Dear Reader:

After a bustling Pre-holiday gathering… Thanksgiving was sedately satisfying. I pieced together some items from a home-cooked ‘ma and pa’ restaurant and added my Thanksgiving string bean casserole… bingo! The two plates were ready. Ben and I had a quiet Thanksgiving lunch.

Bekah and Ady  stopped by earlier yesterday morning for a short visit….and we had fun catching up before they left for Susan’s family Thanksgiving dinner. *Just saw this picture on Facebook…I suspect grandmother Susan is ahead of the game with her grandchildren’s next holiday attire- Santa pj’s! Too cute….Rhodes and Ady!

No doubt this morning…I won’t get up enough nerve to do my daily weigh-in! I have to ‘way out’ to get some exercise first before attempting the scales again! 🙂

The next few days will consist  of taking down pumpkin and turkey related items to make room for Christmas decorations. No rest this year to linger too long in the old pumpkin patch….Christmas tree farms are waiting.

Waiting…aren’t there several different types of it? Quinn Caldwell  explains his ‘take’ on waiting this time of the year.

“There’s waiting, and then there’s waiting. Sometimes it’s the oh-God-when-will this pain-end kind of waiting. Sometimes it’s just annoying, like waiting your turn for the restroom. Sometimes its worse, like waiting out the period of a heart- broken relationship.

But there’s another kind of waiting, too, a delicious, shivery kind: There’s smelling the almost-done pie in the oven. There’s sitting in the theater listening to the opening theme of a movie you’re been waiting a year to see. There’s the feeling when the baby kicks you a week before its due. There’s lying in bed and listening to soft snowflakes falling on the window ledges.” 

These upcoming weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas present us with both types of waiting. We can either choose to see God’s  seeming absence (wars, politics, scandals, climate changes) or choosing “to see God’s almost presence..”struggling teachers and rich philanthropists both doing the right thing, babies being born and the love being made and the ancient stars shining bright as hope in the cold night sky.”

So until tomorrow…Waiting is about looking around at the good and really really bad and realizing one day this all will change… and then taking time to welcome God in our lives. ..the Only catalyst for permanent  change.

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

***A sad story hit the news yesterday….Coach McKissick, my neighbor and friend passed away yesterday morning. I had been to see him and Joan just a few weeks ago and Coach seemed to be doing extraordinarily well…great visit…so it made the news even sadder….but I think the following quote sums up Coach McKissick’s life.

”The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy.”

*Rutledge still has his picture of himself with Mrs. McKissick in his bedroom….I had taken him over to meet Coach but he was still at the Presbyterian Village getting treatments at that time last summer… Joan spotted us, however, came over, and graciously met Mollie and family…and an excited Rutledge posed with her.