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Our Daily Thread 12-26-13

Good Morning!

Only 364 Days Until Christmas! 😯

🙂

On this day in 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers landed at New Plymouth, MA, to found Plymouth Colony, with John Carver as Governor.

In 1776 the British suffered a major defeat in the Battle of Trenton during the American Revolutionary War.

In 1865 the coffee percolator was patented by James H. Mason.

In 1931 George Gershwin’s musical, “Of Thee I Sing,” opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York City.  It became the first American musical to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

And in 1941 Winston Churchill became the first British prime minister to address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress.

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Quote of the Day

“I always looked up there, because I remember a time when the only things on the walls in Fenway were the Jimmy Fund sign and the retired numbers. Never in a million years did you think you’d ever be up there with those guys.”

Carlton Fisk

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This musical opened today in 1931. And it actually won a Pulitzer Prize. Weird.

From TheMusicProf78, who has tons of really old stuff.

Next, it’s Bob Hartman’s birthday. So Petra, Live From FarmAid

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QoD

How was your Christmas?

59 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 12-26-13”

  2. My Christmas was excellent. I wish my Baby Girl had stayed here more and longer but she didn’t. Other than that I was quite pleased. Middle Son took my Xterra last night to go to Pensacola and visit some friends. He said he would leave me a full tank of gas. I shall see in just a bit. I am back to hustling real estate today. Wish me well. I am doing an open house for a large builder from 10-5 todday.
    Youngest Son called yesterday morning to tell us he wouldnet be making it for Christmas but this is something I have come to expect and if he did come he would have shown up just about the time we were finishing dinner so I was OK with that.
    My Aunt V spent the day with us yesterday. It is good to have her around so often. We spok of my father and it is always fun to tell something about him and laugh.

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  3. Our Christmas was excellent. We had time as a family unit (the four of us) and then time with the larger family unit (my husband’s side of the family, except that only our girls were there to represent grandkids). I wanted to talk to all my siblings by phone, but managed to reach (or be reached by) only half of them (three of six).

    But I have a new baby grandnephew for Christmas, born a week ago, and learned of two more nephews recently engaged, so our family continues to grow. (Six so far in what would be my parents’ great-grandchildren, none of whom they lived to see; but I also have one nephew married only two years without children yet, and two more about to marry, and one who just had his first, and multiple more who are single, and also two single nieces “of marrying age,” and I’m sure there will be many more children eventually.)

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  7. We had a lovely Christmas. I’ll tell you about it later, as I’m typing on the run this morning.

    Michelle, I contacted you through your website. Thank you! 🙂

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  8. Just a moment to check in and say it was a good Christmas dispite wrapping the final gift for my brother at noon on Christmas Day before having dinner at his home at 1:00. Funny how a little something weighing less than two pounds can so well play havoc with one’s schedule. Wrapping gifts at noon on Christmas Day was not part of my plan but neither was a Miss Bosley. Perhaps she is really Queen Bosley the way she runs this house. Speaking of which I need to go see just what…

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  9. We had a good Christmas. We didn’t make it to my parents to visit with my parents and bros and sis’ families. Both girls have now come down with what I had. So we’ll visit with them Friday before my MiL arrives to spend a few days. My wife says it was her favorite Christmas in a long time because we just stayed home and relaxed together. She’s easy to please and I love that about her. 🙂

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  12. Today begins the big tear down. When do you all begin dismantling the Christmas decor? This year has been one of the most peace filled, joyous celebrations in recent memory…so very thankful…
    Oh Mum see…what a delightful gift!

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  13. So glad to hear about everyone’s joyous Christmas celebrations! Mine was good, too, with more celebrating tonight as my SIL and her family arrive today.

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  14. We had a nice Christmas, lots of visits & commotion. There are 15 of us, not counting Graham, and Jeremy’s parents. We all had dinner at Chuck’s and went to Jeremy’s parents for dissert later.
    It was interesting talking to John. He was a 1st Lt. of a platoon in Viet Nam in 1971 as the war was winding down. Nobody wanted to be there and certainly didn’t want to be the last one killed in a war they were quitting. It was a though time for them.

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  15. mumsee, what a perfect gift. 🙂

    The big take-down: That may come earlier this year for me. I didn’t get as much stuff “out” as I usually do, but there is some greenery, candles, etc. on the mantel. The outdoor lights I’ll leave up probably through new year’s, they all make the neighborhood look so cheery and pretty at night.

    I see that JanetG never returned. Is she still chasing the kitten? What did Miss Bosley get for Christmas? 😀 Oh, right. A family of her own.

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  16. We are back home, BTW, and glad to be here. We were anticipating another trip soon when Mary has Graham. But she is going to have him dedicated on Mother’s Day, so we’ll wait for then.
    Good idea!!!

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  17. Jan. 1 was always our traditional dismantling-Christmas day. Along with football and a ham dinner, the day was spent wrapping up all the Christmas ornaments for next year. It was a tedious job and a lot less “fun” than putting it all up!

    I think because I remember spending so many New Year’s Days doing that, I tend now to get everything (mostly) down beforehand so that it feels like a clean new year when that final holiday rolls around a week after Christmas.

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  19. We still have Mrs L’s family gathering, which was postponed from Thanksgiving due to illness. So, on Jan 5 we’ll gather in Iowa.

    Yesterday was enjoyable, as we all went over to my brother’s house for an “intentional” dinner. We had ham and turkey along with other traditional favorites, but my SIL is Mongolian and made a Mongolian cabbage salad.

    Today I enjoyed playing with the grandchildren. They got Play Do® and some cookie cutters. I helped them make some of the shapes then showed them how to make clay animals the old fashioned way. Of course, with my lack of artistic ability, they though my attempt at a dog was an elephant.

    As fun as it is here, it will be good to get home this afternoon.

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  20. A very quiet day for me. I had an hour with my friends, then was alone until 5. Then together with family all gathered together. Today, I finally get to see my son and his family. Picking them up at the airport this evening.

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  21. Growing up, Christmas decorations came down January 1. Now I try to leave them up through Epiphany. It all depends on if I get a wild hair to clean and declutter. I am hoping to find a better tree on sale sometime this week and store it for next year.

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  23. Ten thirty in the morning and almost all of the children have finished their thank you notes. I am afraid my tightwad side comes to the fore at times. For example, each child has seven thank yous to write. If they each send theirs separately, that adds up to a lot of postage, so we just have each of the older ones address one of the seven envelopes and all of the notes to that person go in there. I hope people don’t mind. But they seem to appreciate the thank yous.

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  26. Quarter of a century this year, and golden birthday next year…cool. 😉

    We mail multiple notes to a single address, and not only that; all of the thank yous get written on one sheet of paper. I’ve got you beat in the tightwad department, Mumsee. 😉

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  27. Second Arrow came home Christmas Eve. Hubby did not have to work that day, and 1st Arrow not until 10:00 p.m. So all eight of us gathered around our table and had a nice supper of chili and cornbread, and then we went to church. It was so great to enjoy a meal and a church service with our whole family together.

    Fifth Arrow sings so joyously on the hymns he knows! Hubby was sitting between him and me, and I could hear young son singing in the sweetest voice on hymns like “Oh come all ye faithful” and “Hark the herald angels sing”. I love how young children sing so unabashedly! It’s just beautiful.

    Snow had started falling sometime during the service, so we were greeted with a very pretty scene outside when we went to our cars. Oh, and how nice it was for someone to walk across the parking lot in her new shoes with the excellent grips, not worn down. 😉

    We had opened our presents in the afternoon, so when we got home, we did the supper dishes and enjoyed some hot apple cider, our presents, and each other’s company.

    I received a book — A Log Cabin Christmas 😉 — a two-CD set of Vladimir Ashkenazy playing Rachmaninoff, including Piano Concertos 2 &3 with the London Symphony Orchestra, and a little Willow Tree figurine of a woman kneeling to pray.

    Also, 2nd Arrow bought hubby and me a pretty wooden picture frame that says Live Laugh Love, and which contains eighteen windows filled with recent family pictures she had snapped with her camera.

    First Arrow bought something humorous for 2nd Arrow (our vet tech in training, and general cat lover). He got her a calendar, whose cover has a picture of a cat sitting next to an old manual typewriter, with a book lying open on the floor as the cat is pawing at it, appearing to turn its pages. The name on the calendar is something like: “This looks like something I can pee on: And other poems about cats.” 🙂

    Third and Fourth Arrows got a Battleship game, among other things, and had fun playing that. And 5th and 6th Arrows were excited to get sleeping bags from 2nd Arrow, so they could camp out on the living room floor with her when she stayed overnight Christmas Eve. Second Arrow slept on a mattress between the two little campers and told me Christmas morning that 6th Arrow had “fallen out of her sleeping bag and onto 2nd Arrow’s mattress.” 😉

    Christmas Day was a nice quiet day. We didn’t see much of 1st Arrow, as he had worked overnight the night before, and needed to sleep before going to work at 3:00 pm Christmas Day. Second Arrow went to her boyfriend’s parent’s house for lunch, and then was back home for supper with us, and a few more hours to visit before driving home last night. She had to be to work by 7:30 this morning, and wanted to go back the night before, as it is close to a 2-hour drive for her.

    Our extended-family gatherings were last weekend. On my husband’s side of the family, three of our nieces had babies this year, the first child for all of them. One born in February, whom we had seen once before; another in April, also seen once; and the newest one, who is two months old today, and whom we met for the first time on Sunday. Sixth Arrow just fell in love with those babies, and got to hold the littlest one. 🙂

    All in all, a very nice Christmas. We are very blessed!

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  28. Son has decided if he gets married and has children, he wants to get them a kitten for Christmas. If I mentioned that before, I am still dwelling in the beauty of that thought.

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  29. NancyJill’s question about taking down the Christmas decorations: Usually we leave them up until Epiphany, as we have an Advent/Christmas season devotional with ornaments for each devotion that runs through January 6th. However, this year we did not do that devotion book, so we might take things down earlier. In fact, we sort of tore apart our closet area under the stairway last night, where all the boxes in which we store our Christmas decorations are. (We were looking for an old pair of ice skates that 2nd Arrow wanted to take with her so that she and a friend of hers could go ice skating.)

    Anyway, our basement is a big disaster right now, with lots of things taken out of that closet, and so, to get things back in order, I might just decide to take down the Christmas things and get them packed away when I put away the rest of the things from the closet so we can get some order restored shortly.

    I already went through some of the stuff from the closet this morning, and threw some things, put other things in a bag for Goodwill, etc. It was rather nice working on that, as I listened to the first CD in the set I mentioned above while I worked.

    Back to work, with disc two up next. Quite invigorating having Rachmaninoff piano music to accompany my work! 🙂

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  30. QoD: We take the decorations down on January 6. We usually do a small Day of the Three Kings celebration with a gift exchange (the value of the gift must be less than five dollars).

    Thank you notes – my mother always made us do thank you notes as part of our writing exercises for the month of January.

    Right now, my small relatives seem to be suffering from an epidemic of too-much-Christmas. Symptoms: getting upset over nothing, quarreling with siblings over nothing, prolonged crying episodes and complaints of indigestion. Causes include overexcitement, irregular hours and overdosing on sugar. Oh well, I lover them anyway 😀

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  32. I never take the decorations down before New Years. This is the first year I could have seen myself doing it before, but I won’t do so. Christmas happened the weekend before for us, so perhaps that is why it seemed time. I used to always have parties here between New Years and Christmas and sometimes on New Years. I have nothing planned this year, so perhaps that is another reason the decorations seemed like they could come down.

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  33. Friends got to see Bosley. They are still thinking of adopting her. I think it will all work out either way at this point. The timing is not the best for us to keep her, but I have been thinking of more options of how to make it work.

    I did not do too much decorating this Christmas. I think it will be within the first week of January that things will be put away.

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  34. Well, much of the decorations are down and put away…living room tree is still up…outside wreaths and deer are still in position…I’m thinking they’ll stay put until after the 1st….we still have snow on the ground and it just seems there should be Christmas decorations to go with what the Lord has provided in the way of a snow covered forest floor…. 🙂

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  37. Janice – The other day there was some talk about maybe naming the kitten Dash, which reminded me that when our cat Angel was a little kitten, we joked about changing her name to Dasher, because she dashed this way & dashed that way, & kept on dashing all over the place!

    After thinking about that, I thought about how we can’t tell from a kitten’s behavior what she’ll be like as a grown cat. Our Angel was a riot as a kitten, but as an adult cat, she is afraid of everything, it seems, & she spends much of her time under a bed. But she is still quite a sweetie, one of the loudest purrers I’ve ever heard.

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  38. Miss Bosley got a family for Christmas; it may be a foster family or a forever family,we don’t know yet, but since she lives in the moment, she had happy family moments for Christmas. She also got the run (ruin) of the house since she was so easily litter box trained. She is such a people kitten. Her new catnip mice, three, are thoroughly blind by now. She is in my lap now. When son and I were in the kitchen she perched on a stool to watch us. She wants to be where the action is.

    We had such a short time frame for opening gifts that she did not have so much fun on Christmas morning. We did not have anything in large boxes she could get into. About half of our gift opening time is over at my brother’s home and he wants nothing to do with this kitten so we could not take her with us.

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  39. I never was good at numbers. Turns out youngest bio is now twenty seven. No wonder he made that comment when I said a quarter of a century. Time flies when you are having fun.

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  40. Thanks, Karen O for letting me know that kitten behavior does not indicate adult behavior. She has definite mood swings from wired to total slug, almost like manic depression except it is just a case of playing until she conks out.

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  41. I purchased an e-book this year entitled One Bite at a Time: 52 Projects for Making Life Simpler, by Tsh Oxenreider. I read the introductory pages, and am ready to jump into the projects (I’m thinking one per week, but we’ll see how it goes) starting Monday. There are eight different project categories, with many projects fitting into more than one category. The projects can be done in any order. I have decided to start with the two categories that my husband is the most concerned about: Time Stewardship, and Organizing Your Space. Those will cover almost half the year (24 weeks), so by the time summer rolls around, hopefully we will all be more orderly in the use of our time and space.

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  43. 6 Arrows – Sounds like a good plan of action. Let us know what you’re doing (unless it’s too private) so we can pray, & maybe follow along in our own homes.

    When Emily & Chrissy finally move upstairs, I have LOTS to do to re-organize & clean. I can’t wait to get my home back into shape, looking like I want it to.

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  45. Karen, thanks so much for the offer to pray; I can surely use them!

    I’m starting with a project based on Mark Twain’s quote, “Eat a live frog every morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” 🙂 The idea is to tackle the least favorite task first in the day (after the nourishing things like Bible reading, etc.). Then it’s out of the way, and I’m not wasting emotional energy fighting the feeling of “I should do this, but first I’d rather…”

    I need help big time with that, so that is an appropriate place for me to start. Your prayers on my behalf are much appreciated!

    And I’m excited for you to get your house back to how you’d like it, Karen! That’ll be a great feeling for you, I’m sure. 🙂

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  46. 6 Arrows – I always try to tackle the hard stuff first. That gets it out of the way, & makes the rest of the day more pleasant & a tad (or several tads) less stressful. I don’t like that feeling of an unpleasant task hanging over my head. You can do this, & you’ll be so happy you did!

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  47. Gotta get off the computer now. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get to sleep, or if Emily will need to talk to me. Either way, see y’all tomorrow. Nighty-night, sleep tight, & pleasant dreams!

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  53. Thanks, Peter L, that means a lot coming from somebody of your advanced age.

    Donna, did that in France but not so much here. We did have an African frog in our fish tank for a few years. Until it jumped out one too many times.

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  55. boy, the late night talk on here sure gets interesting. Waiting to go pick up son and family at the airport. They are flying standby and the earlier flights didn’t work. Prayers appreciated for staying awake while driving an unfamiliar large truck, with twin cab.

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  57. safely home and had a wonderful visit on the late night drive
    beach trip begins tomorrow
    amazed at the freedom to just drive somewhere at night on smooth roads and feel safe. simply amazing

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  58. Decorations never come down before January 6 – Epiphany. Christmas-tide lasts for 12 days starting on 12/25, so why would you ever take down the decorations before then??

    Now, if we are lazy, (or busy! 😉 ) sometimes they don’t come down until we are cleaning for my wife’s birthday celebrations, which falls on Candlemas.

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  59. “…why would you ever take down the decorations before then [Epiphany]??”

    Because we have freedom of choice, Roy. The Bible doesn’t command us to take them down (or put them up, for that matter) at a certain time, or at all. You can do it as you wish, and so can everyone else, so that no one needs ask, “Why would you ever take down the decorations before then?” or “Why would you ever leave up the decorations until…?”

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