Standing at the Portal ~ Hymn

Standing At the Portal

Standing at the portal
Of the opening year,
Words of comfort meet us,
Hushing every fear;
Spoken thru the silence
By our Savior’s voice,
Tender, strong and faithful,
Making us rejoice.

Refrain

Onward, then, and fear not,
Children of the day;
For His Word shall never,
Never pass away.

I, the Lord, am with thee,
Be thou not afraid;
I will help and strengthen
Be thou not dismayed.
Yea, I will uphold thee
With My own right hand;
Thou art called and chosen
In My sight to stand.

Refrain

For the year before us,
O what rich supplies!
For the poor and needy
Living streams shall rise;
For the sad and sinful
Shall His grace abound;
For the faint and feeble
Perfect strength be found.

Refrain

He will never fail us,
He will not forsake;
His eternal covenant
He will never break.
Resting on the promise,
What have we to fear?
God is all sufficient
For the coming year.

Onward, then, and fear not,
Children of the day;
For His Word shall never,
Never pass away.

Words: Francis R. Havergal, January 4, 1873.

Happy New Year everyone. Here’s a antique post card from one hundred seven years ago.

Glory to God in highest heaven,

Who unto man His Son hath given;
While angels sing with tender mirth,
A glad new year to all the earth.
~Martin Luther

С новым годом!

Happy 2017 dear readers!

Marinated Cheese Platter

Click on over to Mennonite Girls Can Cook for the instructions to put together this Marinated Cheese Platter. It’s easy and great for a crowd.

Hope your last day of 2016 is filled with good things and here’s a prayer for 2017…

A New Year’s Prayer

May God make your year a happy one!
Not by shielding you from all sorrows and pain,
But by strengthening you to bear it, as it comes;
Not by making your path easy,
But by making you sturdy to travel any path;
Not by taking hardships from you,
But by taking fear from your heart;
Not by granting you unbroken sunshine,
But by keeping your face bright, even in the shadows;
Not by making your life always pleasant,
But by showing you when people and their causes need you most,
and by making you anxious to be there to help.
God’s love, peace, hope and joy to you for the year ahead.

Anon.

Cherry Varenya ~ Russian Tea Sweetener

This was one of my most visited posts in 2016. I first posted this in 2008. I’m adding a photo to the top of the post. If you look carefully you’ll see a glass bowl of Varenya on the table next to the tea cups in front of my paternal grandfather (dzedushka) and grandmother (babushka).

The Russian immigrants I grew up around would make and enjoy this Cherry Syrup made with whole pie cherries in their hot tea. They used this syrup in place of sugar to sweeten their tea. I called my mother this week (April 2008) to get the following recipe from her to share for The-Sweet-and-Savory-of-Yummy.

This is a very simple recipe for Cherry Varenya. This is a syrup made with Cherries to sweeten hot tea with.

Cherry Varenya

1/2 Cup Water
1 Cup Sugar
1 Cup Whole Sour Cherries (Pie Cherries)
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice

You would increase the proportions of this recipe according to how many cherries you have on hand that you want to make into Varenya.

Boil the water and sugar to make a clear simple syrup. When the liquid is clear add your cherries and let it boil for 10 to 20 minutes (depending on how hard the cherries were to begin with) At the end of the boiling add 1 Tablespoon of fresh lemon juice to help preserve the brightness of the syrup.

You may want to can it at this point. (I don’t know how to can anything so you are on your own here!)🙂

You can do this process with sliced lemons, too, to make a Lemon Varenya.

Lemon Varenya

When I was young our family would go to a Cherry Orchard somewhere near Lancaster, California in July when the pie cherries were ready to harvest. It might have been in the Leona Valley. We would pick cherries all day and take home upwards of 40 pounds of cherries. That’s a lot of Varenya. When we picked this much my parents would give about half of the cherries away to other relatives and friends who couldn’t make the trek out to the Cherry Farm. Then it was a full day of preparing the cherries for Varenya. Washing, cooking and canning.

The photos are quite dark in this post and I’ve learned a few things since 2008 about taking photos of food and brightening them up before posting them. The photo of my grandparents is an old film photo scanned.

Hope the end of the year 2016 is going well for you. Maybe a cup of tea will help to brighten your day. Blessings…

2016 January-June in Mosaics…

January: Dear started a consulting job from home. We celebrated January birthdays. A business trip to San Francisco with reunions with old friends from my college days.

February: Our Lenten Rose bloomed early. We had a Superbowl party with a Chinese New Year theme with souvenirs I bought at San Francisco’s Chinatown. We also enjoyed a Valentines day lunch with a view in Bellevue.

March: We had a sister’s weekend. We celebrated my Medicare birthday in Bellingham with the Mennonite Girls and our hubbies. Dear and I had an overnight in Vancouver, B.C. to continue celebrating my birthday. Katie and Andrew celebrated their 5th anniversary!

Easter landed at the end of March and deserved it’s own mosaic. Our family was all together. Kulich baking, Seerney Paska, Easter egg hunts and Raclette all happened during Easter weekend.

April: We took a quick trip to Eastern Washington to work on some projects at Dan and Jamie’s. Late in the month I went along with Dear on a business trip to San Antonio, Texas. While there I drove to Austin to meet up with my brother’s family for a few hours.

May: Mother’s day with the kids on this side of the mountains. Dear and I took a road trip to Whatcom Falls and on the way home enjoyed stopping at a restaurant on Chuckanut Drive for lunch.

May: Two trips across the line to Canada to meet our play writer and later to meet a favorite blogger who gives so much encouragement to us Mennonite Girls, Rosella.

June: I flew down to be with family and enjoy my sister’s open house in her new digs.

June: A trip to Leavenworth where our family and our new daughter in law’s family enjoyed a weekend together eating and river rafting.

June: Father’s day brunch downtown Seattle with a photo op on Queen Anne Hill overlooking downtown Seattle.

June: We finished off June with a road trip to Yellowstone National Park and Cody Wyoming with stays in Montana coming and going. June really was packed full!

Six full months of blessings with people we love and trips to places we had never seen before. I’ll share July to December later. Dear’s consulting job ended in June and we began our time of wondering if we were unemployed or if we were retired.

How are you spending the last days of 2016? We are planning a little get together on New Year’s Eve after the Peach Bowl between our Washington Huskies and Alabama. We are the underdogs and will be cheering our Dawgs on to victory. Time will tell. Win or lose we will ring in the New Year with gratefulness to God for all He has done this year in our lives and the lives of our friends and family.

Unfiltered Christmas Morning

Things will be a ~~little~~ lot different next Christmas.

Today we are headed a little north for a birthday adventure with Katie and Andrew. The sun is breaking through the clouds and we’ll take advantage of it for however long it lasts.

Happy Birthday to Our Katie Kat…

She is such a great character. She is comfortable in her own skin and in other skins or onesies, too. The “Kat” photos were all taken on our Christmas morning walk.

She’s the little girl we didn’t know we wanted but are so thankful to God for blessing our home with. The collage above are photos of Katie in 2016.

She has been an avid reader since very early on. At the age of four she read a sign at the beach “caution low head clearance” out loud while walking with our friend. We knew we had a prolific reader. What we didn’t realize is that she could read even before she was four!

We think she’d be a great books on cd reader. She’s read so many genres and she has dramatic skills. So if anyone knows of a lead for her to get into that line of work let me know.

Tomorrow we will have a little outing with Katie and Andrew to celebrate her so our festivities continue which is why I’m scarce on line.

Happy Birthday Dear Katie!

We just got word that our Eastern Washington Kids have made it safe over the snowy pass and are through Spokane with about 60 miles to go before reaching home sweet home.

More snow has fallen since they left here to come to our house for Christmas. We hope they can make it up their drive without having to plow it!

Are you all recovering from good food and frolic? Hope all is well and that you are content.

So Very Merry…

My sister took this photo of my dear old Pop with his youngest great granddaughter on Christmas Eve in California. Christmas Eve happens to be her birthday, too. Happy first birthday dear one!

These are Pop’s grandchildren and great grandchildren that were able to gather together this year 1200 miles from us.

Our kids from Eastern Washington made it over the pass and to our home in time to attend a Christmas Eve service with us.

Katie treated us to a whole lot of laughs when we woke up to see her donned like this for our Christmas morning festivities.

We checked out what Santa had left in our stockings and then had Dear’s Swedish Pancakes for Breakfast. When breakfast was done we crossed hands to pull apart our Christmas Crackers. Our nutcracker themed crackers had whistles in them and instructions to make music together. Katie directed us and we laughed so hard as we each blew our different toned whistles to create some popular Christmas Carols.

We had our annual after Christmas walk and yes Katie was still in her wild cat onesie. Some of us wore our crowns.

I have not uploaded any of my regular camera photos. These were all taken with other peoples phones. We are still celebrating together and it will be awhile before I recuperate from all the fun. The girls are thinking about doing a little Boxing Day shopping today.

Joy to the World ~ Merry Christmas

Joy to the World

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her king;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.

Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, wonders, of His love.

Words: Isaac Watts, The Psalms of David, 1719.

Christmas Eve Day 2016

Today we are anticipating the arrival of all of our kids from different parts of Washington and the U.S.A. That makes it sound like we’ve got lots of kids. Our youngest ones, a daughter and son in law are traveling from Florida back to Washington State arriving at SeaTac Airport at 6:30 pm. We are driving their car to the airport in the morning and parking it for them so they can hop in it and drive themselves to our home to spend the night. Katie and Andrew live on our side of the mountains just 20 minutes from us and left last Sunday to visit Andrew’s father and step mom. Because we didn’t want to miss the arrival of our middle son and daughter in law from Eastern Washington or our Christmas Eve service dropping the car off at the airport was a good option. Dan, Jamie and their dog Rayna are driving over the Cascade Mountain range and will arrive sometime in the afternoon (a 5-1/2 hour drive). We will head to a Christmas Eve service with them and then come home and wait for Katie and Andrew to arrive. Dear is making his yummy Tomato Rice Soup (a Julia Child inspired soup) for all our tired travelers. Our oldest son and wife will be spending most of the day and evening with our Daughter in love’s family whom we love, too. They will be celebrating just 15 minutes from our home. Josh and Laura will arrive late on Christmas Eve and let themselves in since Dear and I will be fast asleep by then. For the record we love and get along with all of our kids and their families. A rich blessing for sure.

So thankful to our God in the Manger who left His throne to bring us salvation by His sacrifice on the cross. Thankful, too, that our three guest beds will be occupied tonight and tomorrow morning we will enjoy a full day of celebrating all that Christmas brings to us. This old house will be overflowing with God’s blessings to.

Praying God will bless your gatherings with His presence and peace today and tomorrow!

Christmas Past…

This is probably Christmas 1957.

Christmas 1958. My brother Tim was 11 months old. I was seven.

In December of 1959 our brother Steve was born. This photo was taken at my Uncle Paul’s home in 1960. My babushka lived with them and we would go and visit on Christmas. My dad has his Molokan shirt on (think Dr. Zhivago) but I’m not sure if this is before church or after church. We would have two more siblings added to our family in 1963.

Christmas 1968 is my guess for this one. Me, Kathy and Vera. Look at those shoes.

Christmas 1969. Tim is eleven, Steve is ten, and the twins, Lana and Leonard, are six.

At my little babushka’s house for Christmas breakfast before church.

Christmas 1974 in our apartment on National Blvd. in the neighborhood of Mar Vista, Los Angeles. We had been married for two and a half weeks.

Our oldest niece Jenna, 1974.

Our first home in Huntington Beach, 1975.

Christmas 1977 in our second home in Huntington Beach.

Christmas 1978 in Huntington Beach. I am pregnant with our firstborn Josh and Chris is pregnant with Jenna’s little sister Annie. These are Dear’s mother and father.

Christmas 1981. Josh and Dan are almost 3 and almost 1.

Christmas Eve 1982 reading the Christmas story with the Bagdanov side of the family.

Christmas tree 1986 in Ventura. Josh is almost 8 Dan is almost 6 and Katie is almost 1.

I think this one is from 1988 in Bothell. Our first Christmas in Washington State.

Late 1980’s in Bothell Washington.

Christmas on Norway Hill 1992 in Bothell, Washington.

PM1912 Postmarked 1912.

We are moving along with all things Christmas at this old house. Food shopping mostly done. A few things to add on Friday. I also am waiting to see if I’m inspired to bake one more favorite that my mom baked for all of us every year. My Bagdanov family had a cooking day today making my mom’s Vareniki for their Christmas Eve celebration.

The Happy Wonderer ~ ellen b.

To honor and encourage

Author Archives: Ellen

Standing at the Portal ~ Hymn