Merry Christmas!

I have been missing in action . . . and "action" is certainly the correct description!

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas was so short this year. My days have been full of ordinary busyness, holiday prep, a few special events, and a week of sickness just to make life interesting. (And my sickness has included an extended period of laryngitis so I haven't even been able to sing Christmas music!)

In the meantime, there has been no time for blogging, no time for commenting (even though I pop in to read blogs now and then). 

Will I ever go back and Gather the Moments of November? 

Will I ever finish telling you about our house projects of 2023? 

Will this be the first time in my sixteen years of blogging that I will not do a Christmas home tour?! 

Perhaps. 😑

Oh, but we are excited about the days to come! We have children arriving on Friday (tomorrow!) and more on Saturday and our home and our hearts will be filled with joy and celebration! 

So before I disappear again, I wanted to pop in to wish you, my dear friends, a blessed Christmas! 

May you know the reality of Emmanuel:

God With Us! 

The Year Macaroni & Cheese Was Invited to Thanksgiving Dinner

The year 2020 will go down in history for many reasons. But in our family, it will also be remembered as the year that we began to have macaroni and cheese at our Thanksgiving dinner. 

I had never considered macaroni and cheese to be a Thanksgiving food. 

Turkey? Definitely. 

Mashed potatoes? Of course. 

Stuffing? Absolutely! (It's my personal favorite.)  

Corn? Yes. 

Cranberry? Yes. 

But I just don't think the Pilgrims ate macaroni and cheese. :)

Then in November of 2020, Kristin posted this graphic on her Facebook page . . . 

. . . and a family discussion ensued!

"Macaroni and cheese is Maryland's favorite side dish and we don't have it at our Thanksgiving dinner?!"

"Maybe that needs to change." 

At the November birthday party, a show of hands revealed that LOTS of people wanted mac-and-cheese for Thanksgiving and, thus, a new tradition began.

There was excitement on our family group chat!

According to some of us . . . 

What's your opinion on macaroni and cheese at Thanksgiving? It is that important?! 

If you celebrate American Thanksgiving, how do you feel about your state's favorite Thanksgiving side dish? Does your family eat that dish with your holiday meal? 

Gathering the Moments | October 2024

Still gathering the moments . . . 

and I am nearly caught up to the present!  

October was a beautiful beginning: a visit from a longtime friend, pumpkin spice scones with coffee, and a gift of a piece of Beaumont pottery with a pineapple design. Be still my heart. 
October was pumpkin waffles for a Saturday night supper. 

October  was a texted photo of adult children and 13 of our grands who met up for a trip to the National Zoo. 

October was more "autumn" showing up inside the house (more pumpkins, more gourds, candles burning) and out of the house (beautiful fall foliage seen on our drives and outside our windows). 

October was a sixteenth birthday! 

 

October was the Northern Lights seen from Maryland 😯. . . but missed because we were at our ESL class and had no idea. 

October was a feline study partner and back door greeter. 

October was getting out all of the brown transferware . . . a little thing that makes my heart happy. 

October was another texted photo, this one of a sweet three-year-old on a special outing with her parents.

October was also a week off of work for Ron. We filled it with so many good things! 

🍂 A day trip with antiquing, a new cafe with the best burgers, a coffee shop, and meandering the streets of a charming town, on foot and by car. In the antique shop, we finally found the perfect chair (style, size, shade) for the Sara Hicks desk. 

         🍂 A house project: blinds on the French doors of the sunroom.  

🍂A Facebook Marketplace purchase: a poster bed for a future guest room . . .  which ended up in our bedroom. 

🍂 A going away brunch party for a sweet friend at our church. 

🍂 An afternoon and evening at Cousins' Camp! Every year, Ryan and Sarah plan a camping weekend for the cousins. (This year, six-year-old Judah came for the first time and Aunt Bekah joined them for the whole weekend. Ron and I went for an afternoon/evening, but no sleeping bags or tents for us old folks!) They take walks, cook over the fire, and sleep in tents, as many campers do. But Cousins' Camp is also highlighted by a series of challenges! Two teams compete against one another in such things as egg tossing, hula hoop passing, panty hose bowling, and forced perspective photography. Keen competition, comradery, and laughter! This annual event strengths cousin bonds and creates wonderful memories!

 

Some glimpses of our month . . . 

 

Our lives are made up of moments . . . one at a time . . . one after the other . . . and those moments stretch into days and weeks, months and years. Oh, how important it is to look for the beauty in those moments and to use them wisely. 

Thanksgiving Tables

November  is here and time for me to start thinking about the Thanksgiving table(s). But, truth be told, I have been thinking about those tables for a long time now! Thanksgiving Day is my favorite day of the year! 

Even though we have a large family, it's important to me that everyone eat together on Thanksgiving Day. When we lived in The Farmhouse, that meant rearranging the furniture and having two tables (one year, there were three) in our large farmhouse kitchen. Here at Pineapple House, we add folding tables to extend our dining room table and the table(s) flows into the living room. 

Thanksgiving Day is not a paper plate day for us. (Absolutely NO shade on people who do use paper plates! We all do what works for us and for our situation!) I love dishes and pretty tables . . . and we have plenty of helpers at clean up time which is a huge blessing. So we get out the dishes of choice: brown transferware or Blue Willow or even the Grandmother Dishes. If there aren't enough, we sometimes cobble together coordinating plates or layer a smaller plate on a white one. We get out the cloth napkins, again, varying every other one if we don't have enough of that year's pattern. We pull together flatware from several sets. We get out the crystal and mix that with dollar store goblets. (Yes, there is a lot of cobbling with our gobbling!) And we always use place cards on the Thanksgiving table to add a special touch of individuality. (The cousins invented games to play with the place cards, so I can't stop now!)

Decorating the   l o n g   table can be a challenge. Sometimes I feel like it's much of the same every year, but as I look back, the color scheme, choice of candles, and variety of mums or pumpkins or gourds give each year a slightly different feel. 

For reflection and inspiration, I gathered photos of our Thanksgiving tables from past years. 

🦃 Do you have a plan for your Thanksgiving table each year?
🦃 Do you wing it or do you think about it all year as I do?
🦃Are you a paper plate family, an heirloom china family, or something in between? 

I'd love to know! 

(Next week, I plan to Gather the Moments of October.)

Gathering the Moments | September 2024

September was one birthday (as opposed to August's seven birthdays), and then there is a birthday break for close to six weeks. It may not seem like a long break, but when the breaks between summer birthdays are only a few days long, six weeks feels like a significant breather! 

September was autumn coffees: pumpkin, maple, caramel. (Which would you choose?) 

September was one last summer gathering - a homemade ice cream party with Ron's siblings and their spouses!

September was bunches of limelight hydrangeas, from the front door basket to crocks and pitchers all through the house. I actually like the autumn-blushed blooms as much as the bright summer ones. 

September was noticing each subtle change . . . the slightly cooler evening air, slowly turning foliage, a few falling leaves. We gathered pumpkins and gourds, a few at a time. 

September was a few days away to celebrate our 46 years of marriage. 

September was coordinating many schedules to share an evening with our daughter Kristin's family. We ate supper and pumpkin cake and played games and, despite the subdued faces in the photo I took, we laughed like crazy while we played Cards Christians Like!

September was also the anniversary of my Daddy's passing. Mom, Linda, and I spent the day together. We reminisced and marveled that an entire year has passed. Mom gave each of us a gift: a small canvas of a long-ago photo of us with our Daddy. We visited Daddy's grave and we were so surprised as we drove up and saw that the headstone was in place! We were expecting it to be completed in October, and yet here it was on the anniversary of his death. A gift to us. 


September moments . . . 

He has made everything beautiful in its time.
Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. 

Ecclesiastes 3:11