Happy New Year!

We wish everyone a very happy and prosperous New Year. Thank you for following our blog this past year and for the many comments that you have shared with us. We look forward to sharing our thoughts with you in 2011, as bizarre as they may seem at times.

Cheers!

Holiday travel

"Are we almost there yet?"

"I'm hungry."

"Can I take my seatbelt off?"

"I'm hungry."

"Why aren't we moving?"

"I'm hungry."

"How much longer?"

"I'm hungry."

"I have to go to the bathroom!"

"My stomach doesn't feel good."

Oh the joys of holiday travel on the road. I guess that's why we fly so much now, or do we? Perhaps your flight plans that looked so good a month ago, suddenly changed in the middle of your Christmas break. Did what was going to be a leisurely two hour plane ride turn out to be a two day nightmare? Did you find yourself sitting in an airport with hundreds of other stranded passengers all who had someplace to go and no way to get there? How about that scramble for a rental car to drive home? Did you make it? Are Planes Trains and Automobiles, or Christmas Vacation still on your Facebook favorite movies list?

Now the big question. Where will you go next Christmas?

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be a sign to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Chirst the Lord. -Luke 2:10-11

Secrets

So what's your Christmas secret? Have you been naughty or nice, or have you been nice and naughty? What are you hiding? We often have trouble keeping secrets from each other so we begin our Christmas shopping about two weeks ahead of time. Hiding stuff is just too tough. Other people manage to shop all year never revealing what they bought until Christmas Day.

It is no secret that advertising messages at Christmas are so enticing and so overwhelming, yet, we fall for them every year. It's the one time of year when we cast the budget aside to buy an extraordinary amount of gifts for those we love. It's a festive time of parties, lunches, and dinners. Other than retail, most businesses operate in neutral from a few days before Christmas until the new year begins about a week later.

For millions of people around the world, Christmas is an opportunity to celebrate the birth of Jesus, born in secret two thousand years ago in Bethlehem. More and more people today openly share their faith in Jesus Christ while others keep their faith a secret. But whatever secrets you chose to share this year at Christmas, I trust you will either take the opportunity to share Jesus Christ with someone, or if someone chooses to share that secret with you, please listen. It could mean the opportunity of a lifetime, or more.

Please have a wonderful day of celebration, and feel free to share the real secret of Christmas.



Big city lights

It's Christmas time in the city. While we love our peaceful life in the country, we are privileged to live close enough to New York City, so replete with iconic images of Christmas, that we can sneak in and see lights on a massive scale. Sure, we all have our Christmas trees, candles in the windows, lights in the bushes, on the fence or outlining a house, but New York just seems to do it up big, as only New York could. From the top of the Empire State Building to Macy’s Broadway marquis and an eleven story cascade of lights, there’s nothing like the city at Christmas.

It seems New York is unscathed by  controversies about public displays of lights with Christmas themes that seem to plague so many small towns. Some towns are open and festive about Christmas, but others have no public displays and don’t even put candles in the windows of private homes. One thing is for sure, they certainly celebrate with gifts and parties.

What about you? What’s your preference? The big city bedecked in millions of lights and decorations, the peaceful small town with a candle in every window and a tree on the town square wrapped in holiday lights, or the town that celebrates the birth of Christ behind closed doors with the drapes pulled?

Gift wrapping

Wrapping gifts really should be easy. A little paper, a little ribbon, and a little girl . . . oh, wait a minute, maybe it isn't so easy. "But she's having so much fun," you say, as you watch about ten dollars in ribbon go up in knots.

Seriously, is your shopping done? Are the gifts wrapped? Are you ready for the Christmas morning rush, or are you still rushing around? Have you gone exploring around your house to find out what you're getting, or are you exploring because you don't remember where you hid someone's gift? Perhaps you've been intercepting email confirmation notices from online catalogs.

We have one simple rule in our house, if you find out what you're getting ahead of time, you don't get it. It just reinforces the concept that Christmas is about giving, not getting.

Load limit

Okay so now our Christmas tree is in a bucket of water in our living room. All day Saturday and Sunday we opened what seemed like a moving van of Rubbermaid storage boxes full of every ornament that we have inherited, bought, made or been given over the past forty years. Some brought back memories of school Christmas ornament projects. That is when kids were allowed to mention Christmas in school.

Other ornaments have hung on our tree ever since I was a kid. Remember the bubble lights from the fifties? We look at them each year, but they are now a bigger fire hazard than candles, so we leave them in the box. We have acorns that look like Santa and clothes pins that look like airplanes. One year we even melted plastic wine glasses in our oven and watched them morph into unpredictable shapes and hung them on the tree.

So how many ornaments can a Christmas tree branch hold? I think you measure it in years and in memories. Somehow the branches, like us, bear the load, no matter how much we make them carry. We just keep watering the tree to give it strength, then sit back and watch our memories glitter in the lights. New Year’s Day, we’ll take it down, repack the ornaments, and haul the boxes back to the attic until next Christmas, along with a few more ornaments that we picked up along the way this year, to add to the memories next year.

Have you caught your Christmas tree yet?

It’s that time of the yet year again when all of us Paul Bunyan wannabes troop off to our favorite Christmas tree farm with our pruning saws to cut down the perfect tree and haul it down the mountain like a fresh deer carcass. We pay the owner for the privilege of wandering through his property to cut down one of his trees, bind it in a fish net, and then tie it down to the roof of our car so it won’t get away, and that’s only the beginning.

If we drove around town any other time of the year with a ten foot tree wrapped in a fishnet strapped to the top of our car, people would think we were nuts, but not in December, at least in the first three weeks, anyway.

Next we haul the tree into our living room and “replant” it into a bucket of water, as if it were a bunch of freshly cut flowers in spring. But this is a tree, not a dozen roses. Next, we put about a thousand or more lights on it, hundreds of ornaments, popcorn, paper, tinsel and a host of other glittering things.

Next we plug in the lights. The tree takes on a whole new life, and the Christmas season is officially underway. The whole tree thing seems so weird when we parse it down to its individual parts, but when it’s done, and we see all the ornaments, the decorations and of course, the star on top, reflect the sparkle of the lights, we begin to understand the beauty of Christmas.

But deeper than that, is the real beauty that so many of us appreciate, the birth of Jesus, savior of the world. Regardless of what your own personal faith may be, it was an event that is recognized and celebrated throughout so much of the world at this time of year. We trust you will sit back and appreciate Christmas for what it represents as you take in the beauty of the tree in your home over the next few weeks.

Winter adventure

Winter is always an adventure, especially on unpaved back roads. We have a lot of signs like this in Connecticut. Some people turn around and go the other way, but others look at it as an adventure. No snowplows, or salt trucks, just cross country skiers, dog sleds, and people looking for an adventure. It's the same road that we have walked down in spring, summer and fall, but now the landmarks are slowly disappearing under a blanket of white snow. Fences, rocks, trees, bushes, ruts and a host of other things that we use to identify where we are on our journey are suddenly gone. How adventurous are you now? Do you keep going to see what’s ahead?

As we get older, the landmarks of our past gradually disappear. Oh sure, like the stumps, rocks and trees we remember major events in our lives but as we get further into our adventure, the details, like the pebbles in the road, disappear. Yes, there were some rough spots in the road that we didn’t see coming, but they are behind us, and the only way to avoid getting tripped up again is to move ahead.

Now, what do you do when you come to a fork in the road? Do you take the road with the least amount of snow, the most visible obstacles, or are you an adventurous risk taker that chooses the one with the most snow and deal with the unforeseen challenges as they surface? Do you keep moving forward or do you turn around and go back to a safe place to sit and wait for the snow to melt?

Personally, I prefer the adventure and the challenges that lie ahead. I have found that when you go back to sit and wait for the “snow to melt,” it’s always harder to get up and move forward, again. How about you?