Follow me.
Let me open up the heart of me.
Take hold of my hand
And let me lead you along on my
unknown journey...
My sojourn...
My quest in finding the answers
to who I am.
Come and learn with me.
Life itself
is a marvelous teacher.

-- December 24, 2007 --

I will no longer be posting here.  At least not on a regular basis.  I have moved here.   On a personal level, this blog has served its purpose.  I have come to realize I need a fresh start somewhere else.  As my poem says, please feel free to follow me...I'd love to have you come along on my journey!

...And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.  And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in the manger.  And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.  And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.

...But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them
in her heart.

Luke 2: 15-19

I've been writing here at Bravenet for close to 3 years now.  It's time for a change.  I'm not deleting this blog as of yet but I've created a new site here and invite you to visit me there.  Let me know what you think.  If the majority of you prefer my site here, I'll stay put.  Please leave a comment at my other site if you have an opinion one way or the other..

Thanks and Merry Christmas!

No "Happy Holidays!" in this household.  No, sirree.  I've been making a point of telling every store employee I've spoken to recently, "Merry Christmas!"  Many have said "Merry Christmas!" just as heartily in return.  But you can tell the stores where they've been told to keep it 'politically correct' because, once I've said it to them, they look furtively around, lean in close, and say "Merry Christmas!" back in not much more than a whisper.  Who would've ever thought America would come to this?  SIGH.....

I was so tempted to post my Christmas entry tonite.  But I won't let temptation take me over like I did one time when I was a kid and I snuck into my parents' room and found all the Christmas presents tucked away in their closet.  And then, on the way out, I heard my Dad coming up the stairs.  Oooooooops.  I dove under their bed but I made a little too much noise hitting the floor and Dad found me.  Oh buddy buddy.  Let's just say I never gave in to THAT temptation again!  Plus it truly ruined my Christmas, knowing everything that was under the tree not only for me but for all of my brothers, too.

The worst Christmas I had when I was a child, tho, was when I was sick with the hard measles and running a temperature of around 104 degrees.  My parents set up one of my Dad's Army cots in the family room and that's where I lay, too sick to even open my gifts.  I think I managed to have every kind of measles known to mankind before I finally reached adulthood.

I think I'm going to throttle little Miss Chloe dog.  Last nite and tonite as I've tried to write here she's sat and growled at me deep in her chest, trying to get me to give in and go to bed.  She won't go when Dear Hubby goes, only when I go, and she's become such a little prima donna she thinks she can rule the roost.  If she keeps this nonsense up, does anyone want a Lhasa Apso?  Preferably someone older with no children and nothing to do but let her lay on their lap all day long!  Arghhhh...this dog is psychotic, I'm telling you.  Lovable...but psychotic.

Well, really...it is about my bedtime.  If I go now, will she think she's made me go?  Probably.  No wonder she thinks she rules the household, eh?

Visits from Santa Claus!  Ah, yes!  I think I wrote in my Weird Meme recently about having a photographic memory when it comes to numbers.  Well, I also have a memory that goes waaaaaaaaaay back.  I can remember having a hemorrhaging nosebleed when I was around 3 years old...the terrifying ride thru the middle of the nite to the hospital in a town 10 miles away, the blood-soaked towel my mom had in her hands, her frantic voice saying, "Hurry, Victor!" to my dad over and over again.  I also remember being packed in ice.  And, once the nosebleed stopped, watching my parents backing out of my hospital room saying "Good nite!" and peering at them thru the crib bars.  The next morning a sweet-voiced nurse gave me a bath in a big tin pan in a sink!

Well, my memories also go back to a visit from Santa Claus.  I was around the same age at the time and I can remember one of my brothers standing next to the crib I had at home, shaking the bars and yelling, "Santa Claus is here!  Santa Claus is here!"  I guess Santa was supposed to have arrived earlier in the evening but my parents had finally given up on him coming and had put me to bed.  So...I was awakened out of sleep.  But I knew who Santa was and I was ecstatic!  That is, until my mom took me out into the living room to see him.  He was SO drunk he terrified me!  I scrambled up into my mother's arms and held her in a death-grip until Santa finally left.  It's a wonder I didn't have nightmares of Santa for the rest of my life.

Back in those days, the mid-1950s, you could contact the VFW in my little hometown and have Santa stop by your house for a nominal fee so my parents had decided to surprise my two older brothers and me and do it.  Little did they know that Santa sampled quite a bit of "Christmas Cheer" along the way and by the time he finally stumbled upon our porch he was three sheets to the wind!

I have photos of me from that nite.  My arms and legs are wrapped like a boa constrictor around my petite little mother.  My oldest brother is sitting on Santa's lap with eyes the size of saucers.  My eyes were huge, too, but from fear, haha!  I can remember the sense of terror, but that story went into the family memory vault to be taken out each year and chuckled over.

I don't think I ever looked at Santa in quite the same way.

I'm having another talk with myself tonite.  I posted this to convince myself I'm having a good Christmas.  I'll let you know on December 26th if it worked.

As I begin writing this I'm not planning on writing another Christmas entry but these two little charmers are so cute, aren't they?  They just put you in the spirit!

I'm going to write about hair.  My hair in particular.  Once upon a time a million years ago I had lovely long chestnutty brown locks that waved their way down past my shoulders.  At 54-in-a-few-days, I have more white than silvery curls now.  And when I say curls, I mean curls.  I've kept my hair short for several years, trying to keep this unruly mop halfway civilized looking but my Dear Hubby said to me a few months back rather wistfully, "I sure wish you'd grow your hair out again.  I like it so much better longer!"  Well, I hate longer hair on older women but, since he grows a goatee that he hates to keep me happy, I felt the least I could do was grow my hair out a little bit.  Definitely not down to my shoulders, but...longer than 3" or 4" in length at least.  So...I began letting it grow.  Is there anything worse in this world than the in-between stage of hair growing?!   I can't begin to tell you how many times I've been tempted since agreeing to this plan to go and have it all whacked off again!  But now, a few months in to it, I'm finding out I'm glad I let it grow.  I haven't had my hair long since it's been silvery-white so I had no idea what it'd do if I let it grow.  I figured it was so wiry and curly short it'd probably be a frizz-ball long...but actually the curls are relaxing quite a bit.  They aren't the soft barely-there waves of my youth but my hair now sits down on my head and behaves itself the way it's supposed to.  All I've been doing is trimming up the fringe of bangs I have along the way.   I have to go in and renew my driver's license in the next week or so and I'm thinking maybe I'll have a halfway decent photo for once.  At least I won't look like I came in after putting my finger in an electric socket!

I haven't decorated my house at all for the holidays.  For one thing, my very active little grandson would be into everything all day long and he keeps me busy enough 10 hours a day without adding that to our days, too.  Did I say this wouldn't be about Christmas?  Well, I've got stacks of Christmas cards all over the house that have been sent to us.  I've lost count of how many.  A lot.  And my daughter asked me the other day, "Aren't you at least going to hang those up for decorations?"  I have good intentions to do so but I haven't gotten to it yet.  So they sit in stacks all around the kitchen and dining room and living room and I look at them and I think, "Today."  Or, "Tomorrow."  But todays and tomorrows are slipping into too many yesterdays and I still don't have them up.  We got a beautiful card from my very dear church email friend I've written about on my blog here a couple of times in the past.  A lovely, long hand-written note inside.  And what had I sent to her and her husband?  I was so rushed with cards this year I think I wrote:  Love, Dear Hubby & Kris.  Stuff like that makes me feel like a lazy heel.  Ouch.  Honestly, I'm NOT lazy.  I'm not.  Frazzled.  But not lazy.

Oh, why not go ahead and make this another holiday entry?  With a birthday right around Christmas I always felt like I was missing out on something when I was little.  My parents were so broke after present-buying I usually got one nice birthday gift...one year I remember getting a Cinderella watch with a pink wristband that I loved.  I never had a birthday party because most of my friends' families either visited relatives or had family-related get togethers during the holidays.  I did get to choose whatever I wanted for dinner on my birthday, and I got to choose the cake and ice cream flavors, too.  But my brothers also got to do that on their birthdays so I never felt there was something special just for me on my 'special day.'  I think I was 6 when my mother decided to give me a half-year birthday party in June just so I could experience a real birthday.  It was fun and it was appreciated...but I told her at the end of the day she didn't have to do it again.  Because, you see, it really wasn't my birthday and I knew it.  I've always been too practical and literal-minded to be able to "pretend" stuff like that.  And my mom understood that and agreed to go back to celebrating on my 'real' day.

One of the sweetest things anyone ever did for me on my 'real' birthday was around the time my mom died, back in 1989.  I belonged to a Secret Pal club at my church and on my birthday my Secret Pal sent me a beautiful bouquet of flowers.  She and two other friends took me out to lunch at an expensive restaurant down on Portland's waterfront...tho at the time I had no idea it was Donna who'd gotten the lunch together and paid for the whole thing...they'd all just told me they were going to pick me up and take me out on my birthday to 'cover' Donna's surprise.  She's such a special person...for my "revealing gift" she'd taken a poem I'd written about my mother right after she'd died and spent a year cross-stitching it onto a gorgeous sampler.  I have it hung on the wall in my bedroom. 

Goodness.  I dunno what's come over me the past few days.  I think I'm trying to convince myself that I do have the holiday spirit this year, and some of these memories that are coming to me as I sit down to type in the evening certainly are helping to restore it somewhat.  I dunno.  I can't dwell on a lot of the things in the past, the Christmases I would've loved to spend differently than we had to.  They're gone, never to be relived.  So I've been having a talk with myself this year, telling myself to focus on the Christmases of the future.  Lord willing there are more.  There's no guarantee on that or even tomorrow.  Each day is precious.  And I am blessed.  And I am happy.  And I may not have all this world's goods, but I'm one of the richest women in the world.

Christmas cards are funny things, aren't they?  We received one today in the mail that had me completely stymied...from the sender's address to the photo picture inside.  And there were no names listed outside of "The L------ Family".   I had never heard of the L----- family before.  I know very few people who live in the town they live in locally and we've already received cards from the people we do know there.  And we have never, ever received a card from this family before.  Huh.

But then I took a closer look at the only adult in the photo and I finally realized he was related to me.  In a roundabout way.  The grown child of step-relatives with his two toddler half-sisters, tho it's such a collage of images of the two little girls floating all over the place I thought, "Man, these people, whoever they are, have a lot of kids!!"  At least I think it was the same two little girls....then again, it might be a mixture of yours-mine-and-ours since I don't really know them.  I bet you never would've guessed that.  Well, once I halfway recognized the young man it finally dawned on me who the card was from and I had a moment there of feeling totally stupid.

Writing about this just brought back a funny story about my Dad.  I haven't thought of this in years, but Christmas cards made me think of it so I'll share it with you tonite.  My parents had moved out here to the Pacific Northwest a few months after they married, right after World War II, coming all the way from New Hampshire.  Back in those days, that was one big move.  They packed everything they owned in the back of my Dad's old sedan and drove across country in about a week's time.  This was back in the days before Interstate highways, remember.  Once they arrived and settled here I believe my Dad made one trip 'back home' for a death in the family, but it was 22 years later before my Mom and we kids ever had a chance to go back to New Hampshire and meet family.  Anyway...my Dad had a cousin named Peg who was married to a man named Tyler and every Christmas a card would arrive from them with a little note of news tucked inside.  I believe they lived somewhere in Massachusetts but I'm not sure.  I don't know if my Mom had ever actually met them, but she faithfully sent a card to Peg and Tyler every year, too.

Now we jump ahead.  Many years ahead.   Before my Mom died and afterwards, my parents and then my Dad had the money to travel and made several trips back to New Hampshire.  On one trip after my Mom had died in 1989 my Dad decided to go visit Peg and Tyler, whom he hadn't seen in probably 50 years.  And my Dad NEVER ever called anyone ahead of time...ever...to let them know he was coming to visit, my brothers and me included.  He had a way of just popping up on your doorstep.  So he pops up on Peg and Tyler's doorstep.  If I remember right, it was summertime and Peg was out working in the yard when my Dad drove up and walked over to where she was standing.  My Dad was one of the friendliest, most gregarious men in the world and he began chatting with Peg like he'd known her forever.  And she very graciously talked with him too, even inviting him inside the kitchen for a cold drink because it was so hot outside.  Dad sits down at the kitchen table with Peg and they're just talking away when Tyler walks in.  He gets in to the conversation, too.  I don't know how long this went on before Peg finally spoke up and said, "I'm sorry, but I don't recognize you." She turned to her husband and asked, "Who is your friend, honey?"  Tyler's mouth about dropped down to his knees and he said, "I don't have a clue!  I thought he was some friend of yours!  I was just going to ask you the same question!"  For once in his life, my Dad was absolutely speechless!  I guess he hadn't realized just how much people can change in 50-odd years...I know from photographs I have of him he didn't look much like his younger self as he got older...he put on weight after he quit smoking, he wore glasses...what was left of his hair was sparse and silvery.   Once he introduced himself, tho, they had a wonderful laugh about it all.  I sure wish I could've been a fly on the wall to witness that one, tho!

And that is my Christmas story for today.  It brought a smile to me as I sat here typing away.  And that warm, fuzzy feeling Christmas stories should bring to a person's heart.  Ah, Dad...you were priceless.

And so it goes.  I went to church this morning and it's all decorated for the children's Christmas program this evening.  What is it about singing "Silent Night" that gives me goose bumps every time I sing it, especially when we do it a capella?  A couple of Christmases ago we sang the entire thing without music in a candlelit sanctuary...beautiful.

Hmmmmmmm.  As I was sitting alone in my pew this morning, a young woman approached and asked if it was ok to sit with me.  I told her certainly and moved over to make room for her.  We introduced ourselves and chitchatted for a few minutes until the service started, then spoke again at the end of it.  She'd told me she's come to our church a few times in the past so I told her any time she spots me -- I usually sit in the same general area -- to feel free to come sit by me.  She seemed very grateful for that offer and I told her there's nothing worse than coming into a place where you don't know anyone and then having to sit by yourself!  I've spent a lot of time sitting there by myself because Dear Hubby was always so busy with driving Sunday School vans or ushering or whatever.  It doesn't bother me to sit alone but I've been going there for over 31 years now and at least I know everyone around me for the most part...that makes a big difference.  I vowed a few weeks ago when I stepped out of my comfort zone and introduced myself to someone new that from now on I'm never ignoring another newcomer.  And here the Lord brought another person my way!  It'll be interesting to see how much of a One Woman Welcome Wagon I become!  And it feels great!!!

I got all of my Christmas shopping done yesterday.  That was a good feeling, too...no more pressure.  I was at the store the minute the door opened at 8 am and I was completely done and out of there at 8:52!  I know what I want and I get it...no quibbling around for me.  Yuck.  It's about the only time of year I do any retail shopping.  Beyond that, I'm a junk store junkie.  If truth be told, even a few Christmas gifts in the past have been bought at thrift stores but...shhhhhhhhhh!  That's our secret!

I've noticed this house in particular before, but I get a kick out of it every time I walk past it, which I did again yesterday when Chloe dog and I went for a longer walk than usual.  Posted all over the fence are signs:  "No Trespassing!"  "Beware of Dog!"  "Enter at Your Own Risk!"  And the decorative sign hung on the front door?  "Welcome, Friends!"  HA!

One gift I found for my grandson was a shirt inscribed: "I'm DEFINITELY up to something!"  How could I resist that one?!

I'm no longer buying a bazillion gifts for everyone.  My daughter is 31.  My son is 29.  My daughter-in-law is 26.  I said the days of child-like Christmases are over now...it's time to cut back and give them nice things, just not as many.  With Dylan at the age now where Christmas is going to be a major day for him and a new grandson coming into the picture, Christmas will focus on them and they will get a bazillion gifts.  Which is the way it should be.  Dear Hubby and I haven't given gifts to each other since our kids were born.  Instead, we'd have a get-away weekend, just the two of us, at the coast or wherever we decided upon going, in January.  My in-laws were always so good about watching the kids for us that particular weekend.  Instead of January, we're hoping to get away this time around in February.  There's a bow shoot then somewhere in eastern Oregon and Dear Hubby asked if I'd like to go to that.  He can freeze his fanny off out on the archery course...I'll stay in a motel room where it's nice and warm and read.  Sounds about perfect to me.

I'm taking care of Dylan a little later today.  Both my son and daughter-in-law are Sunday School teachers and are involved in the program tonite so Dylan will stay with us while all that's going on.  Next year he'll be old enough to participate in it himself, so it'll be back to going to the Children's program for us again!  I've got dishes to do, a dog to walk...always something, isn't there?

This is one time I'm glad I don't have comments on here any more because I'm sure what I'm going to write about tonite isn't going to be understood by a lot of people.  You haven't lived my life in my shoes so there isn't really any way you could begin to understand where I'm coming from.  But I need to just let some stuff go.  Purge, shall we say.  Been there, done that here before.  Time to do it again, I'm thinkin'.

Bear with me.

As always, with some personal stuff, I can't go into detail.  But I can write about how I feel about it, as long as I keep to generalities.  Let's just say for the first time in 34 Christmases as a married woman I thought I was finally going to spend Christmas the way I'd love to spend it.  But, yet again...it ain't gonna happen.  Oh well.  And, really...that's all I'm at liberty to say.  Cryptic, I know, but trust me.   And it isn't because I'm spineless and can't speak up for myself, either.  I'm good at doing both.  But sometimes, in marriage, you just have to do the right thing whether you want to or not.  I am doing the right thing.  Trust me.

Ok.  This is really weird.  In the slow months of the year -- now -- I average between 300-400 visitors per day.  All of a sudden I'm spiking again...over 700 a couple of days ago, around 900 yesterday, and something like 1,037 so far today.  What is up?!  Could it be spam commenters?  But I don't have comments.  It creeps me out because it's totally against the law of averages for my blog readership.  Anyone else spiking?  But why do I ask?  No one can tell me, HA!

Oh well.

My darling little grandson has been in no hurry to become verbal.  He's been able to communicate his wants and needs just fine using the word "Ahhhhh!" in about a hundred different volumes and tones for several months now.  A pointing index finger has helped him along, too.  But I realized he's finally given me and Dear Hubby names!  I am "Ah MAH!" and Dear Hubby is "Da DAH!"  With a lot of emphasis on the second syllable, mind you. 

Christmas shopping tomorrow.  I'll be at the store I plan on shopping at when the doors open at 8 am.  I was hoping for 7 am, but we don't always get what we want in life, do we?  I'm still hoping most people like to sleep in on Saturday a bit and I'll pretty much have the store to myself.  Hope is eternal.

I got a Christmas card from my wonderful friend Ivona the other day.  Inside she'd written she'd love to get together and go out to lunch..."and bring that baby along!!" she said.  In my Christmas card to her I wrote, "I'd LOVE to go out to lunch...but on a "grown up" lunch."  Hopefully on a Saturday!  There's that word again...hope! 

While I'm in the hoping mode, why not hope for world peace this Christmas season?  And hope for at least one election year that isn't full of slimey politics?  And I'm going to hope for a world that comes back to its senses, where kindness and honesty and decency once again abound.  Where parents raise their kids instead of the other way around.  Where everyone has enough to eat, a warm house, and money for gas to get to work.  Money for gas for vacation!  For traveling during the Christmas holidays!  A world where every little child gets their Christmas wish fulfilled.  Where hope truly is eternal.