Oh, Come, Little Children ~ Christmas Hymn

Oh, Come, Little Children

Oh, come, little children, oh, come, one and all,
To Bethlehem’s stable, in Bethlehem’s stall.
And see with rejoicing this glorious sight,
Our Father in heaven has sent us this night.

Oh, see in the manger, in hallowèd light
A star throws its beam on this holiest sight.
In clean swaddling clothes lies the heavenly Child,
More lovely than angels, this Baby so mild.

Oh, there lies the Christ Child, on hay and on straw;
The shepherds are kneeling before Him with awe.
And Mary and Joseph smile on Him with love,
While angels are singing sweet songs from above.

Words: Christoph von Schmid, 1794

I learned this song in Russian growing up and love to sing it today, too. The Russian words are different then the English translation but the ideas are the same.

Forty Years and Counting…

December – When December’s snows fall fast, marry and your love will last.

Today Dear and I are celebrating the day we got married forty years ago. We were married on a Friday evening in Southern California.

I love this photo of my dear maternal grandmother and me. She was a gem.

My grandmother, my mom and me.

Our sweet and oldest niece was at our wedding.

My paternal grandparents came to the wedding, too. This was not a given and we were pleased that they came.

This is Dear’s paternal grandmother and she was not able to travel to the wedding but she visited us in our first apartment.

Out of order but this is a photo from the rehearsal for the wedding.

Here we are heading off to our honeymoon.

As my dear old Pop would say we are so thankful to God for all He “did to us” these forty years! “Thank you God for what you did to us” was my pop’s prayer. He has given us peace and joy through the hard times and good times. He continues to lay His hand upon us and lead us beside still waters. We already had a wonderful anniversary celebration in England in July but that doesn’t stop us from continuing our celebration today. We are headed to a little town north of us to enjoy dinner at a restaurant we enjoy on our actual anniversary day! We trust God for the future of our marriage.

Joy, Joy, Joy…

I love this joyful time of year.

“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”

The tree is decorated and we are all ready for our first Christmas party tonight.

My toe is better and I’ve been able to do whatever needs to be done except for aerobic exercising with the Seniors.

The next 10 days are filled with a variety of celebrations for Dear and me. I am no where near being done with Christmas shopping. I probably won’t really get going with that until December 15th.

How’s it coming together at your home?

Celebrations…

We have lots of fun celebrations this month and we started last night going out to dinner for our DIL Laura’s birthday. After dinner at a new restaurant in our neighboring town we popped over to Katie and Andrew’s apartment for cake and presents. It was fun to see Katie’s creative tree on the wall since they won’t be buying a real one this year. On Monday we had a fun shopping day in Snohomish with Katie and that’s where the photo of her by the Snohomish River was taken.

I’m still working on getting all the decorations up for Christmas. Thursday we have a dinner here with our small group.

I’m having a hard time keeping up with blogs right now so I won’t be joining memes until I am sure I can get around and comment.

Life is rich! Hope all is well in your neck of the woods!

Unveiling of the Mystery Tree

Some of you are new to my blog and aren’t familiar with a Christmas tradition we started several years back to take the stress out of finding the perfect Christmas tree. Our “Mystery” tree tradition goes like this…

We go to the nearest big box store and look for a tree in a certain height with a straight trunk and grab it with it’s string or netting in tack. This year the 6-7ft. trees in the Douglas Fir variety were about $25.00. We throw the tree in the back of the truck and head home wondering what it might look like once we cut away all the string.

This year it took most of the afternoon for the branches to relax as we had freezing temperatures here in the Seattle area and the tree was frozen. As it thawed we could see that it was another fine Mystery Tree choice. We’ve resigned ourselves to be happy with however it might look. Once the lights and decorations are added I’ll show more photos.

Slowly but surely it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas at this old house.

I was so excited to see that WordPress is continuing their tradition of adding snow to my blog for the month of December!

Have you gotten your tree or started your decorating for Christmas?

I’ll be linking up to ABC Wednesday for the letter U soon. Thank you ABC Team and Denise Nesbitt!

O Son of God, We Wait for Thee ~ Hymn Advent

O Son of God, We Wait for Thee

O Son of God, we wait for Thee,
In love for Thine appearing;
We know Thou sittest on the throne,
And we Thy name are bearing,
Who trusts in Thee, may joyful be,
And see Thee, Lord, descending,
To bring us bliss unending.

We wait for Thee ’mid toil and pain,
In weariness and sighing;
But glad that Thou our guilt hast borne,
And canceled it by dying;
Hence cheerfully may we with Thee
Take up our cross and bear it,
Till we relief inherit.

We wait for Thee; here Thou hast won
Our hearts to hope and duty;
But while our spirits feel Thee near,
Our eyes would see Thy beauty;
We fain would be at rest with Thee
In peace and joy supernal,
In glorious life eternal.

We wait for Thee; sure Thou wilt come;
The time is swiftly nearing;
In this we also now rejoice,
And long for Thine appearing.
Oh, bliss ’twill be when Thee we see,
Homeward Thy people bringing,
With transport and with singing!

Words: Philipp F. Hiller, (1699-1799)

InSPIREd Sunday

A simple offering this week during this very busy extended weekend. This church is in Camarillo, California where Dear and I lived for a short 4 year stint while he worked in Thousand Oaks. St. Mary Magdalen Church was kiddy corner to a restaurant that we enjoyed frequenting. In the future I will show you the stained glass windows that have a wonderful story behind them.

For those of you in the good ole U.S.A. I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Ours was fabulous and then we started our Christmas decorating. While in the thick of that I managed to break one of my little toes on my left foot and I’ve been moving very slowly around this old house. I’ve been able to keep doing a little here and there between keeping my foot elevated and rested. We got our first dusting of snow on Saturday!! This Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent. After church we are going to go purchase our Christmas mystery tree.

Enough of me…you can visit InSPIREd Sunday hosted by Beth and Sally and join in some sacred viewings around the world.

November Photo Challenge

Photo*A*Day Challenge ~ Days 24-30

Apple * Shine * Food * Thankful * Makes Me Smile * Home * Scarf

Apple on our apple tree in late August.

Shine – taken in a chapel at one of the Oxford colleges in England.

Food – yummy and comforting pub food in England.

Thankful for 4 marriages that have lasted 40 years in our family, my sisters, ours, and two cousins. Dear and I will celebrate 40 years next Saturday!

Makes Me Smile ~ Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle

Home ~ Where you can put your feet up and relax.

Scarf ~ My favorite scarves are my soccer scarves. This is me and my son Josh enjoying a U.S.A. National Team game at Century Link field in Seattle. Sunday night we’ll be wearing our Rave Green Sounders Soccer team scarves and hope that we can pull ahead of L.A. Galaxy to advance to the M.L.S. finals.

Soccer scarf in Milan, Italy

Old Trafford in Manchester, England. Manchester United vs. Sounders FC friendly scarf!

Our favorite scarves…The Seattle Sounders Season Ticket holders scarves!

Thank you to Kati for her Photo*A*Day Challenge for November.

We have put away Fall decor and we have brought down all our Christmas boxes from the attic. I started full speed ahead on decorating and then I walked into a chair full speed ahead and I think one of my toes is now broken. Oye and bother! Hopefully I’ll be able to walk about better tomorrow. We have a promise of a dry day and we need to go and buy our mystery tree. Have you started your Christmas decorating?

Our 2nd Thanksgiving…

We are so thankful to be able to celebrate two Thanksgiving meals with two different groups of people. Our first Thanksgiving was not on the actual day set aside for Thanksgiving and it was small and sweet with just eight of us around the table.

For our second Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving day we traveled to Edmonds to our friends beautiful home on Puget Sound to enjoy turkey with all the trimmings with 46 of us all sitting at a table. Ha! The kids table, the young people table, and the old and wise people table!

It was a very windy day but the temperature was mild.

We were happy that Andrew and Katie could be with us on Thanksgiving since they missed our “first” Thanksgiving. Here’s Andrew, Katie and Bridget who used to live at this beautiful home before she got married. If you are on instagram you should check out Bridget’s creative creations at http://instagram.com/flora.forager/?modal=true

This dear lady on the right is the Matriarch of the family and is an amazing lady. This photo is of Mary and her daughter in law Brenda.

If you are enjoying Thanksgiving in the Seattle area today you might have scheduled your meal to be done in time to watch the game!

This is my Dear and my dear friend Jody. She is the hostess with the mostess! Dear is always called in to be the master carver of the turkeys (3 turkeys for 46 people).

Did I mention it was windy. My hair is flip flopping with the wind. But…what a view behind my hair!

Thanking God today (and everyday) for dear friends, good food, family, beautiful views, and new friends, too.

The “First” Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends in the Good ole U.S.A.! Gobble Gobble!

When your family grows and then grows up getting together for Thanksgiving can get complicated. We choose to be flexible and we’ll cook a turkey whenever the time is right for our loved ones to get together. We had our first Thanksgiving gathering with the traditional turkey meal on Saturday the 22nd of November. There were eight of us for our meal.

My sister Lana made these delicious individual pecan pies for our gathering.

Katie and Andrew were not able to celebrate with us on this day but we’ll celebrate with them at our “second” Thanksgiving.

My sister Lana and her husband Steve.

In between our meal and dessert we got into two cars and headed to Everett, Washington to see Katie at her first craft show selling her Chainmaille Jewelery handmade in the Pacific Northwest. She sells from her Simple Complication Etsy shop, too. It was a unique show called OddMall. It was fun to see Katie in action and to find out she was making lots of sales.

We came back home and enjoyed the individual pecan pies that Lana made and then there was a fun game of Sequence.

We will be celebrating our “second” Thanksgiving at the home of some dear friends on Thursday. I will be contributing the Yams. Are you cooking a turkey this Thursday?

Since this Timely Post has Tons of T’s in it like Thanks, Thanksgiving, Turkey, Thursday, Trade Shows, and Tradtional, I’ll be linking up with ABC Wednesday on Tuesday for T is for…Thanksgiving! Thanks to the awesome TEAM for hosting!

The Happy Wonderer ~ ellen b.

To honor and encourage

Oh, Come, Little Children ~ Christmas Hymn