Well, it’s November 25th.  One month until Christmas day.  But not one month until Christmas.  Christmas is now.  I’ve written this before,  but I feel I need to give us a gentle reminder to start enjoying the season.  This beautiful season of peace, joy and hope. I was thinking of the people that literally do not celebrate Christmas.  For them it is not about Jesus’ birth.  They don’t believe that happened.  How sad that they miss out on all the blessings, love, hope and assurance  that Jesus wants to give us.  He’s running after us with these things.  He’s in hot pursuit. And so… since Christmas is one of the Christian holidays that is pregnant with meaning (see what I did there) for those of us that believe,  we should be the best at celebrating it.
There are also a lot of people celebrating Christmas that don’t actually know what it means.  They think it’s the gifts and the food and the clothes and the parties and the trips and the stress….and the loneliness. And so they get all caught up in finding the perfect gift for someone or everyone.  They stress over food and entertaining.  They spend money they don’t have to impress people they don’t know or at least, don’t really care about. Some go on trips to get away from it all..all the hoopla.  Bah Humbug.
Why did God send his only son, Jesus, into this dark and scary world?  Because we needed Him.  And they shall call His name Emmanuel….which means ‘God with us’.  God knew we needed Him to be with us.  He knew we needed a tangible presence.  As a Christ follower,  I can feel His presence.  And I humbly admit, I need it.  I need Him.  I read something on Instagram that asked the question, ‘Can you go to Heaven without the Holy Spirit?” and the response was “Bro, you can’t go to Walmart without the Holy Spirit”.  Funny cause it’s true.  Many people DO go to Walmart without the Holy Spirit and it shows.
I know Christmas is difficult for many people that are alone or in poverty or sick or dying.  But it’s up to us to make Christmas better for them.  Who else is going to do it? And remind them that Christmas is just the starting point of all this “God with Us”.  It’s not the end. And they can have everything Jesus is offering and that’s the best gift of all.
Often we give money to the Salvation Army or go fill shoe boxes an Samaritan’s purse or serve food on Christmas Day at a soup kitchen.  Some people actually adopt a needy family and make Christmas so special for them.  And these are all amazing things to do. I love the quote by Charles Dickens “I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year”.  Now that’s what I am talking about.
I’ve given myself over to contemplating Advent. Advent actually means hoping and waiting for something that’s coming. And I don’t think it has anything to do with Amazon. Even though, that’s where I get most of my Christmas shopping done.  I digress.  What are we, in this present age, hoping for?  I’m hoping and waiting for Christ’s return.  On that first Christmas they were waiting for him to come for the first time.  And He came as was promised by the prophets of old.  But this time…..He’s coming back and so I feel very connected to the season of Advent.  I feel it’s so relevant, even now. And that’s the joy and hope that fill my heart and make it leap for joy in this Christmas season.
Not that I don’t love the lights, and the decor and the real Christmas tree and getting together with family and friends.  I DO love the glitz and the glamour.  And the feel good Christmas movies.  The snow softly falling. The cinnamon and hot chocolate.  The baking.  The delectable food. The nostalgia.  The games and the puzzles.  The skating and the skiing.  And Jesus DID say occupy until I come so I’m just doing what He told me.  I am living my best life while I wait for His return. and SO….you will find me sitting by the fireplace reading a book or watching a Hallmark movie and sipping hot chocolate or eggnog.  You may see me at a Christmas party or two having the time of my life.  (It doesn’t take much these days…lol).  I will be at church singing all the carols and also singing in my car with the music turned up full blast. I will go on a tour of the lights.  I think the lights are my favorite thing.  As I drive by large evergreens all lit up for Christmas and laden with snow,  I whisper an unheard thank you to whomever did those.  And also to the homes that really put in an effort to light up Christmas…thank you. I get giddy just driving by. I’ve been known to wrap every single little trinket or gift in a large separate box just so I can wrap things and deck them out.    Christmas morning over here looks like an embarrassment of riches but when all is said and done, there’s not much to show for it.  I do love buying a great gift tho.  Love to hear those oohs and ahs.
So for the next month I am going to be celebrating Christmas as best as I know how.  Every single day.  Grateful to be in a position to be a giver and hopefully spreading joy and cheer to everyone I come in contact with.
God Bless Us Everyone.

After some deep and prolonged soul searching, I have come to the decision to close my at home baking business.  I will not be doing my usual Christmas baking (cookie boxes) or valentines offerings.  I will not be doing random cakes and cookies for special occasions or butter tarts or pies.  I also will not be sewing for others or altering clothes or whatever.  I will not be decorating anything outside of the home. These skills or talents have served me well over the years of being laid off work (multiple times) and through the pandemic.  For over 40 years I have been using my creative skills as a side hustle in all sorts of way.

As most of you that know me are aware, my health has taken a hit over the last few years and one of the important things I need to do to take care of my health is to eliminate as much stress as possible.  Turns out my body and mind are not that good at dealing with stress.  Even good stress.  The body doesn’t know the difference between good and bad stress.  SO….in the interests of being in the best possible health at this stage of my life I am on a quest to eliminate stress.  There are many stresses in life we can’t just toss out the window…we have to learn to deal with them but this creative side hustle is definitely something I am going to learn to live without.

I am looking forward to not having to invent transport boxes for cakes.  Not having to run around and find the best price on butter.  Its gotten SO expensive.  Last Christmas I had to navigate a sugar shortage.  Or burning a batch of butter tarts and having to make a new batch to make up the numbers.  Waiting at home for clients to pick up baking.  Keep the dog from going ballistic when the doorbells rings. Staying up too late and ending up with a cold.  I don’t seem to have the patience to perfect my icing consistency  so cookies look their best.  Yes I have loved being tucked away in my cozy kitchen in December,  in the middle of snowstorm,  while others are out navigating traffic,  baking up a storm inside but I guess I just don’t appreciate that like I used to.  Now I actually have an outside job – that is perfect for me – and that’s about all I want to take on these days.

Thank you for all your support and orders when I got on the gram with my pictures and advertising  Every order made me jump for joy.   The confidence you had in me to bake and deliver a quality product. I have loved being a part of your Christmases and special occasions. But its time for this baker to move on.  I will still bake I just won’t be baking more than fits in my freezer and the belly’s of my people.

July 15 and ‘the greatest outdoor show on earth’ is over. I mean is it?  The greatest outdoor show on earth??  I sort of think the Rocky Mountains are the greatest outdoor show on earth.  Or the northern lights.  Or the place where two oceans meet. Or an African safari.  Anyway, it’s over for another year. And it seems a sort of calm peacefulness has settled over the city.  I’m  glad they do it in the first half of July so we can have the rest of the summer to …summer.  And enjoy a slower energy.

We were a little more involved in the Stampede this year because my daughter was part of a floral event that was held on the grounds.  So that meant driving down to the stampede grounds several times to set up and design, to replenish and to tear down.  I accompanied her to one of the replenishments and to the tear down.  Plus we had family in the city during Stampede so we went to the grandstand show one evening. When in Rome…. I hadn’t been for many years and it was surprisingly…fun?  Interesting?    Just being in that Stampede culture, that totally isn’t me in any way, was an experience. The heart attack food.  The scary, weird rides.  The country music (which I have always considered to be an oxymoron). The chuckwagon races were entertaining. The floral displays added a touch of class to the whole thing. The grandstand show…so, so.  The drone show and the fireworks were the piece de resistance. And the mood on the exhibition grounds after midnight is a total different vibe than it is during the day. With everything winding down and no line ups. Lights flashing and faint music still playing in the background.  Carnival music.

But the entire city is affected by this great outdoor show.  The whole city is abuzz with pancake breakfasts (we went to a couple – it’s a great way to feed your house guests breakfast), and country music, and cowboy boots and the most outlandish outfits that people think are justified just because it’s stampede.  The traffic is crazier. The tourists more plentiful. The smell of greasy food, beer, horse manure and exhaust permeate the air.

By the time the stampede is over, I sort of feel like – cowboys go home.  I want to enjoy the good old summertime in peace. I realize I’m probably a minority.   Most people love the stampede…I think. But I just want good old ‘English tea in the afternoon in the garden’ type of peace.  That’s more my thing.  Or to wake up by a large body of water and watch the ripples and waves.  To scavenger for sea shells.  To eat delicate food at quaint outdoor cafes.  To find a park and read a book while I listen to the birds and leaves swaying in the wind.  To stroll along a river and breathe in some fresh air.  To be intoxicated with the scent of fresh flowers growing along my walking path.  A drive to the mountains.  That kind of thing.  And so that begins for me…today.  A slower pace of life and energy.  For the rest of the summer.

As I have mentioned in a previous blog, the recent hail storm almost wiped out my entire garden in a five minute fell swoop. It is very discouraging after all the hard work of planting and weeding and preparing the soil.  The sore back and stiff butt coming from physical labor that you haven’t done since last year (well that’s just my pathetic little experience).   We’ve had watering restrictions for the last month and so saving water from showers and rain to water plants has become my MO.  It’s much more work.  I felt like I was Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie, going to the well everyday to lug water back for the animals and the farm.   But I did it because I spent too much money on my dream secret garden, once again, to just watch it die.  It’s my summer project. And has been for many summers.  I needed it.  It’s my emotional crutch and therapy all in one.   Then to have it almost entirely wiped out?  And there is nothing much one can do about it.  We can’t control the weather. I mean I guess I could just give up and never plant a garden ever again.  Because it can be emotionally exhausting.  And physically exhausting.  Did I mention expensive?  Gardening is not for wimps. But, oh the joys.
The south side of the barn in our backyard was protected from the hail so I still have one barn wall of prolific green growth that’s thriving.  So I will focus on that.  I am going to replant a few things and move a few things around to fill in the dead gaps.  I will cut some things back to see if they will grow again.  I’ll keep watering and weeding and running out every morning to see what’s happening.  I’ve deadheaded all the dead heads.  I bought a couple more rose bushes to fill in the spaces.  Perennials not annuals. And I will not give up.

Just as a second stroke almost took me out at the end of May.  Well,  it didn’t almost take me out but it did undo much of the emotional and mental work I had done over the last two years. Strokes play with your mind.  Your fears.  Your health.  Your well being. Your confidence. Because strokes are scary even when they are minor.  I am totally grateful that this one was not as bad as the first, but I had just put to bed all those fears.  And decided that the first stroke was ancient history and I was moving forward with confidence and health.  And then wham!  I’m driving down a one way street the wrong way because I had lost my right peripheral vision. It came back in a few hours but not until I’d had another ambulance ride to the hospital and an overnight stay and another MRI and another CT scan and evidence of more brain damage. They wouldn’t let me drive for a month.  Why?  because they thought I might have another?  and kill someone?  Not a confidence builder.
But I can’t live there.  I can’t live in fear.  So I must pick myself up and replant a few things.  Dead head a few things.  Keep watering and weeding. And keep doing what has to be done to optimize my health.  Physical and mental. It’s like I was on the south side of the barn.  The darn thing kinda  missed the best part of me.  Thank you Lord.  I still have much to be grateful for.

The last day of work (for the summer – I work at a school), my boss, friend, co-worker had her staff over for a delightful end of the year dinner. Then I spent the next two days getting ready for an Anniversary party I was hosting on the weekend.  My sister from Mississauga arrived and we headed out to my aunt’s cottage on a gorgeous quaint lake in BC.  The weather was ….meh.  We had a couple of lovely hot days.  We walked twice a day with the dog and watched movies by night – they have a cinema room.  Laid on the dock once the sun and heat finally decided to show their face and burnt my feet to a crisp.  This was slow living for sure.  We headed back to the city to join the rest of my visiting family for a few days and did the stampede and shopped the malls, did a couple of pancake breakfasts and watched a few more movies.  One might think that was slow living.  But it really wasn’t.  What I am doing now, after all the guests have left and the travelling is done….this is slow living.  And slow living is what I plan to do for the rest of the summer.

I find it interesting that people say ‘ don’t go on Instagram.  It will make you depressed as you compare your life to all those other phony lives that look perfect but aren’t happening.’   I go on Instagram to review all my old posts and stories and end up feeling grateful that this is my life.  No, I don’t post all the gory details like my violent episode with food poisoning this past weekend, but I do post the lovely and the memorable and the joys and these are events and people and happenings that are real in my life.  I don’t spend too much time staging things.  Maybe that’s just the MO of people at my stage of life.

I look at my story highlights and reels and posts that end up reminding me that this IS my life.  All these things actually happened and are exactly as I post them and I am so blessed by it all.  Blessed that this is the life I get to live.  It actually does look pretty good. It encourages me.  It reminds me I have so much to be grateful for on days when I’m not really feeling it.  I post the lovely today – as it happens –  so I can go back and look at it on a tough, not so lovely day.

Decorating is one of my passions.  I love to garden.  I’m enthralled by flowers and their growth and their cycles.  I continue to use my creative abilities to make lovely things and I like to share them in order to inspire someone else to do the same.  I’m in my happy place in the kitchen baking or cooking. When it come to Christmas, well I think I own it. I don’t post me doing laundry or ironing.  Or me cleaning the dog poop out of the dog run.  Or coloring my grey roots.

I am just an ordinary person.  An ordinary woman.  An ordinary wife.  An ordinary mom. With an ordinary life.    Doing quite ordinary things in my own creative way.  I am a sucker for schmaltz.  What can I say?

I do get ideas off Instagram for ways to improve my life and myself.  I get inspired by spiritual posts.  Have a good laugh at hilarious posts.  Enjoy and get tips from the gardening posts.  I think I can see right through the phony lifestyles of the rich and famous (not all of them) and I just don’t follow those people. I follow people on Instagram that inspire me and make me happy.  That’s all.  I find it quite an encouraging distraction and pastime.

That’s just my experience.  I like to use the Internet and technology for good and not for evil.  It’s all in how you apply it. Viva la Instagram.

I’m at Costco buying toilet paper.  My daughter is on an airplane headed for the South of France to do flowers for a wedding. Wait – what?  How did a daughter I raised in modesty and poverty end up with this lifestyle?  Where did she get this gumption?  This moxie?  These opportunities? She dropped out of grade 12 math for Pete sake. I thought she’d be cleaning houses for the rest of her life. Oh wait….that was my fate. Doing dishes.  Doing laundry. Cleaning bathrooms. Ad nauseum.

Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life – well, valuable, but small – and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?

From the time I was old enough to conceptualize what I wanted my adult life to look like it always involved marriage and motherhood.  I assume this means that I liked what I saw in my own dysfunctional family.   I didn’t know we were dysfunctional at the time.  I thought we were normal and everyone else was weird.  But I digress…

I wanted marriage and motherhood (in that order) above all else.  I thought of going to design school for a split second.  I thought of becoming a pilot for a split second.  I thought of being an architect for a split second.  And a doctor for a millisecond.  My math ability would never have facilitated the latter two.  But I never for once wavered on Motherhood.

Pregnancy was not kind to me.  I basically turned into an alien blimp so I wasn’t keen on going through that too many times but when our first two efforts produced a boy and then a girl.  I was done.

Motherhood did not disappoint.  Well….sometimes it did. Well… a lot of times it did. You mothers know what I’m talking about. But in the big picture, it did not.  I’ve had the time of my life with these two kids.  Truly.  My life is so much bigger and richer because of them. Even if everything goes south from here on in, I have the past and it was grand. I know children are a gift from God  but I like to think I kind of had something to do with who they’ve turned out to be.  I’ll take ownership of the not so good so I can take ownership of the very good. I was just able to do so many things that I didn’t have the pleasure or opportunity to do when I was a kid, all in the name of motherhood. And who these kids have turned out to be has been a total pleasant surprise. I have no problem whatsoever saying “these are my kids”.  More pride than is probably healthy flows through my veins.

And all the sacrifices and things I have done for them I have done out of pure love (as pure as I can muster this side of eternity).  I have never done anything expecting reciprocation.  OK…that’s a lie.  I did expect reciprocation sometimes and was disappointed when I didn’t get it.  But then I go do the same thing again…out of love.  I’ve never really seen motherhood as a responsibility although it is very much that but more something I really wanted to do and really wanted to do well.  So I keep doing and sacrificing because I can’t help myself. And if some of my choices as a mother are wrong then I guess I’m a bad parent.  I’ll own that.  But if I’m loving my kids the wrong way then I guess…..I’m wrong,   But I’m still having the time of my life with them.  And on this Mother’s Day I’d just like to acknowledge that I wouldn’t change a thing.  Ok…there are a few things I would change. I mean who doesn’t make mistakes?  But I love being a Mother.  This doesn’t mean I don’t want to be spoiled on Mother’s Day kids.  Its good for your character.