I hope you had a very blessed Christmas and have a very Happy New Year! Goodbye, 2015!!!
I'll see you in 2016!
In which I hope to bring some sense of edification through entertainment
This was one of the most unique Christmas WEEKS I've had. The only other time I've had this unique of a Christmas week was when I was overseas and experienced a Hungarian Baptist, 3-day Christmas celebration. I don't have time to go into all the details right now, but suffice it to say we were able to bless a lot of people through a lot of different scenarios! But through it all we were able to keep smiling and loving and blessing. I'm actually really not sure where the whole month of December went... maybe if I start posting pictures on Facebook and here I'll remember where it all went!
I hope you had a very blessed Christmas and have a very Happy New Year! Goodbye, 2015!!! I'll see you in 2016!
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We never really did Valentines day cards growing up and I never really did anything once I moved out on my own. But I was shopping at World Market last week and browsed their holiday section. So many ways to spend money! They have so much cute junk! So I splurged and bought a small package of these adorable vintage style valentines day cards. I thought I'd just send them to my single friends and my pen-pals and anyone else I felt needed a good cheering up. So I pulled out my address book and began addressing the envelopes. Before I knew it, the entire package was gone! And I hadn't even started on any of my family members I thought might like a valentines!
SO I'll probably trudge on back to World Market and pick up another packet... The last few years have been full of letters that had agendas, hurtful accusations, slander and malice. At first it made me cringe away from the written word. However after a lot of prayer I felt inspired and convicted to do the opposite: pour out encouragement and love through the written word and in a tangible, cheerful note. I felt a little weird at first so talked to my husband about it. A lot of the friends I write are busy housewives with babies or have very busy careers and don't have much time to write back. Yet I keep writing. Was I wasting my time I asked? My husband smiled and took my hand. No one dislikes getting an encouraging card in the mail was his response. Sending cards isn't bringing an unreached tribe in the Amazon basin to the Lord, but it is still a ministry. Its encouragement, which is a ministry. So sending valentines to my single friends who have careers (or busy housewife friends who can't find sitters for the romantic holiday to spend time with their husbands) is my little way of reaching out to fellow believers and blessing them. How has God convicted you to bless others in a small but real way today? I haven't blogged a whole lot since the holidays began, and altho I keep telling myself I"m going to get better it doesn't look like that will happen in the near future! I've also been very adamant to myself that my blog will not be a place where I vent or shed light to the cyberspace world about personal griefs or dark issues I'm struggling with. However since holidays are the perfect time of year when all those things crop up, its been a little hard to keep true to that goal. And the New Year has given me plenty of opportunities to break that goal as well. There's been lots of things i want to say but I'm afraid of writing them down and publishing them as they are still too raw and have too much emotion attached to them still. (And then there's the fundamental fear of mine that it won't matter how eloquent or passionate my plea, or how sincere my entreaty; I will simply continue to be disregarded or ignored or judged or shunned. i have no tolerance for lies or hypocrisy anymore and I'm trying to prayerfully learn how to cope with those things when the come roaring back into my reality. So there's a very very brief summery of the dark and twisty turns my mind has been traveling through this year. See, aren't you glad I haven't dedicated more posts to such things?) On a brighter topic, my husband and I have finally cracked the Dave Ramsey code of a budget! This weekend we sat down - me fortified with coffee and tea and him with every modern form of a writing utensil realistically acquirable - and hammered out a budget. I never thought I would be so relieved or happy to have one! I have also been making socks. Why? Well, I have a whole wall upstairs of good, quality yarn from my great-grandma, and I really need some good quality socks for winter. I found a pretty easy pattern that I like, and am slowly learning how to read the yarn type, needle size and guage in the pattern so that I can accurately plan on how large or small my socks will be. All the socks in the picture above I made myself. Trying to get the house clean from 3 weeks of traveling and hosting a church event, plus my husband getting sick right when he started his new job, plus Thanksgiving, PLUS once husband got better then I lost my voice (which means I'm getting sick), plus realizing that it was no longer November.... yeah blogging wasn't on the top of my priorities :-) But between events and trying to keep Kyle and I teetering on this side of healthy, we have gotten some stuff picked up and put away, reorganized, donated, etc. And slowly the house is transforming into a Christmas-y type place. I have, however, been adamant that no Christmas decorations shall appear in an area that is trashed. Which made me stop and remember my mom saying the exact same thing when I was a kid. At the time it seemed like a cruel injustice but now I'm realizing that she had a point! We stopped by the in-laws's last week and picked up all of Kyle's Christmas decorations that he's been given or collected over the years. We didn't realize what a good idea that was, because this year someone gave us an 8 foot Christmas tree and the last two years I've used a 4 foot tree. If it hadn't been for Kyle's addition to the ornament collection it would have been a very bare tree! We also had to go out and buy more twinkle lights because the 4 foot was a pre-lit tree and this one isn't. Which threw us another curve-ball because neither of us every put lights on the tree growing up, that was always our dad's jobs. But we made it through and I think our tree looks very pretty. Its not THE most decked-out tree ever, but neither is it a Charlie Brown tree. The tree skirt has an interesting story: I bought it in a marketplace in Romania, and its actually a traditional Romanian skirt for a young woman. I've just sort of draped it around the 4 foot tree the last couple of years and this year ripped out the seams and draped it again. At some point I'm going to remember (during the non-Christmas season that is) and actually sew it up into a real tree skirt, but this is not that point. I'll probably have to do some supplementing with another fabric , but the Romanian skirt is a very unique weave. I think it might be linen but not sure... and the texture is almost like burlap. I have no idea where I'd get linen-y burlap, and I'd probably want white or red to go along with the skirt. I'd probably have to special order it from online, which is complicated and expensive.... so now I'm realizing why I've just draped it around the bottom of the tree the last few years.... :-) The runner for under our Nativity set is the same thing: another skirt for a little girl in Romania. The Nativity set is from my 'Indian Mother' who gave me all her Christmas decorations before she moved back to India. The nativity set by the TV is from my Great-Grandma. My friend commented that all my nativity sets are racist. Well, I can't help that the one's people have given me are predominantly Caucasian with the wise men being different for statistical purposes. Growing up my mom had a gorgeous red-clay nativity set from Mexico. I'd love to have something like that, or an olive-wood set from Israel. But again, both of those require either an internet purchase or a trip to one of those countries. While I'd LOVE to do the latter, and one day probably will, for right now we'll just have to settle with the racist-nativity sets. I saw a far more intricate chandelier decoration on Pinterest, and this is my far simpler rendition of it. The candles in the window are from my Grandma. I remember visiting her house as a kid and seeing them in her windows and thinking they were so cheery and a wonderful idea. Then she gave them to me and I was overjoyed. The plastic candlesticks are a bit more yellowed then I remember but they still get the point across of making my windows look welcoming and warm to passer-byers. And the crochet doily on the table is also from my Great-Grandma - who gave me the 'racist' nativity set. So that's my cleaning/decorating progress so far. Now I'm off to go pop a few more cough drops and make another cup of tea and down another doseage of Elderberry syrup before I head over to church to try and corral my little heatherns together to make this years Christmas play a real hit. *sigh* And then even though my husband's work's christmas party is tonight, I'll probably come straight home feeling like a truck hit me and fall into bed. |
AuthorA normal woman learning to serve an Extraordinary Lord in Ordinary ways, and watching Him turn it into Amazing Grace! © 2014-2015 Rachel Hester. All rights reserved. Archives
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