A Christmas Meme

Here is a fun Christmas meme that has been sighted on numerous blogs. Please feel free to participate if you have ten minutes of time between wrapping, mixing, entertaining and celebrating!

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? I switch it up. This year it is more wrapping paper.

2. Real tree or artificial? Now artificial. A wood stove and a dry tree just didn't mix.

3. When do you put up the tree? The first week of December.

4. When do you take the tree down? In February some time. I switch in January and do a whole winter theme with silver and blue decorations. I put out snowmen and snowflakes. It helps beat the winter blues.

5. Do you like eggnog? Yes... and this year I tried a new vanilla spice nog that is very tasty.

6. Favorite gift received as a child? My first desk that I found under the tree Christmas morning.

7. Do you have a nativity scene? Yes. I brought the one I received as a child with me when I left home. I still have it, but got another one a few years ago also. If I had more space to display I would love to collect Nativity scenes.

8. Hardest person to buy for? My husband's friend G.H.

9.Easiest person to buy for? my sister

10. Worst Christmas gift you ever received? I got some earring and a choker a few years ago... the earrings laid down on my shoulders and the choker did what is was supposed to do... it choked me.

11. Mail or email Christmas cards? mail

12. Favorite Christmas Movie? White Christmas

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas? I try to pick up stuff throughout the year, but mostly between October and early December.

14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? Yes... and they were well received.

15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Mom's spritz, fruitcake and Nuts and Bolts.

16. Clear lights or colored on the tree? Clear lights.

17. Favorite Christmas song? Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel, White Christmas, and Grown-Up Christmas List

18. Travel at Christmas or stay home? Travel to visit family in Idaho.

19. Can you name all of Santa’s reindeer? Believe me, I sang that song so much in music class in elementary school I could recite them in my sleep.

20. Angel on the tree top or a star? A springer spaniel angel in honor of my first dog Nikki.

21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning? One on Christmas Eve, the rest on Christmas morning.

22. Most annoying thing about this time of year? When stores are out of things everyone needs like ornament hooks, candles, and blue candy canes ( a request from my students).

23. What I love most about Christmas? I love the music, the gathering with family to prepare meals and celebrate together, hearing from old friends, and singing Christmas carols in my little church.

Christmas Baking: An Inland Empire Girl Tradition and Keepers from the Recipe Box

At holiday time each year I do baking as gifts for family, friends, and neighbors. Some years I do a variety of cookies. Other years I mix it up and do breads and candies. This week-end I did holiday breads. The biggest reason I chose the following breads is because I still had a bumper crop of rhubarb and zucchini waiting in the freezer to be used. I love being able not only to give people homemade bread, but also home grown produce!I started with a recipe I haven't used very often. After JEJ did a taste test he decided it was a keeper. These Fresh Rhubarb Loaves combine tart rhubarb, the fragrance of nutmeg and other yummy ingredients to create a loaf that can be served at breakfast, brunch, or as a snack.



Fresh Rhubarb Loaves
1/2 cup butter
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg ( I use a bit more nutmeg from the spice bottle)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/3 cups finely diced rhubarb
1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon


Cream together the butter and brown sugar. Add the egg and beat until well blended. To the flour add the soda, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. With the mixer on low, combine the four mixture alternately with the buttermilk. Blend in the vanilla. By hand stir in the nuts and lastly the rhubarb.

Pour batter into two greased and floured 9x5x2 inch bread pans. Sprinkle the mixture of sugar and cinnamon on top of unbaked loaves. ( I skipped this and just sprinkled them with white sparkling sugar when I took them out.) Bake at 350 for 40-50 minutes. Remove from oven and cool completely before removing from pans.



I also made Zucchini Bread Plus which is posted here. The delicious Pumpkin-Chip Bread was the third recipe I mixed up and it can be found here. All three of these recipes are found in the Best of Friends, Etc. Cookbook by Darlene Glantz Skees.

Sibling Assignment #47: Reconciliation : The Winter Dance

Raymond Pert gave us the following assignment:

"My WR 121 class has been studying reconciliation and reading all these papers about their struggles and successes with reconciliation makes me want to write about reconciliation.So, write a post about an experience you have had with reconciliation. It might be a successful reconciliation with a person you were in conflict with. It might be reconciliation with your self you were out of sorts about. It might be about a reconciliation that has never happened and maybe never will. It might be coming to reconcile yourself with an idea that had bugged you for a long time. I think these reconciliation posts would be enhanced by each of us writing, at some point in the post, about what we understand "reconciliation" to mean and where we look in our lives for examples of reconciliation that help us measure our successes and failures at reconciliation. Have fun!"

You will find his here soon and Silver Valley Girl's is here.

Growing up in Kellogg, Idaho happy memories came with winter . I loved making snowmen, sleigh riding, coming in covered with snow,drinking hot chocolate, and riding on open air truck singing Christmas carols with the Camp Fire Girls. When I moved away from north Idaho I didn't like winter as well. Traveling to far-away places in winter created homesickness and bad road experiences . The winters in southeastern Washington were very different than those of north Idaho. I have memories of lots of cold wind, freezing rain, and did I mention wind? I don't participate in winter sports so I wasn't active during the cold months. The season of winter began to have an effect on my well-being. I struggled during the winter. I lost interest in activities I had enjoyed. I didn't have energy.

In recent years I reconciled myself to enjoy winter. Reconciliation for me is to resolve an issue that causes a struggle. How could I make the sadness season come alive with beauty and grace? I have the holidays to look forward to now that I have family living closer. My digital camera gives me opportunities to capture photo images of winter's beauty. I dress more practical so I don't get too cold and now I carry extra socks (I hate cold feet). Living in my corner of northeastern Washington has allowed me to appreciate the numerous wonders of this season. Beauty can lie in snow covered holly, a lone watering can on the rock wall, or a woodpecker resting in a pine tree.


"The Winter Dance" is the title of the video that helped me capture my reconciliation with winter. In a dance you may feel surefooted, but then the rhythm changes or you acquire a different partner. A dance can be lively and spirited or slow and dreamy. As I partnered with winter for this dance I felt I too became more surefooted. I also paid attention to the changes in rhythm, looked for the lively and spirited parts of the season, and paused to enjoy the slow and dreamy. The Winter Dance is an ongoing life process. When I need to reconcile an issue again I can think about the dance lessons of winter.

I hope you appreciate the beauty in my corner of the world in "The Winter Dance." To find other Dance posts go to Sunday Scribblings here.
( it is only a little over two minutes long... not thirteen... I need to fix that glitch!)

In the Bleak Mid-Winter : A Visit to the Greenhouse

When the weather is icy and cold and the days begin and end in darkness, it is a nice reprieve to take some pictures in the greenhouse. Our greenhouse is primarily used to keep outdoor plants going through the winter and to have a place that houseplants can survive without the drying effect of the wood stove. The ivy geraniums continue to bloom in a vivid pink.
The jade plant was too big to move out of the greenhouse so it has become a permanent fixture.

The sunlight is a welcome treat as these plants turn themselves toward the light.
Taking a picture from a ways back I can catch a whole mixture of ferns, wandering jew, geraniums, and a Christmas cactus. The fragrance from the scented geraniums makes the time spent in the greenhouse even more worthwhile.

I Just Wanted to Teach

When it gets close to winter vacation I try to structure my class periods with my middle school students in a way that keeps them busy and active so we don't stray into the " early Christmas break syndrome".

I entered my classroom Monday and realized that the week was not going to start out in a normal way. My closet door was open which was the first red flag. I quickly learned that our building had been broken into over the week-end. The amazing thing is that my closet was open and nothing was taken and everything was exactly the way I left it Friday.

I just wanted to teach. About the time I figured out that all was intact from the robbery I got a call that we had no water. A line had broken in our little building. That meant no bathroom or sink use. We did okay for about two hours. Then students needed to hike to the main building to use the bathroom. After rotating groups of students for a twenty-minute visit to the other building, it began to cut into the instruction time.

This went on for two days as workers struggled with frozen ground trying to figure out how to fix the leak. I limited my liquids because I knew I would be unable to leave and hike to the main building. The water was fixed on Wednesday right about noon.

When the afternoon class came in again, I just wanted to teach once again. The toilets wouldn't work in my classroom. As the maintenance guy was fixing those, the boys toilet overflowed into the room. New parts needed to be ordered and we still don't have the boys bathroom up and running. The students held together pretty darn well!

It is amazing when you want to keep structure and order plus a little teaching squeezed in how events can get in the way. I hope tomorrow we can end with everything operational!

Top Ten Things That Put Me Over the Edge During the Holiday Season

10. Missing recipe ingredients. I stuck the poppy seeds in a tin on the shelf in the hall last December, knowing I only use them once a year for the Poppy Seed Lemon Bread. As I am mixing the first ingredients this year I discover the tin went to charity three weeks ago.
9. Cat gone bad. After spending two years being perfectly content as a sweet, well-behaved cat Isabelle discovered being a BAD CAT was more exciting and that lots of white tissue paper can tear easily and make a lovely new nesting spot on the guest room bed.
8. Blooming Christmas plants. Enough said. The amaryllis has not even come out of the dirt yet.
7. Nontraditional nativity scenes. I found my nativity set in the Sears Wish Book as a child. I still have it. Mary and Joseph are people. They kneel near the Baby Jesus. I cannot wrap my brain around nativities comprised of woodland bears, trolls, snow people, or Disney characters. I don’t want an angel with buggy eyes and a shock of rainbow hair that stands on end. Three Wise Frostys? No.
6. Nutritional labels on tins of Danish Butter Cookies. Once a year I crave those buttery delights. I want them without the info on bad fats, calories, or amount of sodium. Take away the low fat, sugar free, organic version stored in a recycled, environmentally sensitive container. I’ll take one cheap holiday decorated tin filled with the butter cookies that contain sugar, sodium, bad fat, and yellow dye.
5. Ornament hooks sold out. How can those little hooks that cost about fifty cents be sold out in a local One Stop Shopping store? Were they part of the Door Buster sales on Black Thursday?

4. A Christmas tree getting knocked over. Name a family that hasn’t experienced this. 3. Three words: Candy cane flavors. Remember picking out candy canes and the only choices you had were Bob’s original candy canes in red and green box? Now each season I feel like I am buying food at a carnival with flavors like cotton candy, bubble gum, and hot buttered popcorn. Please! Just give me my red and white peppermint candy canes in the red chimney box.
2. Three words again: Broken candy canes. Every year I hear people of all ages whine “Oh… this candy cane is broken. Can I have another one?” Do they have a different taste? Do they digest differently? Are calories added as they break? Taking a deep breath I hold out the box and sweetly inquire,”Would you like Strawberry Starburst, Blue Raspberry, Grape Crush, or Sour Patch Green?”
1. Holiday stamps sold out last year. The local post office worker carefully explained that all varieties of the 2006 Christmas stamp series were sold out. “We have a nice Dr. Jonas Salk stamp,” she replied calmly. My mind began racing. Let’s see- a red Sharpie, a little Santa hat on Jonas. What could hurt? “I’ll take fifty!” I announced gleefully.