The Pause Continues

Contrary to my "best laid plans" - the Thanksgiving Day "Pause" has continued on into December!

It had crossed my mind that at this point, I might have already brought the Christmas decorations down out of the attic and that I might have already attached a number of colorful decorative nuances to this blog. I also thought I might have begun to pour forth a cornecopia of Christmas cheer on a daily basis by now.

But the "Christmas spirit" hasn't laid hold of me yet.

So let me tell you about how I have spent the "pause".

Ab, AA and I took part in our annual after-Thanksgiving Day-tradition of a Waffle House Breakfast!

What I had envisioned as an early frosty morning breakfast, turned into a late-morning brunch. R. chose to work the day after Thanksgiving and our start was a little sluggish. We got there in time to join the tail end of the "Black-Friday" red-eyed breakfast tour. The atmosphere was festive as we joined the masses of frenzied sleep-deprived consumers trying to slurp down enough caffeine and to scarf down enough maple syrup so as to stay awake for the drive home.

It was neat to see that the Waffle House we frequent for these occasions has a considerably low employee turnover rate since we saw a number of familiar faces that we remembered from our last visit and possibly even a time or two before that.

As usual, we took our seats at the counter so as to be near all the action!

The rest of my time off was something of a blur; I spent a considerable amount of time tinkering with my chainsaw and then a little while actually using it on Saturday. The kids got involved in a "hut" building project out in the woods. Our work site experienced exactly one day without an accident - then we had to start over after Ab had a little mishap with a handsaw (nothing serious - but enough to cause the hut building project to be shut down for a time - I think we are still awaiting our OSHA inspection).

I also participated in one of my annual exercises in futility as I attempted to blow a generous portion of the leaves and pinestraw discarded by our trees, off of my driveway and a portion of my yard and into some specific designated area.

The kids and I did get an opportunity to venture back into the woods since we were reasonably sure the poison ivy and most of the snakes had retreated to the their winter hideaways.

We did manage to accomplish a couple of yule tide activities: We officially broke out the Christmas movies and we lit our first Advent Candle of the season.

As mentioned before, I have a strictly enforced policy of "zero-tolerance" for Christmas movies until the week of Thanksgiving and -in a best case scenario- not until after Thanksgiving Day altogether.

Our first movie this year was the 1938 version of "A Christmas Carol". We all enjoyed this annual story of Christmas Redemption.

Since that time, R. and I have attempted two other Christmas movies - "The Preacher's Wife", which is one of the few newer holiday movies that I think is destined to be a classic. I really like this movie - mostly because of Whitney Houston and the gospel choir singing; but also because R. and I first went to see this movie about a couple struggling in their marriage, when our own marriage was in the throws of its own struggles. In the same vein, we purchased the video and grew to love the movie even more after God had worked out some really neat things in our marriage.

The other movie we attempted to watch was "White Christmas". Unfortunately, in both cases sleep seemed to call to me in such a compelling way that I had to bail.

We are trying to approach our family celebration of Advent by looking at the "coming" of Jesus in three ways: first, how He came to earth as a Babe destined to grow into a Man that would bear my sins. Second, how He is a Savior Who promised to return to earth and thirdly, how He came to each of us that knows Him as Savior and took residence in our hearts.