guilty conscience: too many other people are depending on you to help THEM not curl up and wail.

So what keeps you from having a complete mental breakdown when life points a hundred tennis ball throwing machines* at you and expects you keep your eyes on all the balls at once?

Prayer and awareness that God loves me certainly get me through most days upright and wail-free (or at least merely whiny), but I think God made people curious and this world entertaining for a reason. Guilty pleasures (at least, innocent ones) can give us the little freshing breaks throughout our hectic, stressful days, reset our perspective, and keep us going.

If you're not giving a bit of rein to your oxymoronic innocent guilty pleasures, one of three things is wrong.

First, you may have bought into the current cultural trend of believing that there's a prize for whoever is busiest. People, there is no prize, unless you count exhaustion as a prize, which I don't. Sometimes life gets busy, but we should stay alert for ways to slow it down, take breathers, rest. Learning to say no helps enormously.

Second, you may enjoy being a martyr. We all enjoy indulging in a bit of self-pity every now and then, wishing others would do for us like we do for them, but for some people martyrdom becomes an Olympic sport. Snap out of it! Remember that you can't help others put on their oxygen masks if you are passing out yourself.

Third, you may have a serious mental illness and need to see a licenced medical professional. I'm not joking here, not even one tiny little bit, because I've been there. When people can no longer muster the energy to do something just for fun, become so obsessed with work that they can't stop and smell the roses, or start having physical symptoms of stress (panic attacks, racing heartbeat, weight loss or gain, insomnia, etc.), professional medical help is absolutely critical.

For those of us with fairly normal brain chemistry (stop laughing, George), a little indulgence in guilty pleasures can keep us happy and coping with life's tennis ball throwing machines. Here are a few of my guilty pleasures from the past two crazy-stressful months.

1. The Big Bang Theory. Television has been giving us guilty pleasures since its invention in the late 1920s, though I imagine there really was not much worth watching in those really early days when not even the big three networks were around. Our family hardly ever watches network television in these days of National Geographic, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, History Channel, and Light Jazz Music. Yes, we're geeks, so when a friend encouraged me to check out The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom about geeks, I started watching reruns on cable channels. After watching my first show, I enthusiastically informed George, who was out of town, that we needed to start watching it ALL THE TIME. He asked why. I told him a character named Sheldon went to a Halloween party dressed as the Doppler Effect. George's response: "That is so COOL!" Sheldon is our new favorite person in the whole wide world.

2. Pinterest. The Internet provides lifetimes of guilty pleasures, and at least indulging in a little Pinterest won't require you to go to confession and say a hundred Hail, Marys, as other websites might. Oh, and if you get your significant other indulging in Pinterest, as I have done, then it's a couple's activity. (Just don't let the kids on it as content isn't always appropriate for young eyes and you just never know what will pop up on the screen as you scroll down.)

3. Rereading novels I've read before. Picking up a well-loved novel and rereading my favorite parts is like visiting old friends. Very comforting.

4. Reading magazines. Since so many of my neural circuits are taken up with move-related details, my attention span is gnat-like. So magazines, which I've always loved, give me the quick fix of distraction I need.

5. Coffee. Until two months ago, I drank two cups every morning. I've now moved to three, but recognize that this guilty pleasure needs to be scaled back a bit. Coffee jitters are not a guilty pleasure. 

Guilty pleasures, like everything else in life, are only good in moderation. Too much indulgence in them keeps us from carrying out our responsibilities. But truly, we need a little guilty pleasure in our life.

What are your innocent guilty pleasures?




*Shouldn't tennis ball throwing machines have a cooler name, something less clunky and more marketable? And shouldn't tennis ball be hyphenated? I googled them to find out a cooler name and they don't appear to have one, though some brands have tried to get creative. My favorite was the LOB-STER. But no one would know what you were talking about unless, well, they played tennis. Which I don't. So why am I digressing like this? Guilty word-nerd pleasure, I suspect.