creamed eggs

When I was a little girl, my mother made creamed eggs. I don’t know how often she made them, but I have the memory in my mind that we had them every Easter morning. My childhood memories are quite warped, so it is possible we only had them once or twice or that we really did eat them every Easter or that it had nothing to do with Easter and she made them when she was in the mood to make them with no rhyme or reason to it at all. Nevertheless, they are one of my favorite foods. They represent family, safety, motherhood, love, Jesus, and joy. So, we eat them for Christmas morning breakfast. Every year. We love them. They are soooo yummy, but more than yummy-ness, they are part of Christmas, part of family, part of celebrating our Savior’s birth. I don’t know what they represent to my children, but I do know they expect them on Christmas morning and enjoy every single bite.

For anyone who has never had creamed eggs, here is my mother’s recipe:

2 sticks of butter
1 C. flour (we use whole wheat, but the sauce is a nicer color of cream if you use white flour)
4 C. milk
18 hard boiled eggs
Lots of Nature’s Seasoning Salt

Melt the butter and stir in the flour until it is all creamy. Then take your pan off the heat and add in your milk while whisking. Place pan back on the heat and stir until it is thick. Cut up the eggs and add them into the sauce. Shake on the Nature’s till it tastes perfect. Serve over toast.

What are the foods that add meaning to your traditions? How did you decide upon them?

gift giving

I love giving people gifts, not just at Christmas, but all the time. I love finding or better yet, making, the perfect something for someone I love. This year has been full of that for me. I have loved getting ready for Christmas this year.

The pencil-roll project set the tone for the season perfectly. Giving of my heart, time, money, and skills for complete strangers really felt like I was giving God a gift. I was using what He has given me to bless other people and it felt wonderful.

This month we have been reading The Book of Mormon for at least 30 minutes a day and often over an hour. It has definitely brought our minds to Christ and has forced us to slow down and make time for scriptures. We have also been reading Christmas books, singing carols & hymns, and spending lots of time together each night. Some nights have been pure chaos, some nights have been full of contention, but most nights have been full of family love, lots of snuggles, a bit of giggling and some yummy snacks to share while we are reading.

I have been busy making things for my children and friends – all people that I adore – and it has been SO wonderful to sit and create things that I know will be really loved! I will try to take some pictures today so you can see how cute everything is turning out.

Today the children and I are cleaning up the kitchen (which has LOTS of dirty dishes and sticky stuff on the floor) and then making sugar cookies with my mother’s delicious cream cheese frosting. Tonight we will have Christmas Eve dinner by candlelight, read the story of Jesus’ birth in both Luke 2 and 3 Nephi, and sing Silent Night with each of us holding a candle. I love our Christmas Eve traditions!

I hope your Christmas is full of peace, full of love, and full of joy.

God Bless Us Everyone!

sewing all day long and not much to show for it

Why do I do this to myself? Why do I dream of creating adorable things for my children and not budget enough time for the inevitable mistakes, unpicking and interruptions that happen while I am sewing? Surely this type of stuff happens to all who sew, right?

Two down, two to go. When they are all finished I will take a picture and share with you what I have designed AND made for my children. I tell ya, I am getting more ambitious all the time!

free christmas music, well, really free anytime music

I’m pretty certain I am the last internet user to find out about Pandora, but just in case I am not and you are one of the few uninformed souls out there, I am here to save the day!

Pandora is a free radio station on the internet that only plays music you like. You put in a song or artist that you enjoy and then it creates a playlist of similar type music. If it plays a song you don’t like, you just tell it so and then it will not play that song again. It is so fun! I am have been sitting here hand sewing all day long making something adorable for a friend of mine and it has been wonderful to hear a wide variety of beautiful Christmas music…and I have LOVED every single song that has played! I only have a few Christmas CD’s and we have listened to them over and over the last couple of weeks, so it was really fun to hear something different.

do you have room?

My friend, Laila, just sent me this link to listen to a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful song that has been made into a short movie. Do you get that it is truly wonderful?

I love it! I want to watch it everyday and so do my girls. When I saw a picture of some African children opening up a box of clothes, I started bawling. When I saw Mary holding her son, I was filled with joy. When I pondered if I have room for Jesus, I was filled with both peace AND a desire to do more for Him.

It is the perfect song for Christmas and will surely move you.

Enjoy!

advent calender

I love advent calenders. I have always wanted one, but could never find one I loved. I have searched for one for our family for the last 16 years. Searched! Never have I found one that I was willing to shell out the money for. So, last year, I made one. It is still not perfect and I need to change the way it hangs, but we love it.

I bought 25 little pictures of Jesus painted by Greg Olsen, Simon Dewey, Liz Lemon Swindle, etc. and mounted them on red cardstock. I tied a ribbon through the top and hung them on some thick rick-rack with clothespins. They are all turned backwards and each night after we finish our Christmas song, value, and Christmas story for the day we turn one around. It is really fun for the children and gives them a visible way to see how close Christmas is becoming.

I want to make a piece of wood with little nails in it to hold the pictures, but that didn’t happen last year and its not happening this year, so we will make do with the rick rack and clothespin design for now.

I absolutely love this advent calender and wish I could hand sew well enough to make it, but it would probably take me the rest of my life and would turn out with LOTS of errors.

I also saw this idea recently and have entertained the idea of having my friend Cami cut the vinyl for me.

What do YOU do for an advent calender at your home?

christmas books to gladden the heart

One of our favorite traditions is to decorate our home with our favorite Christmas books and to read one each night of December. Each child has their favorite books they are dying for me to read and they know that one of those nights, they will get “their” book read to everyone. We also sing a different Christmas song each night and have a scripture about Christ. We love this tradition!

If you are wanting to create this tradition in your home, just list out your favorite Christmas books that you own and then list out which ones you will need to either buy or check out from the library so that you have at least 24 books. If you need some ideas, I will share with you some of our favorites.

Grandfather’s Christmas Tree by Keith Strand and Thomas Locker is the heartwarming story of a young couple homesteading out in the Colorado wilderness and being hit by the worst winter storms in years. As they learn to depend on one another and God above, they are able to save an injured goose, give birth to their first baby, and create a story to tell for generations. The illustrations are beautiful and the story is sure to bring a soft smile to your face.

Christmas Oranges by Linda Bethers is a story of children in a cruel orphanage learning to share and lighten a little girl’s heart.

Silent Night, Holy Night: The Story of the Christmas Truce by The Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Walter Cronkite is a story from WWI and enemy soldiers calling for a two day truce to celebrate Christmas.

A Christmas Dress For Ellen by Thomas S. Monson is a true story of a family who is down on their luck after moving to Canada and the generosity of people in Idaho sending food, clothes, books, and games to ease their poverty. Ellen has been forced to grow up before her time and the joy has been snuffed right out of her. Through the selflessness of a nearly blind postman who travels eight hours through a blizzard on Christmas Eve and the love of her family, Ellen is able to feel the power of Christmas and smile again.

One Candle by Eve Bunting. This is a beautiful story about Hannukah and a WWII observance in a concentration camp using a smuggled potato as the candle. We celebrate Hannukah and read it on the first night of the festival.

Christmas Day in the Morning by Pearl Buck tells how a boy wakes up at 2:45 a.m. to do the farm chores for his father on Christmas morning and how much joy it brings to him to give this gift to his father. The illustrations are lovely, full of old-fashioned folksy-ness. (Another invented word!)

A Cowboy Christmas: The Miracle at Lone Pine Ridge by Audrey Wood tells how a fatherless boy answers a prompting to find his father’s friend in a blizzard on Christmas Eve and saves his life. This one is Keziah’s favorite.

A Christmas Like Helen’s by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock (who is one of our all-time favorite authors – check out The Bear Who Heard Crying, Wilderness Cat, and A Farm of Her Own.) This book goes through Helen’s life and talks about different Christmas experiences she has had. It is full of family, faith, and love and will take you back to a forgotten time when life was simpler.

The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey (Book & CD Gift Edition) by Susan Wojciechowski, P.J. Lynch, and James Earl Jones is a delightful story of a bitter and broken-hearted widower who slowly has his heart brought back to life by a widow and her curious, endearing little boy. Get the one with the CD, it is fabulous!

A Small Miracle by Peter Collington is a picture book without words that tells the story of an impoverished woman who restores the church’s vandalized creche and then is saved when those characters come to life to rescue her. My children love looking at the pictures and creating their own words for the story.

We Were There: A Nativity Story by Eve Bunting has wonderful illustrations and tells the story of the lowly creatures (snake, toad, scorpion, cockroach, bat, spider, and rat) who went unnoticed, but traveled far to be present at Christ’s birth. Each animal has its own rhyme and is a great read-aloud.

There Was No Snow On Christmas Eve by Pamela Munoz Ryan is a beautifully illustrated book that paints the picture of what it really would have been like in Bethlehem in the springtime of the year when Christ was born.

The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry is a classic tale of both spouses sacrificing their most treasured item to buy the other a gift for those treasured items. Pure delight!

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens…what else needs to be said? We love it and think everyone else does too!

This Is the Season: Beloved of the Year by Simon Dewey tells the words to the song “This is the Season” and has lots of quotes about Christmas. My children love to look at the paintings by Simon Dewey.

A Christmas Treasury for Latter-day Saint Families by Lloyd and Karmel Newell has 25 different sections with a different value for each day, like Hope, Joy, Kindness, or Sharing. Each value theme has stories, poems, scriptures and songs to teach that value. We use this book to give us a theme for the day and then I pick a picture book to go with that theme. If I don’t have a book for that day, I just use the stories in this book.

The Tale of Three Trees: A Traditional Folktale by Angela Elwell Hunt is a story from long ago that shows how God can make our plans for our life come true in ways we never imagined. Each of the three trees comes to play a part in Jesus’ life, but not the way they had planned.

Sacred Songs of Christmas: A Family Treasury [With CD] by Nicole Wong, Paine Proffitt, and Andrea Eberbach is full of treasured hymns and also songs I have never heard of. We sing a different Christmas song each night and we get lots of them from this book. Comes with a CD to help you with the unfamiliar ones.

Silent Night: The Song and Its Story by Margaret Hodges tells the story of how this staple of Christmas was written and became famous across the world.

When Christ Was Born in Bethlehem by Joseph Brickey has gorgeous paintings on each page and contains the text of Luke 2 to tell the story of Christ’s birth straight from the scriptures. It also contains some references from LDS scriptures, but if you are not LDS, I think you will still love it. It is simply breathtaking.

Please share with me some of your favorites so our list can keep growing!