Scenes of the Season: Advent + Christmas 2013

Happy New Year!

 

Life has been super busy here the last month or so

(hence the lack of posts).

 

During that time we've had our share of challenges:

a long arctic freeze

(brrr!),

some related house woes

(sigh)

and

others I won't bore you with.

 

 But we've also had our share of blessings:

a HUGE answer to prayer which brought some much needed PEACE to my life,

the departure of the arctic front

(yippee)

AND

some VERY, VERY special visitors!

 

Isn't life always like that?

Challenges AND blessings know NO season.

 

 

Here are two of our special visitors--

you probably recognize the small one...

well the bigger one

('hiding' out in the background there)

is small one's daddy 

AND we had the pleasure of seeing them for almost 2 weeks!

An extra benefit is my kids all LOVE to cook--soooo 

I had almost no cooking responsibility for the entire time.

COOKING VACATION!!

 

In this picture the daddy-daughter team are fixing us lasagna:)

Mmm.

It was very good!

 

Another visitor was Santa's Helper who filled in for Per (our tomte -- elf) who was AWOL

(meaning grandma forgot she left him up on top of the bookcase SINCE last Christmas)

He was a BIG help--

leaving gifts for us to pick up at the store,

leaving ornaments out for the Christmas tree

(our first one in years),

and delivering a few Advent gifts for the small one.

Come Christmas Eve, he promptly disappeared, his job done.

Such a magical season:)

 

Per, our missing tomte.

This year I added two more tomte to my collection

(yes, this season ALWAYS includes at least one trip to a Scandinavian shop)

Santa's Helper,

currently taking a long deserved nap in an undisclosed location, will someday be another tomte--

after a little bit of work on my part.

This season also ALWAYS includes at least one visit to a craft store too:)

 

 

We had some visitors outside too--

two hummingbirds

(thanks to a post by Teresa last year we found out our native hummingbirds

 should be fed during the winter)

AND this cutie

(thanks son for the GREAT photo!)

 

 

As I've mentioned,

it's been a LONG time between Christmas trees...

but Santa's Helper managed to find quite a bit of Christmas ornaments packed away in our house

AND

with a few new ones the DH and son picked up,

we were ready to decorate the tree...

 well except for the fact that I had NO idea where our tree stand was--

AND

there were none to be found in the closest town.

 

 

No prob! Farmer Boy did as his family had done for years when he was a boy--

one LARGE plastic bucket,

quite a few LARGE rocks from the garden,

water

and we were set!

 

 

Yes, I admit--I have a THING for reindeer.

It wouldn't be Christmas for me without tomte with red caps and shiny reindeer--

yep, even when we don't have a tree,

I always enjoy having a few of them somewhere in our home.

This year it was awesome to put them on a tree!

 

 

I leave you with a photo of the small furry one all dressed up in her Christmas sweater...

More later--

if I can that is.

One of those new challenges?

 A problem with our laptop.

 

New Year's Blessings,

Aimee

 

Sorry about some of the photos--

sometimes you just have to capture the moment and can't worry about whether your phone

(or camera) settings are correct for the lighting--or lack of it :)

Sorry also for any unintentional grammatical/spelling errors--

it's been a long, long night of troubleshooting :(