The last day of fall...

Yesterday was a beautiful day on the route with sunshine and warm temps. Today is supposed to be the official start of our colder weather. I am not thrilled, but I guess that I have nothing to complain about. We have had a wonderful November. Warmer temperatures and sunshine. It kind of made up for the terrible October with it's 5+ inches of rain and downright cold temperatures.

Now we can start getting ready for Christmas. Up until now it felt like Florida weather and I always had a hard time getting ready for the holidays there. I don't know how it would be living in Miami or some such place. Christmas in the 90's. Of course, if you are like our friends in Australia, I guess Christmas in cold weather sounds weird.

This Saturday is our second annual cookie baking day. I am planning on getting to the church about 8:00 am and starting to bake there. I will bake cookies here at home too before, for decorating there. Our plan is to make about 200 dozen cookies. We plan on giving a bag of cookies to each and every household in Warrens this year. So tonight the kids start decorating the bags. I have the cards in the bags already to print out. Saturday we will bake cookies, decorate cookies, bag cookies and deliver cookies. Then at 6:00pm on Saturday I will be serving soup for anyone that wants to come to the church for supper. Sunday is church and then after church we will finish delivering cookies. At 4:00 pm that afternoon we all meet at the church and jump onto the Cranfest float people mover and start our community Christmas caroling. We will carol all over and then we will be ending at the Hilltopper apartments where there are older people living that are going to host a small party for us. We ended there last year also and it was a great, great time.

All in all this weekend will be busy, but in a way that's good. It gets everything out of the way, so to speak, for the season and then everyone is free to do their family thing and not feel guilty about missing anything at the church.

Next week, we will start decorating here. We plan on getting the tree one day next week and then getting the decorations out. Our family will start cooking for gift baskets this year next week also. Included in the baskets this year will be homemade mixes, breads, cookies and candies. I think we are up to about 18 gift baskets now. It is a blessing for us to be able to give these to the people that we love.

Since money is tight this year for our family, as I'm sure it is for everyone, I have asked the kids to pick out one or two things that they would like to add to our Christmas time that they have always wanted to do as part of the celebration. Jessalyn picked a family meal night out at a restaurant with our family (I think she wants to recreate an Olive Garden commercial). She also would like to have a family game night for board games. Jake is still thinking about it.

Both kids have been very thoughtful in their gifts this year. They are both proving to have my "crafting bug" and enjoy working with their hands. Jessalyn has chosen a few projects that are going to be beautiful when finished and Jake has done some work at school that is marvelous. I wish you could see the drawings he brought home last month. I went and purchased frames right away. They are beautiful. He was supposed to draw one picture. He thought that was not enough to show his vision, so he drew 4 continuous pictures that can stand alone as a scene by themselves or can be stacked one on top of the other for a continuous picture. They are great and Will and I are extremely proud.

Jessalyn just brought me the sheet that she has been nominated by the teachers to be in the area quiz bowl. They suggest that in order to help her, we drag out the trivial pursuit game. Oh great. Nothing like a game of Trivial Pursuit to make me feel like an idiot. Let's just say that my answers are always Zimbabwe for anything geographical. Sometimes that answer is even right.

Have a great day!
dea