Two photos taken today that say twinkle to me. This year’s Christmas tree, just decorated and later reflected in the window:
Why not join in the challenge yourself? Or check out other entries at this link.
Tag Archives: Christmas
last minute gingerbread cookies
Since we spent the weekend before Christmas away visiting family, we didn’t have much time to make cookies. On Christmas morning my daughter and I set about making gingerbread cookies since I didn’t have to put the turkey in the oven until about 2 p.m. Oh but wait!! I had forgotten that the dough needed to chill for a few hours before we could roll it out. So we switched gears, put the dough in the fridge, found a recipe for snicker doodles to appease hubby who really loves them. Didn’t notice the recipe made 66 (SIXTY SIX!!!) cookies until it was almost too late. Are you enjoying my story so far? I realized that I didn’t have enough butter to make the full recipe of snicker doodles and have enough for our Christmas meal. Instead, we halved the dry mixture and made a half recipe. The other half is in a ziploc bag for when we get the urge to make snicker doodles again.
We had our nice Christmas meal and after the dishes were done and put away, we got back to our gingerbread cookies….at about 9 p.m.!! I must be crazy but it was so much fun. My daughter and I have made and decorated gingerbread cookies for several years now. Here is a collection of photos of our gingerbread cookie production. Better late than never!!
rollin’, rollin’, rollin’
the cookie cutters that work the best
ready to go into the oven(and some in the background just came out)
let the decorating begin!
you must have sprinkles don’t ya know
our decorating production area
they do taste better with icing!
Filed under Holidays
Christmas cat
I had so much fun photographing Fritz while we opened presents. I think Fritz enjoyed it more than we did ;)
First he got into a box smaller than him:
Then he got out of the box:
Then he decided to play with the box:
and here he is just looking adorable:
I hope you all had a very merry Christmas!!
Sunday Post – Christmas tree
Wow, Jake is back just in time for Christmas! We just got our tree and decorated it last night and I took some photos so how fortuitous that Jake’s Sunday Post is about the Christmas tree. Do check out other entries, there are a lot of fun ones!
And then a little gallery of a few of my favorite ornaments:
It’s nice to see Jake back!
Filed under Challenges, Holidays
Christmas Oratorio and other festive songs
Last night hubby and I went to a concert performed by Exultate, a group that our former choir director sings with. It was performed at the St. Thomas Aquinas Chapel at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. What a lovely church. And a great venue for a concert such as this. The acoustics were amazing!
This Jesus suspended from the ceiling is breathtaking:
The first half consisted of 14 of the 64 movements of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. The concert started with the director explaining things about some of the movements we were about to hear. One was the fact that Bach borrowed music from his previous compositions and simply changed the texts so that they would fit with the Christmas story. I definitely recognized a couple of those. The program describes how Bach uses music to give a picture of the texts being sung. Since the program describes it so well, here’s part of that section word for word: “this is nowhere more evident than in movement 10 where the violins are racing off to Bethlehem at a furious pace and at the same time the voice parts, with texts being sung independently of one another, tell us ‘Let us even now go to Bethlehem.'” I could definitely feel them racing off to Bethlehem.
The second half began with the choir surrounding the audience and although our friend was on the other side of the church, I could hear his voice. What a treat that was to hear voices singing all around us. And what a rich sound it made too. This is a shot of some of the choir near us:
I think that was my favorite part. They sang more Christmas songs, some familiar and some unfamiliar and then we all got to join in at the end for Joy to the World. A great evening of Christmas music!!
Afterwards we drove down Summit Avenue because I had seen some marvelous Christmas lights recently and wanted to show them to hubby. This tree stands in the front yard of the governor’s mansion:
And across the street were more but I wasn’t able to get any good shots of them. On our way home we stopped at White Castle since hubby had a hankering for their “sliders” and I got a chocolate milk shake. Not the best thing to have on a cold night but it sure tasted good!
Filed under Music
travels with toby 