Nothing says December like the current lineup of television programming available. We have two choices people – sports or Christmas movies. Since I am all in to celebrate the season this year – Chrismas movies it is!
I have watched three Christmas movies in the past two days and none of them were my traditional favourites – ‘National Lampoon Christmas Vacation”, Bruce Willis in ‘Die Hard’ (or any sequel thereof), ‘A Garfield Christmas’, ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ or the classic horror flick ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’. None of them were the traditional family favourites, such as ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, ‘A Christmas Carol’, ‘A Christmas Story’, ‘Miracle on 13th Street’ or Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’.
Nope! This year I have jumped right in to the heartstring pulling, tear jerking, Chrismas movie specials that lead one to believe that Christmas miracles happen, that joy and wonder exists, and that this truly is the season of love, light, kindness and ‘goodwill towards all’.
Norman Rockwell Presents – Coming Home For Christmas.
Christmas a la carte.
Christmas at Holly Lodge
If the lineup of likewise holiday movies holds, I will soon have to make a run to the store to restock our supply of microwave popcorn, wine, and Kleenex. Tis the season. 😥
That’s it for today, folks. Take care and have a great day!🎄
Last night I decided to celebrate the season by changing our decor to something rather more seasonal. It wasn’t a heroic effort but it was a start and more than I have done in recent years.
The creche has always been the first seasonal piece to get unpacked. It has always been humble and after forty some years it is definitely looking ‘authentic.With our temperatures plummeting and our snow accumulating, Frosty is not looking at all out of place.One of so many musical pieces that have joined us over the years.For whatever reason, they scared the wits out of granddaughterGenie when she was a tot. We couldn’t go down the Christmas aisles in Walmart for years without traumatizing the poor tyke. Our only tree so far, but I am seriously considering going all out and getting the real dealthis year. 🌲Santa and the Mrs. hanging out with the Christmas elephants. (Santa and Mrs. Claus are quite sizeable ceramic creations thatDan made – long before we met.
That is it for today folks! Take care and have a great day! 💞
‘The weather outside is frightful’ so what better way to celebrate the season than by sharing a few photos of our authenticcally Christmassy landscape.
Looking out our backdoorOut to feed our furry and feathered friendsDifferent trees and bushes sporting their winter lookGround cedar by our front stepsSnow covering the neighbourhoodTemps are celcius so yes it is as cold as it looks!
With a few more inches of snow to come and winds picking up, this will be an excellent day to curl up in front of the fireplace with a cup of tea or a glass of wine, a good book, and a warm dog. Celebrating the season the Canadian way. 🌨️☃️🌨️
That is it for today, folks. Take care and have a beautiful Sunday! 💞
Today we celebrate the treats that are a central part of the holiday season.
The stores are filled with sweet and salty snacks that will make their way to our table – Mandarin oranges, nuts, gourmet chocolates, Christmas candies, and the like. But, despite the tempting array of readily available delicacies, there is nothing more festive than spending a few hours preparing (and sampling) our own homemade treats to add to the mix. Yesterday, I started the process with a couple of our favourites.
Carmel corn and nuts as per Mother’s recipeFrank’s Red hot sunflower seeds – not a traditional Christmas recipe, but they do help to keep me from overindulging in thethe nuts and chocolates.
There are a couple of more snacks that I will make before I move onto the more serious baking of butter tarts, cookies, slices, cheese cake and the like. So much tasty goodness to celebrate this month!
That’s it for today, folks. Take care and have a delicious day!
Today I celebrate that grand old December tradition of house cleaning for the holidays. Obviously, I do a certain amount of house cleaning every day, but there are certain chores that I do on a weekly, monthly, or even an annual basis. 🙄
In early December, I always tackle one particularly daunting task – the annual polishing of ‘the mirror’. This is not a typical mirror. This is a mirror (or one quite like it) that I coveted for years.
Back in the early 90’s, my ex and I built a new house, and moved in next to Phyllis and Randy. Our homes and furniture were comparable, with one exception. They had the sweetest livingroom mirror on the block. We, on the other hand had the tackiest mirror on the block – but that is a whole other story.
Fast forward a few years and I took my kids, my dog, and my kitchen plant and left my ex. I left the tacky mirror, the house and virtually everything in or around it. The kids and I moved into a three bedroom basement apartment and I gradually acquired everything we needed, plus the income required to cover the cost of renting a nice duplex.
When we moved to the duplex, son Mark, daughter Jen, and I spent a couple of days (nights) stripping the place of an abundance of dark and nasty wallpaper. I painted the livingroom and kitchen, while Mark and his brother Dan helped the landlord (one of my employers) to install a basement washroom and laundry room.
Once we were ready to settle in, I went shopping. My first stop was Canadian Tire where I picked up a barbecue and lawnmower. This was during a very short period of time when CT introduced plastic shopping carts. While I had no problem finding a barbecue and lawnmower to fit our needs, the handi-dandy plastic cart was not up to the task of carrying them to the check out. Two feet in to my destination, my cart suffered a catastrophic fail, the four wheels simultaneously folded sideways, leaving the cart sitting flat on the floor. In all of my ninety five pound glory at the time, I gallantly pressed on to the tills – a combination of brute force, mortification, and hysterical hilarity at the idiocy of my situation. I made it to the cashier, paid, and gladly took up the generous offer of having someone help me to my vehicle.
With Canadian Tire behind me, I travelled on to Richardson Lighting, a bundle of lingering nerves and the occasional fit of hysteria. I only mention this so one can understand that my mindset was a little shaky going in to buy my brand new livingroom mirror.
I entered a sparkling, twinkling, brilliant shop of lights and lamps – all reflected by hundreds of wall mounted mirrors. One quick trip around the shop and I picked out my mirror – very comparable to Phyllis’s pride and joy. A clerk approached me, ordered a mirror from the back warehouse to be brought to the cash-out area and we proceeded to complete the purchase of my dream mirror. The warehouse clerk arrived with NINE cartons. I was not expecting this turn of events and at this point I was beyond considering the skill it was going to take to get this performance up on our livingroom wall – much less the time and effort it was going to take to keep it clean and sparkly.
Fortunately, son Dan was home when I arrived. For a fifteen year old, he did an admirable job of assembling the lawn mower and barbecue. He also got ‘the mirror’ hung, although some of the language he used was rather less admirable.
At the end of the day, I had my mirror and when I moved to husband Dan’s house a couple of years later the mirror came with me. Son Dan had moved across the province by then but husband Dan did a likewise admirable job of hanging the mirror.
Twenty some years later, ‘the mirror’ hangs on our wall and comes down once a year for December holiday cleaning. Yesterday was my polishing of the mirror day so today I celebrate that it is over and done! Once more my mirror sparkles and shines the way that it is meant to.
All laid out and ready to cleanHung back upand ready to sparkle and shine
I still have cleaning to be done before I am ready for the holidays but it is all down hill from here. 😉
That is all for today, folks. Take care and have a great day!
It has been a few years since I have done any serious Christmas shopping. We have pretty much dropped exchanging gifts between adults and have been giving cash to/for the kids. I didn’t expect to change this new normal, but I placed an order through Amazon the other day and couldn’t resist the perfect little gift set that I found for our barely three year old grandson, Cason. It arrived late yesterday, so today I am celebrating the joy of Christmas shopping. 🎁
Cason and Dad (son Dan)all dressed up for Dan and Amanda’s wedding reception this past summer.Before the official wedding reception photos…. Son Dan was in the house scrubbing an abundance of blue marker off of Cason when we arrived. Within minutes of that cleanup, Cason had poured grape pop all over his shirt and gotten a splinter in his foot.The perfect gift for a little boy with a huge yard to explore, energy to burn, and the imagination to find his way into and through all kinds of trouble!
I haven’t had so much fun shopping for a long time. I might have to get out to some brick and mortar stores around town to see what else I have been missing out on in recent years.
I hope everyone is enjoying these early days of December. Our weather is holding but there are colder temps and snow in the forecast so I had better go run the errands that I need to get done this morning.
December has arrived! For my blog challenge this month, I have decided to highlight at least one thing that I find worthy of celebration each andevery day. I will be honest here – December has never been my favourite month of the year. It has never been in my top eleven months of the year. But, attitude is everything, so I am going to do this. Who knows, this may be the year that December moves up a notch in the monthly ratings. 🌟
So today… I am celebrating my new haircut! That’s right, this morning I paid a visit to one of the best hairdressers that I have ever had – Morsal. She is quick, friendly, and has an abundance of skill and talent even with those of us who are blessed with freakishly fine cat hair. We had a lovely visit as always. (Did I mention that Morsal is also hilariously entertaining?).
I haven’t appreciated a hairdresser this much since Terry L. retired. Terry was a light that lit up every room. She always teased that I was her most religious client – I always (only) showed up at Christmas and Easter. 🙄 But, if you met Terry, you were her friend for life, regardless. It didn’t matter if you were at her shop, out and about town, or in her hometown (where my parents lived), if you met Terry it was a special moment in your day. Sadly, Terry passed away from cancer shortly after she retired. I went to her funeral with my daughter and the church was filled with those she loved and those who loved her back.
Needless to say, Morsal has big shoes to fill but she does an admirable job of it. Starting off the month with a fresh haircut and a nice visit is definitely worth celebrating today!
That is it for today, folks. Take care and have a great day! 💞
Today is November 30th, the final day of my month of WISDOM. This seems like an opportune time to source and share ‘words of wisdom‘ on letting go and moving on. Retirement was not my first go around with dealing with this concept in my life, but it has been a challenging one. I am well into the moving on stage, but there are still times when I can use some wisdom and encouragement. If you are going through a similar situation right now, I hope that these quotes will help to brighten your day and make your current path a little easier.
“When you let go you create space for something better.” – Anonymous
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need.” – Tao Te Ching
“Holding on is believing there’s only a past; letting go is knowing there is a future.” – Daphne Rose Kingma
“There are things we never want to let go of, people we never want to leave behind. But, keep in mind that letting go isn’t the end of the world, it’s the beginning of a new life.” – Anonymous
“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.” – Lyndon B. Johnson
“In the process of letting go you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself.” – Deepak Chopra
“You will never get what you truly deserve if you are too attached to the things you are supposed to let go of.” – Anonymous
“The beautiful journey of today can only begin when we learn to let go of yesterday.” – Steve Maraboli
I couldn’t resist closing off today’s post without this video clip. 💞
That’s it for today folks! Wherever you were, wherever you are, wherever you are going, I hope that today you are happy and hopeful. 💞
Elephants have played a recurring part in my life since I scored my first stuffed animal some 65 years ago this Christmas. Today, as one of my final blogs for November, I thought it only fitting that I source and share a few “words of wisdom” on the mighty and marvellous 🐘.
“When you have an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away; it is best to let him run.” – Abraham Lincoln
“Patriarchy is like the elephant in the room that we don’t talk about, but how could it not affect the planet radically when it’s the superstructure of human society.” – Ani Di Franco
“The elephant needs a thousand times more food than an ant but that is not an indication of inequality.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“A true elephant is one who never forgets his Herculean strength…” – Nikhil Parekh
“If anyone wants to know what elephants are like, they are like people only more so.” – Peter Corneille
“He who mounts a wild elephant goes where the elephant goes.” – Randolph Bourne
“If elephants didn’t exist, you couldn’t invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense.” – Lyall Watson
“They say an elephant never forgets. What they don’t tell you is, you will never forget an elephant.” – Bill Murray
That’s it for today, folks. Take care and have a great day. 💞
This month on my blog I have endeavored to share ‘words of wisdom’. On Sundays, I have tried to keep those words as positive as possible. For this last Sunday of the month, I have sourced out ‘words of wisdom’ on what else, but SUNDAY!
“Sunday is a day to clear the mind of all that has transpired the week before.” – Byron Pulsifier
“Have a blessed and beautiful Sunday.”
“A Sunday well spent will bring a week of content.”
“Let this Sunday be a day to reflect, a day of respectfor all you have been blessed, let your joy be expressed.” – Catherine Pulsifier
Sunday is the perfect day to refuel your soul and be grateful for each and every one of your blessings.
“Don’t let thoughts of Monday steal your Sunday.”
“Sunday – Take it slow and give your soul a chance to catch up with your body.”
“May your Sunday be blessed with love, joy, peace, and happiness.”
That’s it for today folks. Take care and have a wonderful Sunday! 💞
Seclusion 101 with AnneMarie 