Rose Parade Preparations

Eric, who is on the Ronald McDonald House Executive Board invited us parents to join his family at a reception at the Rose Parade Float Pavilion where the Ronald McDonald House float and 15 others are being constructed.

Roses imported from Ecuador, where they are in season.

The flower tent.

"May I take your order, please?"

Various color seeds.

The Space Shuttle has pulled up to an outer space McDonalds Drive-through.

Christmas Day 2009

The children are older so we don't have to get up so early now. But the call came at 8:00 a.m. that Grant was awake and ready to open stockings so off we went.

Breakfast was traditional cream cheese puffy buns and fresh pineapple wedges with a cherry on top. We like our traditions! Then opening gifts (this is the quilt I designed and made for Vanessa, whose name means "butterfly"), cleaning up the mess, resting, then off again to Eric's sister's home (Christmas Day meal is her holiday). This year it was a Mexican feast. Yummmmy!! It reminds me of one of my favorite Christmas carol lyrics by Alfred Burt, a man who wrote a carol for his family every year until he died of cancer:

We'll dress the house with holly bright and sprigs of mistletoe

We'll trim the Christmas tree tonight and set the lights aglow

We'll wrap our gifts with ribbons gay and give them out on Christmas Day

By everything we do and say, our gladness we will show

We'll dress the table daintily, our finest treasures use

That all a-sparkle it may be and bright with lovely hews

Then for the feasting we'll prepare a kitchen full of wondrous fare

That each from all the dishes rare, his fav'rite one may choose

And ye who would the Christ child greet, your heart also adorn

That it may be a dwelling meet for Him who now is born

Let all unlovely things give place to souls bedecked with heavenly

grace,

That ye may view His holy face with joy on Christmas morn (mor-n)

Christmas Eve 2009

Christmas Eve was filled with Christmas music, last-minute baking, late afternoon church service, and dinner at Eric's parents' home. Christmas Eve is "their holiday." Then Tom and I slipped home to rest up for the next day while the children and cousins opened mounds of presents from the other Nana and Papa. We always open gifts on Christmas morning at Roxanne's (Christmas morning and Easter are Roxanne & Eric's holidays). Here is our Christmas card picture and the cake I brought to the Christmas Eve feast.

Good News Club

Here are some of the actors in our Christmas play at "Micah House-Oxford," a large house in a low-income area of our town where volunteers from our church give the children a snack after school, help them with their homework, help them cook, do crafts, and this is where I have a Monday afternoon Good News Club. Good News Club is where I tell a Bible story using flannel-graph and teach the children God's Word. We have Joseph and Mary, the star,

the 3 wisemen with Herod in the background. They took their acting very seriously, and the children in the audience were the quietest they have ever been.

Annual Gingerbread Tradition

Ahhh, the day after Thanksgiving. Everything is cleaned up, everyone has gone home, and the grandchildren are staying the night for our annual day of baking gingerbread. This year they requested Snoopy's doghouse, so I went on the internet and found pictures of the other characters and made patterns. Here is this year's result.

Visions of Sugarplums danced in their heads...

Advent Devotions

This is the first year I actually got around to making a "Names of God" tree which I've had in mind for about four years. We are getting together as a family with the grandchildren and looking up the names of God and their Bible references on the Sundays of Advent to prepare for Christmas.