And we love Him, because He first loved us.

O holy night! The stars are brightly shining.
It is the night of our dear Saviour's birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
'Til He appear'd and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees! O hear the angels' voices!
O night divine, O night when Christ was born;
O night divine, O night, O night Divine.

Led by the light of Faith serenely beaming,
With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand.
So led by light of a star sweetly gleaming,
Here come the wise men from Orient land.
The King of Kings lay thus in lowly manger;
In all our trials born to be our friend.

He knows our need, to our weakness is no stranger,
Behold your King! Before Him lowly bend!
Behold your King, Before Him lowly bend!

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name.

Christ is the Lord! O praise His Name forever,
His power and glory evermore proclaim.
His power and glory evermore proclaim.

Merry Christmas. :)

Christmas Eve Eve

I love Christmas Eve Eve.

Mostly because my favorite day of the year is Christmas Eve. By Christmas Day it already feels like its over to me - Christmas Eve sums up all the anticipation and joy of the season. It remains the most magical evening of the year. There's always some sort of family get together on Christmas Eve. The kids are bubbling with excitement. Santa will be here soon. All the decorations are finished, all the wrapping, all the buying. You can just sit down - for often the first time that December - and soak it all in.

Plus, Christmas Eve has more of a ring to it. :)

Though I usually quote Snoopy's Christmas during this time of year (#2 on Top 5 Favorite Secular Christmas Carols, only beat out by Carol of the Bells) I've recently gained a new appreciation for an old standard.

Thus, I give you It Came Upon a Midnight Clear performed by Sixpence None the Richer. I should return before Christmas, but in case I don't, know that this is my hope for you: that all of you have a very merry holiday, that your celebrations be filled with loved ones and that the birth and beauty of Christ be fresh your hearts. Love you all.

For lo! the days are hastening on,
By prophets seen of old.
When with the ever-circling years
Shall come the time foretold.
When the new heaven and earth shall own
The Prince of Peace, their King,
And the whole world send back the song
Which now the angels sing.

Tis the Season...

I had (originally) planned on blogging for each day of Christmas Week. It's full of activity this year and I was hoping to respond to each night.
But since it is so full, I usually come home and crash afterward instead. With no days off this week at work, and with all the activity, I'm purposely trying to get extra rest (despite the fact that work has been, bizarrely, slow.) So. Recap.

Sunday: The Christmas Service
Sunday was nice. We've canceled drama rehearsals for the month (for which I'm grateful despite how much I enjoy them) and I spent the afternoon at home. Woot.
That evening was our Christmas service at church. All in all there were 22 of us - a small gathering, but there. When Gary asked for twelve volunteers we suddenly realized to our amusement we would have more onstage than in the audience. I love my little church.
The past few years we've always had a very serious candlelit service, which is beautiful and I always enjoy it, but this year was much more lighthearted and a nice change. There was one candle at the front, one that is there for every Christmas service and made me smile - one candle to remind us of Christ. We opened with requested favorites such as Jingle Bells, Have a Merry Little Christmas, Silver Bells, Rudolph... And then Pam spoke up that we had not sang Rudolph with the opening lines of the reindeer names, so we started the whole song over from the very beginning. :)
And Gary asked us for our favorite Christmas memories and after prayer he read the Christmas story, pulling from all the gospels to complete it. We sang a few more requested Christmas carols - this time ones from the hymnal - and Gary finished up by reading another story of the birth, this time by Max Lucado. The final piece of the evening was darkening the church and lighting our candles in the quiet. In the midst of the the flickering glow I marveled at the churches that met like this in the past and meet like this today - hidden away for their safety, with only candles. For a moment a palpable connection with believers already gone and others now tucked in pockets of the world. A reminder to remember my brothers and sisters in chains.

Monday: A Double Celebration with Friends
The annual Christmas party! Christmas Party Part 1 was held at the Nickersons house where feasting was commenced. Turkey, the garlic mashed potatoes, stuffing, cheddar biscuits...it was all deliiicious. Philip, Kelly, Eric, Cambria, Holly, Sam, Brad, Regina and myself all gathered around their table. And after cleaning up....
Christmas Party Part Deux! The Hinsons household. Old photos from college graced the television, we reminisced, unwrapped gifts and spent the rest of the evening relishing each others company. And there was an aaamazing double-layer dark chocolate cream-cheese icing cake with dark chocolate chips by Holly herself. Yum. Yum.

Tuesday: Bricktown Bonanaza
This evening after work I made a trip up to Bricktown - I had to leave a little late due to a very unexpected family piece right at ten till five. But Imy graciously finished it and I was able to leave and arrive just in time to see the kiddos getting their pics with Santa. Then it was off to Chelinos for the 12 of us to devour (in my case) delicious quesadillas.
During dinner a man making balloon art came up to the table and delighted all the girls with varying shapes. Anna & Amy received a ladybug and teddy bear respectively that could be worn on their wrist (this was very cool! I had never seen that before) while Ashia requested a motorcycle and a very eager Ashlyn loved her puppy dog. They were really well made and I thought it was wonderful how four balloons totally made their night. Balloon man was awesome.

Anna: Knock, knock!
Who's there?
Anna: Um...rock!
Rock who?
Anna: Rock-aren't-you-glad-I-didn't-say-banana!? Ahahahaa!Knock, knock!

Good times, good times. Finally soaking in the season, I'm ready for the rest of Christmas week.

Bonus feature! Christmas videos!
Every Christmas as a kid I watched the Sesame Street Christmas episode several times. And while I do remember them singing Feliz Navidad while ice skating, mostly I watched it for the Cookie Monster segment. That was my FAVORITE. And for a few years I could never find it on youtube, but you can noooow.... :)







Also awesome this week: the lunar eclipse happening on the winter solstice that hasn't happened in some odd 400 years. It was totally worth getting up for - but if you're like me and didn't - here's a time lapse video of it out of Florida. It's worth the watch clocking in at just over two minutes.

At least the rainbows were pretty.

I was in our back room this morning, cutting up and processing the new flowers. I'm mindlessly filling up buckets. And I can't explain why I walked away. I've never walked away. But I guess I wanted this morning to be exciting.
The water hose had been going slow and as I wandered a few steps off I had in a flash completely forgotten about the water hose as I was apparently in Sherri-happy-fun-time-land. There are rainbows.

But when I returned several minutes later I certainly remembered. Since there before me was a layer of water covering the entire back half of the room, flooding up underneath the cabinets, soaking the bottoms of several cardboard boxes, trying to crest our thick standing mat...

I dashed to turn the water off and tried to survey the leakage. It didn't look that bad. Not really. More like a thin layer of water. Just on the back half of the room. I ran up front to grab some newspapers for the small spills that occur. My boss called out that I should treat the amaryllis like callas, don't give them too much water or their tips curl.
I could feel the sheepish grin crawl all over me. Too much water? Sure. No problem.

I threw the newspapers out, grateful I actually had decided to wear my warm, thick boots that morning because otherwise I would have been soaked. And cold. And three layers of newspapers later I finally got the water down enough to where I could sweep the rest of it out the back door. A half hour process. My boss laughed.

Adventures. Adventures.

Help me out, yeah, you know you gotta help me out...

Confession. I started Christmas shopping last Thursday. Started.
...
This is actually very unlike me. Thankfully, the lovely Holly was willing to go along for the ride and we dashed from store to store. I can now safely say a mere few days later that half of my shopping is done. Yes.

But for most of the people I hadn't bought for I had hit a brick wall on ideas. This was...unfortunate. So tonight began Operation: Beg. Text messages went out. Pleading for ideas. And I'm grateful that all of you responded. :) You should have seen the happy dancing occurring with each message. It was gleeful. I'm sorry I had few ideas for you in the first place. I wish I had a good explanation. Next year I'll try to be more on game.

A summation of everything else:
* More poinsettias arrived in the shop today.
* We only have four grave blankets left and I am super pumped about that.
* A guy came in today just to let us know how thankful he was. Last Friday he bought a bouquet to take to his friend and he had never seen her light up like that. Aw.... that makes me smile.
* I'm about 100 or so pages into Game of Thrones.
* I've recently started listening to the Killers. Any suggestions? "Dustland Fairytale" is my favorite. (But "All The Things That I've Done" is on about its 20th play now.)
* I've attended both beautiful Amy's and snazzy Tate's birthday parties. Tate's party was Dr. Seuss. Look at this cutie. (I'm stealing the pic.)


* I listened to Amy's lovely piano recital in a room at the local library I never even knew existed. She did wonderful.
* I heard all about Carson's Santa visit.
* Phyllis, Amy & I went to see Little Women on at the local community theatre Saturday night. I approve of all of their renovations!
* But before that, Amy & I had a deliiicious dinner at Chilis.
* And at some point I went Christmas shopping.

C'mon Marianne... (Edited)

Man. Most of my friends have had a lousy week this week. Crossing my fingers things lift next week. I'm so sorry guys.

Dropping off a few links:
D'aaaaw.... I love these two. Check out this cake by Charm City Cakes.
Wall-e & Eve Cake

Great Big Sea is offering a free Christmas download from their website for the season. :)

An old classic video I felt the need to reshare for amusement:
My Name is Potato

And of course, Batman 3 interviews (spoilers):
Eckhart Interview on DKR Rumors

Mm... I'm not entirely sure why my blog earlier decided to smash two posts together. But I was rushing anyway and had no chance to fix it. Sorry for any confusion. It apparently was against my posting Batman news.

The Oregon Visit

May be edited later as I recall more details. I use a lot of 'amazing,' 'awesome' and 'wonderful' and that's only because, well, it was.

Tuesday
We flew out Tuesday evening and despite a delayed beginning we dashed to our Houston gate just as they began boarding. (Will, I waved to you from the plane.) We hurried around corner after corner, up and down escalators and through entire sections of the airport. There's a man out there that gave us a ride on a cart the last ten minutes walk. Man on the cart, I love you.

The flight to Oregon felt loooong. It was four and a half hours which, a few years ago, would have been nothing. But I haven't flown in so long it felt forever. The good news though is that I finished Wizard of Earthsea on the flight, and that was highly enjoyable, so it certainly helped me finish the flight (favorite character: Ogion).

Grandma and & I arrived in Portland around 11:35 that night to a balmy 19 degrees. After many hugs and while we were waiting on baggage Amanda informed us that the slider door on their van was stuck. Open. The door was not entirely closed, but the ice was holding the door together and they couldn't get the ice broken. It made me smile - you are never without an adventure when you visit the Wojahns. :)

"The other day I saw the sweetest turkey hat." - Amanda

Wednesday
I was so glad we had arrived on Tuesday night and had a nights sleep before diving into the the week. It really gave us a whole extra day there which was awesome. Wednesday we opened the day with eating at a fantastic local restaurant which only serves fresh fish (delicious). We followed it up with dinner at the Cheesecake Factory (Snickers cheesecake) and then the play A Christmas Story that evening which had this amazing set.

Thursday
Thursday was Turkey day! Grandma and I joined the gold goblet club that evening as we dined on Diane's delicious meal. Amanda, Brian & I spent most of the day(s) playing Super Mario Bros. Wii (which is amaaaazing. all the nostalgia and fun of the old games all refreshed.) When I left Saturday we were at World 6.

We sat down that evening for the meal, listened to Christmas carols in the background and enjoyed each others company. Cell phones were off. Just each other and wonderful food. It was nice. They have a wonderful Thanksgiving tradition.

That evening Amanda was looking for more Wii games and noticed the local mall would be open (including Gamestop) so Brent, her and I went and got in line at 11:30 for the midnight opening. We arrived just in time before the huge rush of people hit, but unfortunately the deals there weren't as good as we were hoping. Nonetheless, I'm glad I went out with her.

Friday
Friday morning my Uncle Brent and I went wandering in flower wholesalers! I had looked for an open market (wanting to see the differences of flowers there), but was unable to locate one. Being a photographer he knows all these great places, so we went to a string of wholesalers he had previously been to. But you should really have a wholesale license, so I was a little timid at our first venture especially since it was such a small wholesaler and it was obvious we were new. While it was a no big deal if we weren't buying, I was just a little unsure. But the next one we went into was huge and people wandered freely so I enjoyed looking amongst all their fresh and silk. And as we were walking out I noticed the wholesaler next door was a company we order from in the city, so I happily perused through their store as well. I saw fresh fiddleleaf ferns (veeeery popular in wedding work right now and none of our wholesalers in the city had even heard of them), Sahara roses (which would have been all wrong in a wedding we had considered earlier), beautiful cosmos, peonies out-of-season, greenery that looked like crushed velvet in royal purple.... It was a lot of fun for me. And it was reassuring seeing the trends there for the holidays are ones we're using in our shop here. :)

Then we swung by with the whole family to rescue Diane from evil Black Friday retail work and celebrated with Baskin Robbins (it is not a trip to Oregon without Baskin Robbins). We watched football, booed the Oregon Ducks and eventually had to switch the game off the tv and onto the radio because WE WENT TO ZOOLIGHTS. ZOOLIGHTS, I LOVE YOU. ZOOLIGHTS YOU'RE AWESOME. ZOOLIGHTS. ZOOLIGHTS. (An actual rendition of my internal monologue the whole time I was there.)

Zoolights is held at the Oregon Zoo every year where the entire park is covered in thousands of Christmas lights. Christmas lights everywhere. Lights on trees, lights outlining the carousel, lights in animal shapes... You don't mind that all the animals are sleeping, because the lights are too beautiful.
Of course, not all the animals were sleeping.
We saw two exhibits. As we wandered into the polar bear exhibit suddenly we realized there were no polar bears. PENGUINS. We saw ELEPHANTS and PENGUINS. And LIGHTS. And LIVE BIG BAND JAZZ. At the ZOO. And I was in love. We rode the train. We shared holographic glasses amongst the group. One pair made all the lights look like snowflakes, the entire Santa heads.

We drove home trying to decide if we could eat or not. But we decided sure, we could and stopped at the Old Spaghetti Factory where I learned there are spinach pasta shells (Spinach Tortellini, deliiicious) and also had spumoni for the first time (pistachio/chocolate/strawberry, deliiiicious). And then utterly, utterly stuffed we drove on home for the night.

"Whoa! I gotta drive with these things! Look, blinking Santa heads! Santa heads everywhere!" - Brian


Saturday
Saturday was it. We were to fly home in the afternoon. :(

As a final lunch we ate at Five Guys, a hamburger chain that is apparently really, really well known for their hamburgers. And they were indeed really good, but man, they're fries were the best. And off to the airport... We arrived early, but it gave us time to roam the shops where a Powells was located. Grandma and I needed books for the flight home, so it worked out perfect. I glanced through the Science Fiction section, since they had obviously paired it with Fantasy. Nothing caught my eye until I saw Ender's Game, highly admired and discussed by my friends and one I knew I did need to read. I almost didn't - I was never a fan of reading sci fi, but wow I'm so glad I did. I had no idea what to expect but I was suddenly completely consumed by the story and actually concerned for the characters well-being throughout the whole flight. Due to lack of sleep, I was able to finish it last night. I'm so glad I read it. An immediate jump to top ten books ever and will probably edge out Perelandra.

"What do you mean, 'do I want to leave the beaver hat on'?!" - Amanda

And now we're home. Portland, honestly, feels like my second home. I love it there. There's mountains, ocean, forest, city...all within hours of each other. I love staying there. It's almost a refuge and its perfect.

So my Thanksgiving was wonderful. We had the opportunity to see family we don't often get to see, at a holiday we've never had a chance to celebrate with them before. We loved each others company and had the time to take in some awesome places and events. Indeed, it was perfect.