To all our beloved friends and family who have seen us through this year of tragedy and rebuilding—-we are so thankful for you. Your thoughts and prayers and words and meals and gifts have meant more to us than you will ever know. We celebrate with you God incarnate, come in the flesh, to bear our sins and suffering. He is our light and life. May you be blessed with His everlasting love and peace, this Christmas, and always.
Merry Christmas from our house to yours! Love to all!
xoxo
And after the storm,
I run and run as the rains come
And I look up, I look up,
on my knees and out of luck,
I look up.
Night has always pushed up day
You must know life to see decay
But I won’t rot, I won’t rot
Not this mind and not this heart,
I won’t rot.
And I took you by the hand
And we stood tall,
And remembered our own land,
What we live for.
And there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.
And now I cling to what I knew
I saw exactly what was true
But oh no more.
That’s why I hold,
That’s why I hold with all I have.
That’s why I hold.
I will die alone and be left there.
Well I guess I’ll just go home,
Oh God knows where.
Because death is just so full and man so small.
Well I’m scared of what’s behind and what’s before.
And there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.
And there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair
I’m not sure I can convey the sheer joy of watching my ballerinas perform this weekend in a wonderful and classic rendition of The Nutcracker. I was teary eyed more than not. And I breathed a huge sigh of relief when Emme finished her last dance as Clara. This stuff is hard on mommas.
We have loved the music for a while but this experience has made us all huge Nutcracker fans. My little Elea was such a cute ‘party girl’ and made may have enjoyed her backstage time as much as her onstage time. She carefully packed her crafts and activities and snacks and refused to leave early EVER.
It has been a wonderful, memorable, exhausting experience.
And getting to dance with very talented professionals? She’ll be on cloud nine for quite a while.
We are so blessed to be loved and supported by such a wonderful family—-sisters, brothers, grannies……
cousins…….
Aunt Gina……
Auntie Julie, Auntie Sue-Sue, Grandma (who came all the way from Minnesota!)
A big smooch and thanks to dad (Stevie) for being so patient and supportive with all the late nights, missed meals and occasional crabby girls!
It was my very favorite Nutcracker performance and I highly doubt it will ever be topped. I could be slightly biased though 🙂
We made it to Friday, comrades! I don’t know about you but I wasn’t sure I’d make it to Friday in the same size jeans. I’m still not sure. I have the stretchy variety on at the moment and I wish for all the world I could keep it that way. I must confess that it’s been the kind of week has you scratching your head saying, “Exactly what in the Sam Hill have you been doing all week? Your house is not decorated. And those Christmas cards aren’t gonna send themselves. And how many days are you gonna fool with that mantel sister?” But I defend my honor with this one photograph. I declare myself absolved.
By all the right standards, it’s been a good week 🙂
And YOU’ve made it extree special with all your calories!
So now, wow me again with your tasty treats! It’s time for breads, breakfasts, and beverages. I’ll be sitting {in my yoga pants} on the edge of my seat!
This is a party of appetizers. You share (with links or pictures) your favorite appetizer recipe(s) for Christmas and then link up here (to your blog or Facebook page) so we can all get some new ideas for fabulous starter food. If Thanksgiving food is all about the meal then Christmas food is all about everything else—-the tapas, the sweets, the breads, the drinks, etc.
Monday (or now if you’d like)—-Appetizers
Wednesday—–Sweets
Friday—-Breads, Breakfasts and Drinks
Sounds like fun and I will participate myself sometime tomorrow when I get all this technical mumbo jumbo figured out.
Start linking tonight if you’re ready 🙂
Here’s the code for the party button if you’d like to display it on your blog. If will link back to the party and is kinda cute if I do say so myself. Just copy and paste the following crazy stuff into the HTML tab of your blog and magic will occur. If magic fails to occur, let me know. I’ll sprinkle more fairy dust.
<a href=”https://www.lifeingraceblog.com/2011/12/christmas-cheerappetizers-link-party.html”><img src=”http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7013/6455740323_7c6fd13415_b.jpg” width=”875″ height=”450″ alt=”christmas cheer”></a>
Now let’s get cooking!
p.s. If noone shows up to the party, I’ll be forced to make full page collages of the foo dogs all week. And judging from your comments, some of you would be very afraid 🙂
p.p.s. I know some of you have had trouble with the photo button but I think it’s working now. You could also just drag the photo onto your desktop and then add to your post and make the photo a link similar to the way you’d make a text link. If you post the ‘html’ code I’ve given and then hit ‘publish’ without going again to the ‘compose’ tab, it should work though. For some reason when I switched between compose and html, it adds stuff to the html code which makes is then not work. See what I mean about blowing up the internets?
