On getting ready...

I love Advent.  I love the whole idea of Advent being a time to get ready to celebrate the mystery of Christmas.  It's the time in the church when the colors change from the ordinary-ness of green to the majesty of purple or the peace of blue.  A time to wait for the wonder of Christmas.  And while we wait, filling the days with decorations, present shopping, gift wrapping, parties, nutcracking and cooking.  As well, as a quiet moment or two for reflection.  I love Advent because unlike Lent, it's not so serious after all we're getting ready to celebrate birth not a death.  And, not that I don't deeply value Lent but Advent is such an expectantly happy time when we can all be together on the road to Bethlehem.   

Over the weekend, I did most of my Christmas decorating.  We still have our real tree to put up.  We're redecorating the family room so the living room is full of that room's furniture and there's no room for the tree but most everything else is more or less out and almost everything is in a place. 

I like to think of Christmas decorating as a part of our preparations and looking at our decorations is a great visit into the land of memories.   Growing up, I can remember the boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations that we had at the Williamson house.  I vividly recall some of my favorite decorations as a child:  three wise men my mother had made out of coke bottles brilliantly clad in exquisite velvet robes with carefully crafted felt, bed and sequin faces sitting on a nest of fiberglass "angel hair" and and entire Christmas village that was erected under the Christmas tree that I set up every year.  I particularly loved a white swan that sat on a large round  mirror to look like a pond.  An electric train, that never ran in my lifetime, wrapped around the town and it took hours to arrange everything in its exact place under the tree and in our living room. In my memories it took all 5 of the Williamson children plus my dad to get the job done.  As a teen-ager, I think I did the decorating all by myself as the youngest child.  My older sisters were married with their own homes and my brothers didn't get into the decorating.  But, I couldn't wait for everybody to come home and the house to fill with people.

Today, the Mathews are waiting expectantly for Christmas and the gift of family and our house is ALMOST ready to welcome them.  They won't come in one huge bunch like when I was growing up.  On Christmas morning it will be just us four --  our little family we like to call it (we're looking forward to that -- our sweet Christmas morning) but over the next two weeks we can't wait for the arrival my BFF Stacey (Friday) and of the Selby girls next week.  All I can say is "yeah, yeah, yeah!" 



One of our favorite ways to count down the
days until Advent.  Oh look...it's a Nutcracker.

 So, there's probably no real point of this blog post except to say, I love getting ready to celebrate Christmas and I'm so thankful that wonderful friends and family are coming to visit.  Yeah, yeah, yeah!!!