Christmas is so here!!!  Our livingroom is dominated by a lovingly decorated tree, sweet-smelling and bright.  The kitchen smells like cookies and Christmas carols are filling the air.  I bask in the joy of now and of years gone by.  I don’t have good childhood Christmas memories, but as an adult they are incredibly sweet.  My daughters laugh and banter as they decorate the tree.  We all work together wrapping presents, sharing in each other’s finds and relishing the surprise each present will bring to those not here yet.

When they were little, our children were given $20 each to buy all their presents.  They quickly learned to pool resources for family and even mutual friends.  Somehow it worked out, and they got to give something to everyone.  They still love giving gifts and they still pool resources to get better gifts. We never celebrated Santa Claus at Christmas.  We talked about his example of generosity, but I couldn’t bring myself to intentionally lie to my kids.  I think in some way it is better.  They always knew who to be grateful to and who to thank. I think it might have made them more responsible in their own gift-giving, knowing that things don’t just appear.  Someone had to make the effort. 

So Christmas day we will go to my sister’s house for the extended family Chirstmas.  Later in the week we will celebrate with our grandchildren.  It is their turn to be with the other grandparents.  We will wait with our own gifts until they are here. 

Thank you, God, for sending Jesus as your great gift to us!!  We are so grateful for your love and your peace.  Thank you for providing all we need!  We love you, and we especially love this season when we ponder the majesty of heaven coming as a tiny, helpless baby all because of his love for us.  We certainly don’t deserve such an honor!

This semester is flying by!!  It is strange to be my age and still dominated by the school schedule, but I definitely am.  This week is full of activity. It is our last week before Christmas break.  We also have a graduation.  Our youngest is graduating from Texas A&M with a degree in Civil Engineering.  Whoop!!  It the end of an era for me.  Our last child is finishing college and beginning a new career.  It has taken me the full four plus years to adapt to her not living at home full time. Now I get to adjust to her living across country.  Beginnings and ends.  They just naturally go together. 

God did not make people to live alone.  We simply have no idea how precious friendships are. I remember reading a story about orphans in Vietnam after the war.  Those who ended up in the poorer orphanages were thriving and those who were in the more affluent ones were dying.  The difference in their care was that in the poor orphanages several babies were placed in cribs together.  The poked and pushed each other. It wasn’t necessarily a friendly contact, but they were at least in touch with another person.  Those babies grew.  We need each other more than we know.

I don’t know if I am getting stuck in my ways as I get older or if I was always a bit stubborn.  Today my girls and I decided to skip out after worship in church and go to the outlet mall.  We had planned to get milk so I imagined that we would get the milk right after church, take it home, then go shopping. 

Oh, no.  That was not what they had planned, and, of course, we didn’t discuss it.  So here we are in the parking lot getting ready to leave, and I tell them what I need to remember to get from home since we are going to go there right after the grocery run.
“Why would we go there (the grocery store) before the mall?” 
“But I left my phone in the charger because I forgot to put it in last night.”
“It’s ridiculous to go back home before going shopping, and I’ve got my phone anyway.”
“But I didn’t plan to go straight from church.  I wanted to change and get more comfortable shoes.”
“Mom, why are you being so stubborn about this?  It’s not that big a deal.”
“But it’s not the way I thought it was going to be.”
“Well, can’t you just change gears?”
“I’m trying!  But I think my gears creak when they change these days.”

We all laugh and have a great time tromping around the mall.

There is a picture in the news these days that shows a mother cat with baby puppies that they are claiming are her own.  I am reminded of an experience I once had. 

 

When I was 5 years old in the ’50s, we lived in France. It was a small
town on the outskirts of Paris.  Everyone had gardens and some kind of
farm animal like chickens or rabbits or pigs. I remember walking past a
courtyard in our little country town one morning.  There was an old
French gentleman smoking a pipe and sitting in the sun beside his
kitchen door. At his feet was a dog nursing 2 puppies and 3 piglets. I
was really surprised! I knew that dogs had puppies, not piglets.  So I
asked the man sitting there why the dog was nursing pigs. With a
straight face and twinkling eyes, he told me that the father was a pig.
I looked for a minute more and thought about it. Well, that just might
be true.  Probably 30 years later I learned that it is common to buy
nursing piglets and give them to a mother dog to nurse.

I’ve been tricked once so I am of course skeptical.  I’m waiting to see what the genetic outcome of this will be. 

of a strange story.  I took the kitten to class on Thursday.  She was the hit of the room.  I don’t think her feet touched the ground much all day, except to eat and use the cat box.  The kids loved her.  So after school a very sweet high schooler with three sister took her home to continue her new life as a cuddle toy.  She definitely has the temperment for it.

   

Monday several of my students were 10 minutes late getting to a lecture class.  I was told that they were trying to rescue a cat from the boat.  For now, someone is storing a skiboat near the dumpster at the school.  The kids swore there was a cat stuck in it somewhere, but no one could find it. 

So this evening I was leaving from school rather late because several students stayed for tutoring.  My husband had parked his van near the dumpster, and when I went out to it, I definitely heard the howls of a lost cat.  We just couldn’t leave it especially with my knowing it had been stuck for a few days.  So we searched the boat with no luck.  It would stop crying when we were noisy, but when we were quiet it started again.  We simply could not figure where it could be.  With Nick under the tarp in the boat and me outside, we realized that the cries were coming from the dumpster. Digging through the bags of school trash and boxes brought no result.  We stood in the dark and listened for it to cry again. Its heart-breaking cries sounded like they were coming from under the dumpster! Surely that was not possible!  We looked all around it, but there was no other place it could be

So Nick found a good sized rock in the field nearby and a six-foot board that had been left beside the fence separating the play ground and parking lot.  With these, he levered the dumpster up enough to shine a flashlight under it.  Amazingly, there was a tiny grey kitten crouched in the space next to the bottom brace in the center. It had been crouched in a three-inche space between the ground and dumpster..  The dumpster had been partly on the paved parking lot and partly in the dirt.  There was no gap anywhere for the little creature to get out or in for that matter!  I chased it out with a stick, and it bolted under the lowest car in the parking lot.  There it howled pitifully. 

It took us another half hour of chasing it back and forth under five or six cars before I finally grabbed a foot on the top of a wheel and pulled the terrified kitten out.  By that time it was covered with motor oil and shaking uncontrollably.  Poor thing.  Its traumas were not over.  I had to bathe her as soon as I got her home.  She is a silver-gray cat with gray eyes.  Very pretty.  She is bathed, fed, and sleeping on Nick’s lap as he dozes in the recliner.

Tomorrow I’ll take her to school in a cage and see who wants a miracle cat.  I cannot imagine how she got herself stuck under a dumpster and didn’t get crushed!  She has no injuries that I can tell. Well, she has certainly used up one of her lives, eight to go!

Commitment.  What an amazing concept it is!  I remember many years ago when our children were small and we were living in the mountains.  We were visiting some friends who had recently married. The wife had been in charge of the preschool in Breckenridge before we moved to Telluride. They were expecting their first child, and I was so excited for her.  So she asked several of us who were married what we thought were the most important things in a marriage.  Each of the three couples had different things to say, but Nick and I agreed that commitment and forgiveness were the most important attributes in a successful marriage. 

She actually got annoyed.  What about love?  I told her that if there wasn’t forgiveness and commitment that love would die.  She didn’t believe it.  Three years later she and her husband were divorced.  Twenty-eight years later we are still married. Many of those years were very hard, and it would have been easy to blame each other for the problems. We still have problems, but I still stand by my conviction.

I asked my mother what she thought was most important.  She and my dad agreed that respect was most important.  They were married 48 years before my dad died.  They also made an agreement that they would not both be angry at the same time.  She said many times she would realize he was angry so she felt she had to wait her turn.  Many arguments were diverted by that decision.  I’m afraid that is not the case with Nick and I.  I’m not so self-controlled, but we work it out.

I’d be curious to know what some of you others think is most important in a successful marriage.