A Belated Merry Christmas!

I hope you had a very blessed Christmas celebration this past week!  My family and I celebrated last weekend.  Our youngest son is a submariner, and was home on leave for the first time in almost two years, so it was wonderful having him here!  Unfortunately he had to fly out on Christmas Eve and we decided to come home early because of an impending blizzard.  It was a good thing to, because later on Christmas Eve it began snowing and blowing and by early Christmas Day we woke up to a raging snowstorm!  We got over two feet of snow, so to say it was a white Christmas would be an understatement!

I’m hoping to share some family photos as soon as I get them uploaded and edited.  We celebrated at our daughter’s, and took my mother along with us.  I think Mom had a wonderful time as well.  She helped my youngest granddaughter Kristen, age 11, bake her first batch of homemade sugar cookies and banana bread.  They enjoyed an afternoon of baking, and we all reaped the benefits!  Kristen decorated the cookies herself, and I must say she exhibited her love for art!  I’ve never seen orange and purple Christmas cookies before…Kristen certainly has her color theory down pat…she mixed her frosting in all the colors of the rainbow!

In order to focus our celebrating on the things that mean the most, we all decided to keep our gift-giving to a minimum…there were a lot fewer presents under the tree, but the gifts that were given were meaningful and much appreciated…Missy and Duane outdid themselves in preparing all the meals (it was such a treat not to have to cook for almost a week!)…our early Christmas dinner was fabulous with a smoked turkey and home-cured ham!  All four of our children were able to be together for the first time in two years and we had a wonderful time visiting and laughing together.  Kristen read Luke 2, our annual Christmas eve tradition, for the first time…years ago it was Chris’ father who read the Christmas story…he passed away in 1996 just before our oldest granddaughter, Brianna was born.  Since then my dear husband has read the Christmas story, but this year Kristen sat on Grandpa’s lap so he could help her with the “hard” words…she did a beautiful job reading, and helped us focus on the reason for the season.

It was hard to see Luke leave on Thursday, but I’m so thankful he was able to be with us…he is such fun to have at home!

I’ll leave you with a couple of Christmas projects, all created with a Christmas stamp set, Winter Snow, from Oxford Impressions (one of my favorite rubber stamp companies!)…

I’m also hoping to post some exciting news soon…at least for me it is!

And I’ll leave you with a treat, one of my favorite Christmas carols, performed by a group formed over 20 years ago when they were students at NDSU.  In the summer of 1989 I was participating in a craft show at Trollwood Park in Fargo, ND, and the Blenders were the entertainment at the park…I’ve since had the pleasure of hearing them perform in Beulah.

Thank you so much for stopping by today!
Toodles!
Anita