little black journal

It was indeed a very Merry Christmas, spent cozied up with my family at my brother’s home in Portland.  I spent as much time as possible hanging with my darling little nieces – I was happy to bounce between holding sleeping, peaceful baby Morgan in my arms and playing with chatty, precocious Elise on the living room floor.  There were several moments throughout the weekend when I stopped and thanked God for my growing family.

On Christmas Eve, Shane, Mitch, and I took Elise to Peacock Lane to see the Christmas lights – Elise oohed and aahed at each and every house, exclaiming over the brightly lit reindeer and snowmen.  There is nothing like a child’s unabated Christmas joy.

Christmas morning was full of cinnamon rolls and presents and one particularly thrilled little girl who tore wrapping paper to shreds and exclaimed over each new toy.

The rest of the day was spent enjoying a good dose of Christmas Day laziness – occupying ourselves with cooing at the baby and stuffing ourselves with a home-cooked holiday feast.

Elise has quickly taken to the role of big sister.  This was an attempt at seeing just how much adorable-ness I could pack into one photo.  Answer:  A LOT…

We went out for breakfast on Sunday morning, and then, far too soon, our Christmas weekend was over.  But the joy and warmth that comes with being surrounded by family was so, so good while it lasted…

Merry, merry Christmas to you and yours.  Hope your Holiday was filled with joy, warmth, food, and time with loved ones.  I am feeling particularly warm and fuzzy this Christmas evening, as I spent much of the day with the newest addition to our family cuddled in my arms – Morgan Lynn was born four days ago, and in the words of her Grandma, is “as perfect as perfect can be”.  I am decidedly smitten with her, and ready to take on all of my duties as Aunt:  doting, cooing, cuddling, and when called upon, back-rubbing and rocking.  Mommy and Daddy seem to have a handle on diaper changes, midnight feedings, and spit-up relief, so I’ll leave that fun stuff to them, ’cause I’m in the generous Christmas spirit and all…

God bless!

Yes, the past several days have been filled with a heaping helping of Holiday comfort and joy.  Last weekend, we participated in our C-group’s 4th annual fondue party, complete with gluttonous amounts of melted cheese and chocolate, a white elephant gift exchange in which everyone unloaded their tacky, odd, or just plain laugh-able belongings, and, of course, our 12 Days of Christmas sing-along charade (I played the part of the French Hen; Shane starred as the Drummer Drumming).

The next morning, Shane and I gathered with the tried-and-true few to run our 3rd annual post-fondue 5k, making at least a small step toward offsetting the previous night’s caloric overload.  But any caloric burn was then offset by a post-run brunch at Both Ways Cafe.  Ah, well, we tried…  Much of the remaining weekend was spent enjoying the warmth of our home, watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, doing a little baking, and reading by the light of our Christmas tree.

Last night, Shane and I shared an epic steak dinner with Jack and La Verne downtown – three hours after we set foot into the restaurant, we rolled out of there, fatter, happier, and brimming with thankfulness for good food and good friends.  I left work early today to come home and whip up another batch of Christmas goodies, get the family’s gifts wrapped, and generally revel in the joy and anticipation that is Advent.

I will admit, as the wrapping paper littered the living room floor and the batter-caked mixing bowls piled up the sink, my pre-Christmas comfort and joy temporarily turned into pre-Christmas frazzle and backache.  But everything eventually came together, my to-do’s got done, and I’m enjoying the chance for a quiet moment to sit down and re-read the Christmas story.

“The angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid.  I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.  Today in the town of David a savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.'”  – Luke 2:10-11

Joy, indeed.

The holiday season always seems to throw me into a bit of an emotional whirlwind – lots of high highs and low lows.  I get all gushy and reflective; memories and feelings that might lay dormant for months at a time suddenly surface, making me want to laugh and cry and be alone and be with every single person I love all at the same time.  It’s a tizzy.  But it’s good.  The past couple of weeks, what’s stood out to me more than the joy of Christmas traditions or the melancholy of missing loved ones and loved places is the overwhelming sense that I am blessed.  This realization has hit me again and again and again – I am blessed.  In the middle of the night when I was woken by the sound of monsoon-like rains, I prayed for the thousands of homeless people in my city and thought about how fortunate I am to be able to snuggle deeper under the covers and shun the cold from my warm, cozy bed.  As we sang Christmas carols with our community group, while our dear friends Brian and Nicole listened in from Africa via Skype, I thought, “Thank you, Jesus, for this surrogate family”.  As I eagerly await the arrival of my soon-to-be-born niece, I imagine what it will feel like to hold her in my arms for the first time on Christmas Eve and I want to fall to my knees and praise God for babies and family and brand-new life.  As I sip my cup of hot green tea and read by the light of our gift-laden Christmas tree, I think, “God, you didn’t have to give me all this”.  But He did it anyway.

“From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.”  – John 1:16

Loving…

Christmas-time baking – I made my first batch of almond butter toffee yesterday, and am on the lookout now for a good cookie recipe to add to my baking repertoire.  Preferably one that calls for massive amounts of both butter and chocolate.  ‘Tis the season…

My new copy of Drawing Now.  Insanely beautiful drawings, from a collection of enviously talented artists.  I love every. single. page.

Holiday movies.  Every December, I pull out Serendipity to swoon over John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale’s fairy-tale romance, and Little Women to cry over the heart-breaking loss of Beth.  Shane and I have also made it a tradition to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy every December – though they don’t fall in the ‘holiday’ genre, these movies feel deeply connected to the Christmas season, as we always caught them in the theater as a family during their late-December releases.

Rainy Sunday afternoons, when I can light a couple of candles, snuggle up on the couch, and munch on holiday goodies while flipping through good books or watching the afore-mentioned movies.  Today was that sort of day, and it was gooooood.

It’s extremely rare that I read the same book twice – I instead tend to focus my efforts on my constantly-growing shelf of unread books, which is the curse (or blessing) of being a person with a book-buying addiction.  But when my book club decided on Traveling Mercies as our latest pick, I felt like I was due for a little time with ol’ Annie Lamott – it had been 3 or 4 years since I’d picked up anything of hers.  And good, good Lord, this is good, good stuff.  Like, speaks-to-my-soul kind of stuff.  Like, makes-me-laugh-out-loud-then-want-to-cry kind of stuff.  Like, ‘Amen, Sister!’ kind of stuff.  She talks about her faith in a way that allows you to understand that it’s entirely possible to be deeply connected to God, but still deeply flawed, whether with anger, bitterness, self-centeredness, or vanity.  Being a Christian and being a person with a closet full of skeletons are not mutually exclusive.  And Anne’s closet certainly has skeletons.  But her life is incredibly rich with moments of finding and being found by God.  He hunts her down in the midst of her drug and alcohol addiction; she accepts His embrace through the death of her best friend; she even takes a moment to talk with God in the midst of the most frustrating circumstances, like her car breaking down while she’s on her way to visit an old friend that’s dying of cancer:

“‘It would be hard to capture how I felt at that moment.  It was a nightmare: Bad Mind kicked in.  Bad Mind can’t wait for this kind of opportunity:  ‘I told you so,’ Bad Mind says.  It whispers to me that I am doomed because I am such a loser…  ‘Will you pray with me?’ I asked Sam…  We said a prayer together that we find a solution, that we feel calmer.  I don’t believe in God as an old man in the clouds – ‘bespectacled old Yahweh’, as the late great John Gardner put it, ‘scratching his chin through his mountains of beard.’  But I do believe that God is with us even when we’re at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, protects, even in traffic.”

Amen, sister.

Oh, my, it was a full one but a good one…the highlights:

watched our dancer-friend Donna perform an amazing piece entitled ‘Paper Chase’ at Velocity  |  drank wine, ate cheese, and had a very involved discussion about cars at the Tin Table with Shane, Jack, and La V  |  cut down and decorated what I think might be our best Christmas tree yet  |  ate cherry pie at a little ho-dunk diner in North Bend  |  made egg-nog, spiked it, drank it  |  attended a lovely choral concert at St. Mark’s cathedral  |  ran myself ragged trying to get all 13 of my little preschoolers to assemble ‘Advent paper chains’ in Sunday School this morning  |  sat in a cafe and scribbled in my sketchbook  |  unwound from all the busy-ness with out latest Netflix pick and some quality couch-time with Shane.  and…whew!

After an early-morning spin through the mall with Shane’s mom, and a hearty breakfast with the rest of the family, Shane and I said our good-byes, hopped back in the car, cranked up the heater, and headed to Minneapolis for a quick city-fix before our flight back to Seattle on Saturday.

After checking into our lovely room at Graves 601, we made our way to the Walker Art Center – a museum designed by Herzog and de Meuron and filled with all kinds of contemporary art.  Much of the art was a bit too…’conceptually abstract’ for my taste (a continuous video loop of a tongue rolling marbles around inside of a mouth, for example), but the current exhibit on Yves Klein is crazy, crazy good.  I first became familiar with his work at the Pompidou in Paris and fell in love with his cobalt blue paintings and his innovative use of the human body as a paintbrush.  But this exhibit also contained several of his fire paintings, which were new to me and absolutely beautiful.

The museum itself was also a work of art, with its unique materiality and bold, cube-like forms.  Not my most favorite H&dM building of all-time, but still an interesting place to experience.

Post-museum, we spent some time strolling through the shopping district near our hotel.  We noticed that a crowd had begun to line both sides of the street outside of Macy’s, and decided to hang around for a bit when we heard that the big Christmas parade would be coming through downtown in just a couple of minutes.  As we stood there, shivering and cringing from the cold, we began to question whether the parade would be worth losing feeling in all of our limbs.  After the first rinky-dink float rolled past, we decided it wasn’t.  We took refuge from the cold in a nearby store – I don’t think I have ever seen Shane so willingly agree to shoe shopping.   Once we’d thawed out, we made our way back to the hotel (via an impressive series of inter-connected sky-walks, since it turns out you can traverse a good portion of downtown without ever having to go outside – Score!), and wined and dined ourselves at Cosmos, the super-chic restaurant inside our hotel.  With our bellies full of duck breast, crab cakes, and pork belly, we headed downstairs to the bar at Bradstreet Crafthouse for a couple of late-night cocktails.  We were given a cozy little table in the corner and enjoyed the chance to catch up with each other – we reflected on our time spent with Shane’s family, talked about the people and places we looked forward to seeing back in Seattle, and enjoyed the chance to be in our own little Kelly and Shane ‘bubble’ for awhile, where nothing mattered other than each other.

We had just a couple of hours to enjoy the city the next morning, and I had a grand ambitions of a photographic tour of Minneapolis, but instead decided it would be nicer (read: warmer) to linger over our breakfast at Hell’s Kitchen, and then sit for awhile in a nearby coffee shop and sip hot tea.  Nothin’ wrong with that…

And so, our short-but-sweet 24 hours in Minneapolis came to an end.  I feel like I got just a taste of the city’s offerings and we look forward to getting back there sometime soon (but hopefully in the summer…).

Apparently time flies when you’re dozing on the couch – hard to believe that our few days with Shane’s family are nearly over.  Tomorrow we head down to Minneapolis for a night out on the town, and Saturday we return to Seattle.  We’ve had a perfectly relaxing week, catching up with family, catching up on our sleep, catching up on our caloric intake…  Shane logged some serious Lego-building hours with his nieces and nephew, I made progress in my quest through Harry Potter, and we saw plenty of lovely, freshly-fallen, puffy white SNOW.  Such a treat…  Our stay in Alexandria, in photos:

We celebrated Thanksgiving day with food and gifts and a little Thanksgiving play (complete with cat-masks), written and directed by Shane’s fabulously creative little niece.  It was a good day, the perfect culmination of a week that went by far too quickly.  Shane and I have much to be thankful for in the generosity, love, and hospitality of his family.  Shane’s dad remarked tonight how nice it was to see me feel at home here, and I really do – this cozy little house in rural Minnesota has become my home away from home.

And with that, I must sign off – my mother-in-law and I have a 5 a.m. shopping date in the morning, so I better get some shut-eye.  God’s blessings to you and yours.

Indeed, we are sitting at the airport as I type, waiting to board our plane to cold, snowy, cold (did I already say that?) Minnesota for a week with Shane’s family. This trip has become an annual tradition for us, and I’ve come to look forward it more and more each year. I love being in a house full of family, watching Shane play Legos with his nieces and nephew while the smell of roasted turkey wafts in from the kitchen. I love taking a ride down memory lane with Shane, as he takes me past all the places he used to get into trouble as a kid (yes, my gentle, law-abiding husband used to be the king of car crashes, stolen road signs, and toilet papered front yards). I love getting up pre-dawn with with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law to hit the Door-Buster sales the day after Thanksgiving. And I especially love waking up to the sight of a freshly fallen blanket of snow, knowing that if I so please, I don’t have to do anything that day other than curl up on the couch with a cup of tea and a good book. Cheers to time with family, to relaxation, and to my new fuzzy, warm hat. It’s going to be a very, very good week.