Canyons & Fireworks

Streams of rain poured from the heavens the day after Christmas. The rumbling of raindrops calmed my soul and gave one final justification, of the season, to be a homebody. Hopefully treasured times of connection with friends and family have filled your December and not just an exhaustive list of rooms to decorate, recipes to make, and items to purchase. Regardless of how your Christmas season turned out, it's drawing to an end. Are you satisfied or are you visited by the post-holiday blues?  Soon the gyms will be full and mindsets will shift back to goals and work. A part of me loves the idea of a new beginning and casting vision. Today my thoughts are elsewhere. I can't help but notice how quickly we go from one thing to the next. The tides of time roll in and out but, what about rest?  More than once I have had to learn the lesson of Sabbath rest. The all powerful God, at the very beginning, institutionalized rest weekly. The gift of trusting the Provider enough to refrain ...

What are your favorite Christmas movies? It's a Wonderful Life is a personal favorite.  My daughter loves Home Alone and my husband usually chooses The Polar Express . Last year I added the movie Klaus to our must sees.  Regardless, the various depictions of A Christmas Carol are mandatory. Rob and my mother both go for the hilarious Bill Murray's Scrooged . As someone whose second language was English and who grew up outside of Pittsburgh, all things Sesame Street have my heart. A Muppet Christmas Carol is like my Christmas movie spirit animal with A Christmas Carol starring Jim Carrey as a close second. Charles Dickens' instant bestseller from 1843 portrays a narrative we sill find uncomfortable today. To correct behaviors, one must heal the person which involves addressing memories and wounds from the past. This truth hit mainstream popular culture 180 years ago but we still try to avoid the personal implications.  Why do we shy away from this transformative work...

My first Christmas as a wife and step-mother I received the most luxurious package. My darling neighbor had a box of golden gourmet pears delivered. Included was a charming pear shaped ornament with an image of a bird on it with no explanation. The subtlety made me love it all the more. Once realized, I decidedly commenced my family on a twelve year commitment. The following years would be memorialized in alignment with the carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas.  Rob found our second year's ornament in a shop at Christmas in the Village in the Historic Gold Hill.  The merchant explained that she acquired the ornament from an estate sale and believed it to be from the nineteen fifties. In our third year as a family, my mother-in-law did extensive genealogy research. Her work divulged the surprising truth that Rob is not primarily Italian but rather, quite purely, half French! A convenient development given our tradition. I took great pleasure in making several ornaments. First th...

Every year my husband, daughter, and I faithfully purchase our trees and wreaths from NW TreeLot. We stumbled across the local lot on our first Christmas together and loved their products and picture booth station.  Our yearly snapshot on their grounds marks the beginning of the season for our little family.  Our next annual festive photo is the three of us in crazy Christmas hats. This year may prove a bit challenging as our daughter is less than excited about the whimsical caps. My plea to our teen is, “But it's tradition!” When I was growing up my mom liked to buy living trees with the roots still intact so that the sapling could be planted outside in the spring. As an adult, I appreciate mom's environmentally sound custom but as children my brother and I hated it. The living trees were usually tiny; and all we cared about then was size. Other than the living evergreen, I do not remember a lot of family traditions from my upbringing.  In part our family was, shall we s...