Do you decorate for holidays?

I know lady in my town, Pat, who goes all-out for holidays. She decorates for everything--Easter, St. Patrick's Day, Halloween, all of them. And by decorate, I mean does a complete accessory remodel of her home.

From the front porch to the bathroom, every inch of her house and every flat surface is covered with something "festive". You can't set a glass of tea down because of the ceramic eggs, plastic bunnies and silk flowers this time of year. And it's like this for every season!
Whenever I've graced her home, I get totally distracted by one, single thought:

Where does she store all this stuff???

Anyway, now Easter is just around the corner and the family will be gathering at my house for a big ol' ham. (With apologies to all you sheep producers out there, I must say I detest lamb--and ain't no amount of mint jelly is going to cover that up!) As I did one final cupboard inventory today, to avoid going to the grocery store on a Friday before a holiday, I started thinking about how to doll-up my table.

I saw a Better Homes and Gardens piece with Easter table decorating ideas. So, once again, I'm feeling like a holiday hostess failure.

Yeah, I'll get out one of my good table clothes, and the gold-trimmed china my mother-in-law gave me. But I really don't know what to do beyond that. I saw a really fancy dessert I was thinking of serving, but it seems out-of-place on my plain old table and my non-festive family.

The fact that my family doesn't appreciate such things--or the effort behind it--makes me feel like I live amongst wolves. I'm sure the girls will dress up for Easter Sunday at church. They'll look lovely sitting beside The Husband in his good jeans, I'm sure.

Am I the only one with a husband who thinks anything beyond the usual is silly?
I think we're living at the intersection of boring and why bother.

But, that's okay, I guess. The important thing is we'll have a fun time watching the daughters and the nieces run around the yard (weather-permitting) searching for eggs.

Holidays on the Farm

When I think back about the holiday season growing up on a farm, the thing that really comes to mind is cutting our own Christmas tree from "the back 40".


We were always a Live Tree family.


Tromping out to the woods behind the house, always on a cold, cold day, to pick out the perfect tree with my Dad was an annual tradition.


Only we never got to pick the perfect tree.

We always had to get an icky-old cedar tree--and usually one with a flat spot on the back (because it was going up against the way anyway).
Dad was (is!) a practical kind of guy.


I always, always, always wanted to have one of those pretty, perfectly conically shaped pine trees that smelled sooo good.


But we had to save those. For what I don't know.


The few pines we had were ones Dad had planted himself. Many were from seedlings he'd brought back from a visit to Georgia.


Looking back, I have to admit, the cedar trees weren't so bad--especially now that I live in a fake-tree home (The Husband has allergies that banned the live tree a long time ago! This is our plastic tree as it is this year.).


I think it was more of an issue of The Forbidden Fruit that made the cedars seem so awful. Besides, it seemed we had at least 2.3 million of them on our Southern Indiana hills. And cedar trees are basically the vegetative equivalent of rats.

I do have one of the old glass ornaments we used to adorn those scrubby cedar trees. We had these in red and green.
I always loved them...
Just don't tell my mom that I swiped one when I was digging in the attic a few years ago!


Check out what is going on--or has in the past--during the holidays in the homes of other farm families by visiting the Real Farmwives of America link up on Facebook.

Have a Happy New Year!

Party Time with The Girls!

As you all know, I'm a the leader of a Girl Scout troop. My loyal band of seven had our annual after-school Christmas party this last week.

The one thing I really appreciate about our annual shin-dig is the girls always make the presents for each other in the gift exchange. We draw names and discuss the rules every year. And they always, always, always say that's the best part.

And I love to see what they come up with.
One of the things BabyD's "Secret Santa" gave her was a tree ornament made from a real tennis ball. BabyD took up tennis this year. Santa-Girl even customized it with her name.

LittleD's giver made her brownie cupcakes with pink frosting (her fav) and a bookmark with a Yellow Lab on it.

After I loaded the girls up on sugar: Cupcakes and ice cream. We got busy on our special craft project. It's really easy and might be a good service project or gift for some older folks in your life.

My Scouts love to do crafts and we got this idea from one of the moms--she's a nurse at a rehabilitation center for senior citizens. My girls wanted to do a project to serve others--something we're always talking about. She said the patients are always losing their glasses. So, we decided to make beaded neck chains for their glasses--the kind librarians are notorious for. (Sorry to stereo-type any of you would-be librarians out there! My sister is a librarian, and I haven't seen her dawn one yet.)

I actually found those little loop-ends at JoAnn's. They come 30 to a pack.

LittleD and I spent about an hour pre-cutting the string and crimping the loops on ahead of time. This helped us jump right in at our Scout meeting, since we had to eat, exchange gifts and make 30 of these before we left.

I got a good deal on assorted beads. The girls just jumped in and started stringing their own designs.

I think these came out beautiful. I sat and crimped the other end as they finished them up. We had a pretty good assembly line.
We did make some of them with plain leather cord for the men. (We didn't think 88-year-old veterans would appreciate the pink and silver beads as much.)

Check out the first batch:

Pretty cool, huh?

We have a half-day before Christmas break, so the girls and I are going to put them in cute little gift bags and hand deliver them to the patients, along with Christmas cards and maybe a carol or two. They've visited nursing homes before, and they are quite excited to go.

I love that these girls, who range in age from 10 to 13, are so willing to give of themselves and share the love of Jesus to some seniors who don't get a lot of visitors, let along gifts. They genuinely enjoy talking to these seniors and hearing stories about when they were young.
One more way that the kids remind me to be a better person.