The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.
~ G.K. Chesterton

Perhaps it’s because skies are so grey and the days are so dark, that late December’s sunrises seem especially precious.  

You don’t need to be a child to feel that there is something magical in the air at this time of year.  Who would have thought rose hips from summer’s wild blooms would have transformed so easily into a snowman’s grin?  All you need is a little imagination…

Nature has been waiting all year to share its gifts of the season…

With or without the presence of snow, there is something enchanted in the outdoors… available to everyone and easily bought for the price of opening your eyes and your heart.

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things…
~ Sara Teasdale

The woods look barer than they did this fall when all the bright leaves covered the trees.  But,  but it’s at this time that reflections of the sky can finallt reveal themselves in previously hidden forest brooks… You never know what’s waiting to be discovered in the woods.  Even in late December, there are still surprises to be found.

He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree. 
~Roy L. Smith

Treasured memories

Merry holidays from My Heart Behaves.

We had a white Christmas!!! Can you believe is snowed here in Dallas? Today we went on a walk to burn some of those eggnog calories off and came across this festive snowman in Exall Park beside our home. His eyes and buttons are made from olives and his nose is a carrot. I love that whoever created him donated a witch’s hat that kept falling because of all of the wind, and a single red rose around his neck, for good luck perhaps?

I hope he never melts.

xo,
Kristina

This was not a big sewing Christmas season for me. With friends coming to visit at Halloween and a trip to see the parents for Thanksgiving, not to mention several Christmas concerts, parades, and trips to visit friends, I have just not had the time or been motivated towards Christmas projects this year. Although I did do a couple of things that I will share.

Last fall, Mom called and asked if I would embroidery the Denver Bronco’s emblem on a fleece jacket for my Dad for Christmas. Mom sent me the jacket and I was happy stitch it up for her (and for Dad). I have stitched this design before on a couple of baby sleepers for other relatives, but I had to reduce the size to fit the small sleepers. It was nice to actually stitch the original design at it’s original size and it stitched very well. Unfortunately with the dark blue color of the jacket, I had to pick colors that would stand out on it, so I did not get to use the colors I would have liked to, but the colors I used worked well enough and I am happy with the end results. Hopefully, both Mom and Dad will like it too.

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My sister sent me a pattern for a crocheted snowman ornament because she knows how much I like to crochet amigurumi’s. Since I have her name for Christmas this year, I decided to make her one to go with her Christmas gift. Although the snowman was very fun to crochet and worked up really fast, I was not totally happy with the pattern. Next time I will try to make his head more round instead of so pointed. I stitched his scarf a little longer than the pattern said so I could easily tie it around his neck and it would lie against his body instead of stand out. The hard part for me as always is stitching the crocheted parts together and the face. Even though there was very little to be stitched together on this snowman, it was still a fight for me. I am not totally happy with his smile either, but it was the best one out of several tries. For his eyes I used some glue on wiggle eyes instead of the black ones the pattern used. At first, I was wishing I had used the black eyes. His wiggle eyes make him look like he has had too much Christmas nog. After having him sit on my desk and smile at me for a while, I have become fond of his face. It has given him some personality. I hope my sister likes him.

This little taste of Christmas crafting has made me want for more. So, maybe next year I will be more organized and start my Christmas sewing and crocheting in July or even better yet January.

1. Expect more posts, as I now have a digital camera. Many a time I have clicked on the “WordPress” button in my bookmarks toolbar, but then clicked away from the front page because I need a picture to enrich what I would say. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

2. My uncle humiliated me because I was speculating about the possible use of Firewire ports attached to external hard drives and whether or not it would allow a PC without Firewire to use said brand name cables to connect to a camcorder. Came close to tears, don’t know how much it showed, but now I’m either going to declare that I will never discuss computers again or throw myself into learning every single component of the Unix operating systems because I doubt he knows much of them.

3. My cousin and I murdered a snowman on Christmas Eve.

I broke off the head. She added the blood.

Hello everyone,
Sorry for my late blog entry but every time I went to go and type one out on my BlackBerry something popped up so I couldn’t tell you what went on with me today and mainly I had a good christmas day and now that its nearly over in most/all parts of the world then you can comment and tell me/reflect on your day.
I find that for the last 2 Christmas’es I have developed chronic headache and it maybe down to the consumption of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans they are just so damn nice and I only eat so much candy like that once a year I don’t even do that on Halloween.
Anyway I have to tell you that I got a BlackBerry Bold 9700 I will be doing a review some day and I will tell you everything good about the phone and here are two problems but they are not ones that would inter fear with others,
The battery life I got 12 hours out of it and it had reached 40% left in battery and I decided to re-charge it however I will today leave it go until it reaches 10% and count the time as usual if I ever test something out,
But I do have a strange feeling that I tend to use my BlackBerry a little bit too much as say’s the ILoveBlackBerry timer/monitor.

I don’t set out everyday to use it like that the weird thing is the only thing I intend to do when I wake up is tweet and that’s my goal everyday however it is not my only goal but its one I will remember.
Finally I would like to say that if you knew someone this christmas who was alone this christmas and or who was estranged from their family and alone and did nothing about it then you DID NOT DESERVE Anything this christmas and as I have said christmas is about thanksgiving and giving to give to people and not just to give in order to receive gift’s back

Did you help someone this christmas or if you don’t know of anyone who needed some company did you donate to charity and if not why?

Follow me on twitter

Thanks for reading and merry christmas and happy holiday’s

From Colin

I hope everyone is having a great day no matter where they are or what they’re doing — be it Christmas with family and a million “close” relatives, a tropical soiree on the beach or of another faith and choosing to scavenge for SOMEWHERE to have dinner (try chinese restaurants! just trust me one this one)

Magical tree this year! Snapped this one before any of the presents were put underneath (oh well)

After a crazy night last night, where my family lost a collective 50 years off our lives when we skidded and spun around trying to make a right turn on the ill-prepared for winter/snow/sleet streets of Dallas, today was a lot safer by comparison. Though I loooooved seeing my relatives who are unbelievably sweet and accommodating to my weird diet always. Seriously, there is no understating how incredibly awesome southerners (or maybe just some southerners, now that I think of Paula Dean) can be about the menu when friends & relatives come to dinner with varying tastes, diets, and preferences. Even though they don’t read this blog, I thank them for making Christmas Eve a delightful experience and sharing their daughters with us for the evening! (I forgot how incredibly enjoyable it is to draw make-believe characters and then make up lives/stories for them)

Anyhow, today’s Christmas-themed breakfast was a welcome treat!

I made my coffee oats (1 cup of coffee and almond milk) with nuked frozen raspberries, a few dark chocolate chips, some green leaf sprinkles and coconut!

Then we basically fasted before dinner (with my immediate family, i.e.: just the four of us). Most other “close-ish” relatives live in Miami or Brazil, so we miss them but we get it — it’s a trek! I don’t know about everyone else, but my family opens ALL the gifts on Christmas morning. I never even contemplated opening one or two the night before, mostly b/c my mom never put out all the goods until the middle of the night on Christmas Eve so that my brother and I would know Santa had delivered the rest. There was always the big unveil on Christmas day, where the wrapped presents would be practically spilling out from under the tree. Surprisingly or not, this tradition never stopped and I admit that I get a little excited every Christmas morning thinking about the effect of packages upon packages “tied up with strings.” (I hope you get that reference).

Presents were exchanged and I can only hope that everyone liked my gifts! I loved quite a few this year, but of course there are always some that might need to be exchanged, like the shirt-set from Free People that my brother gave me that — no joke — makes me look like the long-lost member of Nirvana and/or Pearl Jam. I have no idea what Nick told the sales lady, “uh, she’s pretty frazzled and weird. And she smells like teen spirit. Gimme something like that.”

Seriously.

Our Christmas dinner, on the other hand, was anything but weird or from the ’90s. I helped make the salad (yea, I’m sure you saw that one coming) and the cranberry sauce. My mom doesn’t give herself enough credit, b/c she seriously cooked/prepped everything else! There was turkey, wild rice with raisins(I think?), cornbread stuffing (?), sweet potatoes with pecans, salad, and cranberry sauce.

The lineup:

of COURSE I was most enthused/proud/excited about the salad

The Christmas Crazy Salad has spinach, raw zucchini, pomegranate arils (first for my dad! he was….surprised), grilled peaches seasoned with allspice and graham masala, apricot quarters, cold yummy roasted brussels sprouts, and almond slivers. Dressed in a homemade maple vinaigrette! It was pretty great and I’m not sure if my brother or mom liked it, but dad seemed to! And my plate, of course, consisted of mostly salad and then turkey with some cranberry and sweet potato nibbles.

Ok! Back to family traditions! Off to the Christmas movie before the food coma wears off!

But before I go: It simply wouldn’t be Christmas/any vacation with my family if Nick didn’t do something lewd and/or obscene. So, without further ado, the cocky snowman that he left from apparently hours of work in the middle of the night. (edited to add: cocky snowman was alllll Andrew, not me!)

Yes, it's got all the accoutrements -- bottle of liquor, Indiana insignia, and carrot-tongue sticking out. But can you see what his creator truly ENDOWED him with? *sigh*

Oh wait, close up in case you couldn’t exactly see

**************NOT FOR CHILDRENS’ EYES!***********

Frostly clearly chose NOT to take a cold shower this morning

Now Christmas is truly complete. Until next year — ciao!

In the following YouTube video, you will see where and how they make the world smallest snowman at the NPL UK. They sure make science fun and turn it into entertainment.

Wishing you all the most

beautiful warm dazzling sparkling 

loving  

Christmas!

What’s your xmas wish?

xoxo  

“The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other.” – Burton Hillis  

“Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.” – Norman Vincent Peale

It’s a Guitar Hero Christmas

Nope, we’re not adding Christmas songs to the game, but instead making the game part of the decor. [kumbaric] hung strings of lights on his garage door in the shape of this familiar gaming interface. The best thing is, you can actually play the game based on these lights. [Thanks Yuppicide]

Smallest… Snowman… Ever.

You can make one of these if you have an electron microscope and an ion beam on hand. This is the product of some clever folks at the National Physical Laboratory near London. This is a pretty fat snowman, 1/5 of a human hair across. By the way, you should have read the subtitle with the voice of Comic Book Guy (like we do when reading the tolls’ comments). [Thanks Matthias]

A little help please

[Andy] outdid himself with this creative decoration. Hanging a dummy from the gutter and placing a tipped over ladder beside it had some folks alarmed. The police asked him to remove the prop after they almost ran off the road while driving by. This was real enough that somebody actually came to the rescue, climbing to the top of the ladder before discovering the ruse. [Thanks Rob]

Lights that blow your mind

This video is from a 2007 display and features over 45,000 lights running on 176 channels. Individually controlled colors, fading effects, and music synchronization put on a show that will get you kicked out of your gated community. Admittedly this guy runs a business dealing in Christmas lighting displays, but that doesn’t diminish the sheer awesome of what he’s done. [Thanks Patrick]

Have a safe and happy Christmas. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that you get that new Weller you’ve been hoping for.

For more than five years Latvia’s tourism slogan was “The Land That Sings.” Now the organizations responsible for it want something new: the question is what?

While Latvia is contemplating what would be the most attractive slogan, everyone seems to be united about its capital, Riga, which has launched a claim that it was the home of the first Christmas tree, 499 years ago. It is hoped the story will attract curious tourists and a promotional video has been released to spread the word ahead of a big marketing push for next year’s 500th anniversary.

You can watch the video by clicking HERE.

There is a large plaque where the famous Christmas tree stood. Unfortunately, right now it is buried under deep snow despite being located just a few yards from the Town Hall.

More easily spotted is the main Christmas market. I went there looking for some interesting Christmas decorations, because that would be something you might expect to find in a place famous for the tradition of Christmas tree decoration.

Sadly, I did not spot much in the market. But shops sell the usual plastic Christmas balls, figures and glitz. The only place I found something a bit different was the art gallery/shop Istaba.

In fact the best tree decoration was brought to our door this morning by our artist neighbour. It was cleverly handmade from colourful strings of wool in the shape of a sparrow. It was jolly, nice and natural. Perhaps there is a gap in the market?

But walking through the city in the snow with snowmen sprouting in all the squares and parks, the smell of mulled wine in the air and people carrying skis towards Uzvaras Park, it seemed clear that Riga certainly has the potential to be a first-class winter destination.

After a day playing in the snow, a relaxing visit to a sauna or spa makes the perfect accompaniment. Again, Riga has all the facilities necessary, it’s just a case of joining everything together in an accessible way at an attractive price. Putting myself in the position of a tourist who perhaps did not know exactly what to expect from Riga, I found myself thinking I would have been pleasantly surprised at how “Christmassy” the city is in a genuine way.

Maybe next year will see Riga rivalling Vienna, Rovaniemi and Munich as one of THE Christmas destinations.

Merry Christmas!

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You HAVE to click here to see the snow bear that my dad (Poppa Joe) built this year!

Happy Holidays, everyone. Stay cool O.o

Hope you guys have a great Christmas!   Mwaaaaaaah~

What a perfect time to compete the 21st Daily Shoot assignment.   A nice snowman to help with the Christmas spirit.

#DS21: “Sunday challenge time! Make a photo of your favorite keepsake in soft diffuse light. “

Merry Christmas for those who celebrate it. For those of us who don’t, please enjoy these adorable figurines anyway!

via AgencySpy