Family Christmas Countdown

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Let it snow, Let it snow, Let it snow!

We had a big snow storm heading our way down here in the 4 Corners region and we were so excited. But, as usual, it snowed ALL around us, but we just barely got a little skiff which wasn't even picture-worthy.

But, I know that some of you have had snow this week. Jed and Laura even got some in Dallas today. So, if you have snow, I challenge you to go out and take a picture of it (and put yourselves in the picture if possible) and post it for the rest of us. Maybe it will help us get in the spirit of Christmas. I'll be waiting and watching. :)

Love, Earlene

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Thankful Hearts





It is hard to believe that Thanksgiving has already come and gone. It seemed to come upon us out of nowhere. But, what a blessing it is each year to kick off the official holiday season by pausing to count our numerous and bounteous blessings. We truly are so very blessed in so many areas of our lives.

Family is certainly at the top of our list of blessings to count. I wish that we could all have been together, but since that is not possible, it is nice to at least have this blog to bring us closer this holiday and get us thinking about each other. We love each of you!

Joanna, Cory and Gabe joined us for the weekend. We ate, visited, shopped and visited with extended family. And enjoyed little Gabe! We skipped the pre-dawn shopping this year (after staying up until 11:30 PM planning it), but did head out on a few shopping trips that day.

We had a nice dinner out at Mama and Papa Rhien's home on Thanksgiving. It was fun for Joanna to visit with her cousin, Rachel, and her little family. They are just a couple of weeks different in age and have always been fairly close. Rachel and Justin live back in Farmington now, which is lots of fun. There weren't as many of us at dinner as there often have been in past years, but we had a nice time with those that were there.

Joanna and Cory left on Sunday to head home and I came down with the stomach flu or something on Monday morning. Ugh! But, I am feeling better now, for the most part. We are in the midst of our holiday decorating and I will post some pictures of some of that once it is done. In the meantime, here are a few pictures from our Thanksgiving.

Relax and listen to some Christmas tunes and enjoy the season!

Love, Earlene, Scott and Julia

Monday, November 27, 2006

Christmas cookies

Mom meant to post this here first, but accidentally put it on our blog, so I copied it over here, so its in both places. :) Alicia

We started our holiday season with a new project. We usually make all our candy on Thanksgiving weekend, but this year, we ate Thanksgiving at the Bishop's. So then on Friday, we spent cooking our own turkey and such, so we didn't make candy - just one batch of million dollar fudge. We made caramel corn last week to send to Spencer in Iraq, so we didn't make it this weekend.Anyway, we wanted to be creative in the kitchen, so we invited the missionaries over to make cookie plates for them to take to people. They ended up not coming so we went ahead and made the cookies and they came today after church and Brian helped pack them up. Then we tied pass along cards for the Nativity video on to them. It felt good to do a little service. We are trying to spend our holiday season this year focusing on other people and on things we can do for others with materials we have at home. It was a very good and satisfying start to our holiday season. I highly recommend it!!!!! LOVE Charlotte

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Real or not?

For the second year, we are having a debate about whether or not we should get an artificial tree. We stuck our toe in the water last year by buying artificial garlands to hang over the dining room sliding glass doors (and liked them well enough that we never took them down all year, sigh--a sort of indoor echo of the chrismas lights on the front porch).

The advantages would be that we could put our tree up anytime, which would probably mean we got it up earlier in the month and could enjoy it longer. We wouldn't have to do it together (it's hard for us this busy time of year to find a night when we can both go to get the live tree). It would be less of a fire hazard. We wouldn't have to worry about water spilling on the floor. We could have a bigger tree than I am willing to pay for with a live tree. We wouldn't have to struggle with the lighting (though we also wouldn't have the whole assortment of different kinds of lights we have on our tree now). I wouldn't have to saw it in thirds and get it jammed into the green waste can on a specific garbage pickup week.

The drawbacks are that it would be one more big thing to take up room in our little garage. It wouldn't feel as magical as the live tree feels to me. It wouldn't smell as nice. It wouldn't have our funky mix of lights (the inside of the tree has big traditional lights in colors and clear, including some that blink; the outside of the tree has white and colored mini lights). I am afraid of making a mistake buying such an expensive item I don't know anything about. What happens when some of the lights burn out? I love the thought when I put up the tree that I am following a spiritual tradition that is thousands of years old. I don't know if an artificial tree would have that same feeling. It would be converting one more biodegradeable thing into a plastic thing that will eventually stay in a landfill for hundreds of years.

So there I am, still stuck on the question. . . I know many of you have artificial trees--what do you think?

Much love, Sandra

Real or not?

For the second year, we are having a debate about whether or not we should get an artificial tree. We stuck our toe in the water last year by buying artificial garlands to hang over the dining room sliding glass doors (and liked them well enough that we never took them down all year, sigh--a sort of indoor echo of the chrismas lights on the front porch).

The advantages would be that we could put our tree up anytime, which would probably mean we got it up earlier in the month and could enjoy it longer. We wouldn't have to do it together (it's hard for us this busy time of year to find a night when we can both go to get the live tree). It would be less of a fire hazard. We wouldn't have to worry about water spilling on the floor. We could have a bigger tree than I am willing to pay for with a live tree. We wouldn't have to struggle with the lighting (though we also wouldn't have the whole assortment of different kinds of lights we have on our tree now). I wouldn't have to saw it in thirds and get it jammed into the green waste can on a specific garbage pickup week.

The drawbacks are that it would be one more big thing to take up room in our little garage. It wouldn't feel as magical as the live tree feels to me. It wouldn't smell as nice. It wouldn't have our funky mix of lights (the inside of the tree has big traditional lights in colors and clear, including some that blink; the outside of the tree has white and colored mini lights). I am afraid of making a mistake buying such an expensive item I don't know anything about. What happens when some of the lights burn out? I love the thought when I put up the tree that I am following a spiritual tradition that is thousands of years old. I don't know if an artificial tree would have that same feeling. It would be converting one more biodegradeable thing into a plastic thing that will eventually stay in a landfill for hundreds of years.

So there I am, still stuck on the question. . . I know many of you have artificial trees--what do you think?

Much love, Sandra

Saturday, November 25, 2006

rockin around the Christmas tree.



This picture is of Alli about a year ago. It is amazing to see how much she has grown since last year!!!! It is fun to see things from a fresh child-like perspective, and Christmas-time is no different.

Our apartment complex turned on all the christmas lights. They have lit up all the trunks of the trees down the main road that goes through the complex. We'll take a picture to show it to all ya'll (see, I'm from texas for sure now). We went on a stroll as a family last night down to see the lights, and Alli enjoyed it a lot. Not knowing just quite what the lights are for, she started singing "Happy birthday to you" over and over and over again. Then she tried to blow out all the lights. I guess she thought they were all just candles.

Alli loves our Christmas tree, and loves to dance to Christmas music by the tree. She doesn't really know about the commercial side of Christmas yet, or at least she doesn't seem to. It's nice to see the joy on her face when she sees a picture of a snowman, or and angel, and that she gets excited over the festivities and family-togetherness-time without having to associate it all with commercialism and new toys. I'm sure that we will try to keep teaching her over time that this is the case.


ok- I'm guilty of shopping all day friday... but I'm done shopping now, and it feels great to know I don't have to brave the stores and the crowds anymore.

Actually we did most our shopping before thanksgiving so it wouldn't have to be distracting in this christmas season.


We love you all, and feel grateful that you are our family-
Love- JED

Friday, November 24, 2006

Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy,buy, buy, buy, buy

Hmmmm, I suspect the Christmas countdown blog isn't supposed to be about rants.
But I just can't help it. As usual, we carefully avoided stores and shopping areas today (in fact, we took Susan's mom Betty with us to the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park to see the exhibit of the Gees Bend quilts). Nevertheless, I was struck in the past twentyfour hours by a number of things: the papers yesterday morning were fuller than they are on Sunday with all the sales flyers; some stores actually opened on Thanksgiving day for people to get a jumpstart on the shopping; the HGTV channel has a solid lineup tonight of my least favorite show ("I want that"); we could hardly get the door open tonight because there were so many catalogs pushed through the mailslot in the door. There's just something about all this frenzy and waste that just sticks in my throat.

We were feeling so full of gratitude for our families, for the wonderful food, the beautiful day, how much we love the Bay area. And for right livelhood, our dear friends, the beauty of the natural world, the joy of creativity.

So the waste and the uselessness of so much of the excess just seems so wrong to me today. It's not that I don't like to buy things--I've been really enjoying the clothes I got for my new job, and I am loving my new car. But there just seems like so much money spent on stupid stuff people don't need and so much energy spent on this frenzy instead of on the peace, the love, the gratefulness, and the moments of stillness and silence that the season seems about to me. I mean, couldn't we have Thanksgiving for acouple days before we move on to buy, buy, buy?

OK, enough ranting. I'm enjoying everyone's blogs and looking forward to sharing our holidays as they unfold.

Much love, Sandra

Carper's Christmas Cards

We just thought we would share pictures of the Christmas cards we made this year. Happy Thanksgiving everybody. :) Carpers






Thursday, November 23, 2006

The Lip The Squint and The Grin





Our holiday weather is, as you can tell, not very cold or white yet. Yup, it really is still green here... and we are just begining to lose the leaves on the trees.

Pumpkin Roll with Cram Cheese Filling




Here's Laura's Pumpkin Roll recipe, she makes if every year. I asked her to write the recipe on here, because I don't think i could explain it all. I love these, I can never get enough

Hey all,
Ingredients:
-3 eggs
-1 cup Sugar
-2/3 Cup of Pumpkin
-1 teaspoon Lemon Juice
-2 teaspoons Cinnamon
-1 teaspoon Ginger
-1/2 teaspoon Nutmeg
-1/2 teaspoon salt
Filling:
-8 oz Cream cheese-softend
-4 Tablespoons Butter-or margerine (not softened)
-1 Cup Powdered Sugar
-1/2 teaspoon Vanilla

Preparation:
In large bowl, combine eggs and sugar, beating well. Add pumpkin and lemon juice, mixing until blended.
In separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, spices and salt. Add to egg mixture, mixing well. Spread batter into greased and waxed-paper lined 10-by-15-inch jelly-roll pan.
Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes. Remove from oven. Cool for 15 minutes. Place cake on clean tea towel or dish towel sprinkled liberally with powdered sugar. Cool for 10 minutes longer. From 10-inch side, roll cake up in towel. set aside. or put in fridge.
While cake is cooling in towel, prepare filling. Beat together cream cheese and butter; stir in powdered sugar and vanilla and blend until smooth.
Unroll cake. Evenly spread filling over cake. Roll up cake (without towel). Wrap in plastic wrap. I usually cut the roll in half first. Then put tin foil over the plastic wrap. Cover and chill at least one hour. I put mine directly into the freezer, i think it taste better frozen.

The cake can be alter to be healthier by using honey, but I wouldn't recommend tampering with the filling, except for maybe less sugar if you'd like.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING


HAPPY THANKSGIVING ALL!

Yesterday I came home to see that Alli had fun making thanksgiving crafts with Mom at home. Here's a picture of the turkey they made together.

Alli is thankful for many things this year, here is the list she just told me.

thanksgiving
shoes
love
rain
dress
cat
clifford
thanksgiving
a daddy
peanut butter sandwich
a mommy
a car
a star
dancing
a doggie
a christmas tree
a bear
ice cream

So there you have it.
We are also thankful for all those things as well. It takes a child's simple thanks to help us realize how simple "Thanks" can be, and how powerful it can be. We are thankful for all of our family even as you are all far away from us. This thanksgiving we send out our love to all of you. We miss you all, and love you very much.

-Love Jed, Laura, and Alli

Sunday, November 12, 2006

"Holiday Tree"



We decided to call our Christmas tree our "holiday tree" for now - not to be politically correct, but because some people have given us a hard time for setting it up so early. We've had it up for about a week now. Nicole actually wanted to set it up before Halloween, but I put my foot down on that one. There's just something special about the mood Christmas tree lights create. We will put our Christmas decorations/ornaments up on or after Thanksgiving & probably post another picture then.

The moral of the story: if you're in the mood to set up your Christmas tree now... don't worry about what others say, and just set it up NOW :)

We've also been listening to the new Gladys Knight & the Saints United Voices CD. When I was visiting Salt Lake, our school group visited the Deseret Book corporate headquarters, and they gave us each a little gift bag which included this great CD!

Anyway, we're excited to share this Christmas blog with all of you. It should be a lot of fun!

Love, Paul & Nicole

P.S. I'm also willing to help anyone who can't figure Blogger out... (208) 403-9249

Cranberry sauce is the heart of Thanksgiving

Having Diabetes has forced me to focus on the foods that are essential to me about Thanksgiving. Oh, a little turkey is nice. And I like sweet potatoes. But the two most important things are the stuffing and the cranberry sauce. I used to have three cranberry sauces--the jelly kind out of the can, the whole cranberry kind I made myself (with nutmeg and cinnamon added), and a fresh cranberry relish (one package of fresh clean cranberries ground up in the food processor, one or two oranges complete with peel, also ground up in the food processor, and a cup or two of sugar--let sit in the refrigerator for at least five days before Thanksgiving). I never liked the jelly, and I've given up on the relish. So that left finding a way to make the whole berry sauce without the two cups of sugar.

Here's my recipe, which is actually pretty yummy:
Two or three bags of cranberries
Two diced pears
One container of frozen pear or apple juice concentrate
Stevia or splenda
Cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon to taste

Melt the frozen fruit juice in the bottom of the sauce pan.
Add spices
Put in the cranberries and the diced pears
Boil while stirring until the majority of berries have burst
Stir in stevia or splenda, adding several tablespoons at a time, until sauce achieves desired sweetness.
Taste again the day before Thanksgiving and add additionnal sweetner if desired

The stevia has a slight fruity aftertaste, but it works well with the cranberries.

Enjoy the holidays!
Love, Sandra