Frou Frou Gypsy in Combat Boots

Oh the joys of Christmas Dinner! The food lovingly and perfectly prepared. All the family gathered around one big table dressed up in their best Holiday clothes. The crystal and China is sparkling and there is a smile on everyone's face. That's what Christmas Dinner looks like, right? I suppose so in a Norman Rockwell or Currier and Ives painting. Certainly not in my house! We use to have a more traditional Christmas dinner, with Turkey and dressing and all the fab sides. It was certainly never all of us at one table, none of us lives in a castle! the kids were usually at the "kids' table" and the adults if they were lucky, all sat together in an adjacent room. As the years went by and we got larger and larger....the more and more tables we needed! so now we may be in any number of rooms at any number of tables. There were years when some china was used because we needed that many plates. I think one of the best stories is that one year my Aunt who was hosting Chr...

This is our Advent Wreath. I use the term loosely because i don't know what else to call it, and it is round. It sits on our kitchen table where we eat dinner. Well, i guess where we usually eat dinner, or eat dinner on good nights! I would love to tell you some great story about this being some family heirloom, but i don't have one. I purchased this several years ago from a company called ABC. I don't recall how much i paid for it, but it wasn't a whole lot. It is sort of like a puzzle, fitting it together every year. It has to be "just so" or it won't sit right. and before you leave me comments telling me that the candles are supposed to be purple and pink, i KNOW that. I decided to go with white because the one year i spend the $8 and bought "Advent" candles, they dripped all over the wreath and i had to scrape purple wax off Joseph and the Angel! I've decided to stick with my $4 cream candles and just be "non traditional". I...

As a kid, my Papaw always "played Santa" and handed out the gifts. He would always sit on the floor next to the tree and say a hearty "HO, HO, HO!" as he called out names and passed presents around. I guess i never really thought much about it; that is until now. Now he's gone and who passes out the gifts? who has the honor of filling his Santa boots? The answer really is, no one. Now it is more of a casual thing with most of the adults just passing out things from under the tree. We try and make the kids (no longer us...they're our kids now!) unwrap one by one so we can actually see what everyone gets! We typically go youngest to oldest..but they get antsy waiting on their turn. there are 9 of them! It's interesting to me how two people, my grandparents, got married, had three kids, who had 6 kids, who had 9 kids! so what use to be a family of 5, is now a family of 28, minus three who have passed, leaving us at 25 people! That in and of itself is a ...

When i was a kid, Christmas was somehow different. it wasn't that i was the one getting all the gifts instead of giving them...it was a feeling. It was the family. Way back then, there were obviously less of us. The 6 "grandchildren" were kids , so that takes out the extra husbands and wives as well as the "great-grand kids" so that's 14 people of our "little group" who didn't exist yet, at least in our world. Every year we would go to one of the 3 "kids" houses, my mom's or one of her brother's homes. We'd go and have a big Christmas lunch, turkey and dressing, ham and potato salad, green bean casserole, and all the other sides you can imagine. The Grandchildren were always keyed up wanting to see and hear what Santa had brought the others. Not so patiently waiting to open Christmas gifts after lunch. As the grandchildren grew older we began to realize that the aunts and uncles weren't getting gifts and we didn't...