Merry Christmas!

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.  And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.  

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.  And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.  And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. 

And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.  And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.

Luke 2:8-18

There was no little drummer boy at Bethlehem that night.

The animals did not know how to talk.

The wise men didn’t make it on time to see that sight.

But shepherds, ah yes,

Were out upon the hill ‘neath starry sky.

To them the angels came with message rare –

Glad Tidings of Great Joy … to shepherds.

A man who tends a flock of sheep by day,

Watching over them all through the night,

Searching for the one that’s gone astray

Until again the lost one’s in his sight;

Who leads his followers to pastures sweet

And keeps them safe from perils they can’t see –

This kind of man, this kind was first to see

The King of Kings. They knew that it was He.

Why shepherds?

Why were they the first to view the babe?

Because, He was a shepherd, too.

Teresa Bateman

A Wedding in Our Family!

As I was sitting down this evening to do a little blogging it occurred to me that I was noting that Maulbeere got engaged, which happened earlier this week, without ever having posted about Schwartzbeere's wedding, which happened last August.  I am remiss. Forthwith let me fix that.

 I like to take pictures.  I like to take pictures a lot.  So I do. As you can well imagine, at an event like a wedding, an event that usually takes up a large portion of the day, a lot of pictures are taken.  The hard part becomes paring them all down to pick a few to post and share.

 This wedding was a little different from any other that has happened in our family in the past.  A few wedding traditions were observed.  So the bride got to take the walk down the aisle. And what's more, she was accompanied not just by her father but by her father and her mother both.  I thought that was nice, a nice recognition of two people who have been important in her life up to that point.

Another fun thing that has developed in our family is that we have a cake expert or two in the group.  So Heidlebeere was in charge of the cake.  She did the engineering, though she did have a bit of help from several people, including her oldest.  What a team.

Schwartzbeere and his bride picked the figurines that went on top of the cake.  Initially the plan had been to not have any figurines on top.  But the day of the wedding they were in a store and saw these and decided they would be perfect.  So that's what ended up on the cake.

 The cake, when it was done, turned out really well.  It looked near perfect.  That was quite the trick considering it was baked and decorated to about 85% done and then packed up and transported 70 miles to where the wedding was held.  Then it was carefully unpacked and assembled.  When the finishing touches had been added it looked real nice.  More on that later.

Lots of family, lots of pictures.  The bride's family welcoming the new groom into his family. The grooms family welcoming the new bride into her new family. Two families coming together to celebrate a new family getting started. Certainly a time for celebration. That's what its all about.  Maybe that's one reason the Lord, in the scriptures, speaks of time passing and life going on as "marrying and giving in marriage."  It is the cycle of life.

Now every wedding has its memorable moment.  Some more humorous, some less so.  Some that take a while to be able to laugh at, some that are instantly hilarious.  I'll let you decide where this one fits into that continuum. After the cake was all decorated and on display, looking absolutely perfect, the room got warm.  Warm room and cake icing don't always play together nicely.  And so it was that the icing warmed up and softened up and something I've never seen happen at a wedding took place. The top two tiers of cake slid off of the bottom tier.  Yup.  It really happened.  And you'll notice in the picture that batman and the princess survived the ride quite nicely.  So what to do you?  You paste it back together as best you can and the wedding went on.  And the nice thing was that, other than Heidlebeere being a bit mortified, everyone took it quite well.  And at the end of the day, it was a good day to be alive and together.

Christmas Cookies!

Yesterday we went over to Blaubeere's house to watch her kids while she and her husband went out to a Christmas play nearby.  We decided a fun way to pass the time would be to do cookies so Brombeere made up some cookie dough before hand and we took it and all the stuff we needed to decorate them with us. We also took a few cookie cutters, Christmas shapes; a star, a Christmas sock, a snowman, a gingerbread man and a Christmas tree. Fun.  Sugar cookies are pretty much my favorite kind of cookie and so far this year I haven't had much opportunity to have any so that's what we decided to make.  

So the grandkids got to help roll out the dough and cut out the cookies.We worked at the kitchen table and everybody got to practice taking turns.  

When the kids saw the few shapes we had brought they decided that wasn't enough to work with so they went and got some of their own cookie cutters.  Never mind that they weren't particularly Christmas shapes.  That was okay.  So we had fish, kangaroos, dolphins, teddy bears, cows, a blue ribbon (which I thought could have passed as the Christmas star if you used a little imagination) and a rhinoceros.

We didn't want to make a whole ton of cookies because, after all, what can you do with cookies but eat them and who needs all those calories?  But we still ended up with probably just over two dozen cookies.  We didn't actually count them.  Ah, well.

We took the stuff to make frosting.  We also took sprinkles put on the cookies. The original plan had been to make several different colors of frosting but when it came time to actually make it we forgot to separate it out before adding the coloring so we ended up with only three colors, red, white and blue.  How patriotic.  But that's a different holiday.

 Brombeere had a real good idea for the frosting.  She put it in squeeze bottles and let the kids put it on that way.  She's smart that way, maybe it was a trick she learned from teaching kindergarten and working with little kids a lot. I have actually never frosted cookies that way but it worked pretty good.  You have to make the frosting just a little thinner to do that but it worked quite well.  We got the blue a little thick at first but once we added a little milk to it to thin it out it was good as the other colors.

 So everybody frosted, sprinkled, frosted, sprinkled and we all ate a few, too.  Some ate more than others, some struggled with the idea that we weren't going to eat them all, some just ate decorations and not much in the way of cookies.  But when we were all done everyone had fun and we ended up with some fun cookies, too!

 This is one I frosted.  Turned out pretty good, I think. It was a fun time.