Sunday Salon: Merry Christmas!

Five reindeer, two Santas, three goofballs with jewels for eyes, and a dog in the snow. Merry Christmas from all of us.

 

Weather: Today it is raining a lot! This week we had really cold weather for several days and then it rained so the rain froze on the ground, the tress, the cars, everything was coated with ice. Fortunately the weather warmed up by the day so we could go out and finish our preparations for Christmas dinner and last minute shopping today.

Christmas Eve: Today my eldest daughter and family are with us for games, books, dinner, and gifts. Right now our grandson is playing Boop with his Grandpa. It is a silly game which involves moving kittens and cats around on a bed but one can boop their opponents cats off the bed while exclaiming "Boop!" It makes me laugh thinking about this new word being introduced into our family vocabulary. Later, we will read How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Dinner is our family's traditional meal of beef stew and corn bread. Later the young family will attend the early service at church while the rest of the family will attend the midnight service. Later we will read together The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson. It is another family tradition. We read the story aloud every year. It is about the Herdman family and their encounter with God and the church through a Christmas pageant.

Christmas Day: Now that we have no children living with us, we will sleep in and have a lazy morning. Since Christmas falls on Sunday we plan on attending church before returning home for our traditional Christmas breakfast of crepes with all the fixings. Our single daughter will join us for the meal and then we will open presents. Usually there is a flurry of phone calls to my mother and all our siblings sometime during the day. Later we will be joined by my cousin, his wife, daughter and grandchild. In addition to the turkey with all the fixings, we will give sticky toffee pudding a try for the first time. If it is bad, we have no back up plan. We're hoping we can talk everyone into a few board games. We'll see how successful we are on that score.

Reading, blogging, and book judging: I haven't posted a Sunday Salon for a month so I won't even try to list all the books I've read or the blog diaries I have posted but I will announce here that the end of my duties as a Round 1 Cybils Book Award Judge for Poetry will be finished by the early part of the week . I liked most of the 58 books I read for this role and won't be too disappointed if my favorites aren't selected. I am the only judge in the group with a focus on secondary education and I have noticed a certain bias toward books for younger kids. Oh well, I liked those books, too. The final selection hasn't been made, so who knows what will happen? I'm ready to pass on our choices to the next level of judges and be done with the task for a year.

Best/most memorable line of the day: The Christmas Day service at our church was poorly attended. Many members no doubt attended one of the two services on Christmas Eve and so it was understandable. When our pastor called for the children to come forward for the children's sermon only one boy came forward, his own son. Pastor John asked if there has ever been a time when the boy wanted everyone to know about some exciting event, like a birthday or some other special event. The boy thought for a minute and he said, "I was born on my birthday." Then he thought for a minute and added, "Jesus was born on his birthday, too." I've been smiling about his sweet comment all day. Let me guess. You and I were born on our birthdays, too. Isn't that sweet?

 

-Anne