White Christmas -- Bah Humbug!

For me Christmas traditions have always been important -- late Christmas eve church service with the bells at midnight, family all together. This has been one of my strangest Christmases. No church last night thanks to the blizzard. No brunch with the kids. Instead, Jack and I spent a good part of the afternoon trying to dig our way out of the house. We managed to get one of the cars out. A neighbor made a pass at the top of our driveway with his snowplow and Jack decided to back my car out of the street into the driveway. It's now sitting in the yard -- stuck until the spring thaw. Hope we can get the other car out in the morning and get to the kids for a belated brunch. It's not quite 5 p.m. and I'm already in my pajamas. After the shoveling, I came in for a shower and decided to get snuggy.

I think this year tops my previous weird Christmas -- the year we spent Christmas in Singapore. Sitting close to the equator, it was hot and sunny. We did get to late night church at the local Anglican church -- odd, with the windows open and anthuriums and orchids in with the poinsettias. No family that year and every time I walked into our hotel and heard the kids' choirs singing carols, I'd burst into tears.

I'm older now -- experienced Christmases with kids away from home and parents passing -- I know life isn't always what we want or what we expect. But I have learned that there is a bottom line. God IS and Christmas IS and so, even though this day was not as I had planned, I'm still celebrating. I hope you are, too!

The Christmas Blizzard of '09

"Oh the weather outside is frightful...!" Oh, yeah. It started with rain and sleet this morning and morphed into a big snow storm. The snow's been falling for hours now and (for Oklahoma) it's gotten pretty deep -- deep enough that I offered to go look for the mail because I have snow boots and Jack just has loafers.

Roxie is frustrated because she doesn't like stuff falling on her -- especially when it's wet stuff. And how can you pee when you can't find a blade of grass? I've taken her out a couple of times but she's keeping her legs crossed as she skitters back to the door!

I can't deny that it looks beautiful. And I'm nice and cozy inside the house and watching one of my Christmas faves -- "White Christmas." Still, we won't be able to get up the driveway and go to church tonight. Don't know if we can get enough shoveled off in the morning to get to Jay's and Carolyn's to watch the boys open prezzies. They're supposed to come over here for dinner tomorrow night -- can you smell the turkey roasting? -- but who knows if they'll be able to get out of their neighborhood. For now, I'm just happy we're all inside and warm, all healthy, and we have plenty to eat. We are truly blessed.

Catching Up

I can't believe it's been so long since I've posted! What a busy couple of weeks. I did post on http://www.teddietravels.com/ so that the school kids could keep up with Vanilla before their Christmas vacation but I just didn't get around to posting here. So here goes.

The first of the month I went to Nashville -- I hadn't been since 2001. The purpose was to enjoy the Christmas attractions like the decorations at the Opryland Hotel,

to see the Radio City Rockettes Christmas Show,

and generally celebrate the season. (Including a great dinner at the Capitol Grille in the historic Hermitage Hotel)

But I also enjoyed some of the year-round goodies Nashville has to offer. The Country Music Hall of Fame is fabulous -- even for someone who isn't a big country music fan.

The new symphony hall is gorgeous. I think the symphony is probably excellent. Hate to sound like a philistine, but the program the night we attended was so dissonant that I couldn't tell if the orchestra and chorus got the music right or not. Two of the three pieces were chosen to recognize the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's birth. Or maybe death -- he wasn't exactly the King of Jollies. And neither was the music. I was scratching in the bottom of my purse for an anti-depressant but Staci came up with a better idea.

Honky-tonkin'! Oh, yeah, nobody does it better than Nashville!