Some Christmas Reflections...

So....merry Christmas Eve everyone.

It's been merry up to this point for me, too....But then, it happened. We go to a Christmas Eve service every year, and upon returning from it tonight...Well, lets just say the peppermint candy cane cookies I'd slaved over all afternoon were no where to be seen.

We kicked our goldendoodle Abby out of the house into the cold to ponder her actions and banished my smaller dog Odie to the upstairs to do the same. Then in silent sorrow I picked up the small candy crumbs left behind and sighed heavily a few times. Mom sympathized. So did Dad. Myron wanted to go play xbox.

It was a disappointment, but....they are only cookies after all.

It's a little odd. This holiday season has been a rather disorganized and iffy one for my family and I. I think there's just a lot of reflection of last year that's making it this way. My gram passed away last December, so that Christmas time was a very hard one. The Christmas tree was bought from a parking lot for the first time. Ever. The decorations went up much too late. The presents were bought and wrapped at strange times. Frequently it was just the kids at home. Mom was gone all the time at the hospital in New London, Dad worked, Gregory was out a lot, and that left me and my little brother. You'd think all that would just ruin Christmas. But it really didn't. Yes, it was very tough, but it's in those tough times that we grow closest to God I think, when we see that we really can't make it on our own, relying on our strength to hold us up. So it was then, I guess, that I really grasped the true meaning of Christmas. The 'true meaning of Christmas' sounds a little hokey after all that it's been commercialized to be. But still. Sometimes you think you get something, but then when something happens that really makes you see, you realize you've never actually gotten it until now. That's how it was for me. I got it. That it's not all about the decorations and the food and the family and friends and lights and movies and music. That stuff is cool and all, but it's not what Christmas is about. It's about a dad who sent his one and only son down to live in a fallen world and save it. Can you imagine that? I don't even know how he did it. It just blows my mind. So no. Last Christmas wasn't ruined really. It was made. This Christmas has been primarily the same. Lacking in the organization factor and bountiful in the hectic-ness, and I still think I 'get it'. Sometimes it has just taken a little digging or a beautiful Christmas carol to get it out there again.

* * *

Tonight is Christmas Eve, and that still sounds funny to say. It just doesn't feel like it should be time yet! But it is, and Myron has gone to bed hurriedly, anticipating...Mom is washing some dishes and then finishing the christmas wrapping last minute, as it happens every year, Gregory's out who-knows-where, Dad's cooking, and I'm sitting up here in my dimly lit room, listening to trust 100.5 (all christmas, all the time), writing. Tomorrow we'll see how early I wake up. Last year it was 7 am and that seemed horrifically late, considering the fact every year before then I'd jumped out of bed around 5:30. Seven am or not though, the tradition of me and my brothers all tip-toing down the stairs into the sleepy darkness, surveying the presents, grabbing our stockings and then seperating into our rooms to open them still held true, and it will this year also. Until somone moves out, that's how it will work. When we're done with the stockings, we usually take a tour of each other's rooms to see the outcome of our unstocking-ing and then we'll become a little impatient and go wake up our mom and dad. Then we'll all mosy down the stairs together. Us kids will sit ourselves down in our designated unwrapping territories and wait until the parents have fixed a much need cup of coffee. Then it'll begin ;) Between many laughs, much christmas music, much mess everywhere, and lots of cookie consuming, the morning will go by, and we'll start preparing for the Meal. This year we're having my Aunt Heide and Gramp over, that's all. Keeping it nice and small. It'll be wonderful. The shunned dogs will once again be loved, fingers, tired from hours of wrapping and bow-tying, will have relief, stomachs will be ready to be filled, candles will be lit, and everything will be wonderful....

I'm excited. And off to bed.

Merry Christmas Everyone, God Bless.

curly hair

I have curly hair right now :) Thanks to my cosmetology-student-hair-stylist best friend, Emily. Our families being tied together at the hip practically, we have Hewett/Logan gatherings quite often and celebrate them as only we can do. Meaning fights over small ice cream cakes, inside jokes like, "You can do it, Mr. Hewett," Twilight talking, comedy movie watching (we like to have the whole room of 11 laughing) cooking and eating much of the time, and today, at least between Emily and I, hair curling. And a little bit of bangs cutting/fixing.

Yay ;) I have a friend who can do my hair for me. Doesn't get much cooler than that.

TOMORROW IS CHRISTMAS EVE!

A Pointless Journey. A Fun Story.

It was a day somewhere in late October...


My dad is a nature guy. That's his job. He goes out into fields and forests and dales and inspects dirt. The title "Soil Scientist" doesn't do too much justice to the profession. He runs his own business and has his own office and clients and is apparently a quite highly regarded man in the state. I'm guessing this is because he basically gives everyone who wants to build something somewhere the permission to build that something somewhere. But we're straying...It was a Sunday, and on Sundays we don't usually do anything after church except chores, eating, talking about doing yard work, and watching tv. But this Sunday after a wonderful and quite traditional sandwich lunch, mom prided herself in pushing dad out the door with his three children and leaving him to do with us as he willed.


Now, I bring my camera virtually everywhere. Sometimes my smaller, more compact digital, sometimes my inherited, bigger, bulkier Panasonic Lumix. Today I brought the latter. It was a b-e-a-utiful day out, sun shining brightly through the thinning branches, and the temp was anything drastically unseasonal. It was nice. So dad brought us to Valley Falls, a small park/beachy place about a mile away that we can reach by driving or taking the once-traintrack trail behind my house.
We drove.
And we brought my little Scoodle (poodle/scottish terrier, Odie) with us. He's the much less hyper and jumpy of my two dogs. When we got to the park, my older brother started walking absently around with his cell phone, texting, and my little brother tagged along, dragging Odie with him. So they were gone, and my dad had his quite-much-more-expensive-costing-and-l0oking camera, so, as for some reason we always seem to do with things, we inconspiculously developed an unspoken, unaddressed competition of who could take the prettiest pictures. I quite frankly think I won.
At least in the creative department. Artsy pictures are my faves.
We left a few hours later after a good long time of me and my older brother Gregory observing and chuckling at hikers and walkers tripping up and down these really annoyingly crafted stairs. It was fun. When we got in the car, my dad said he was going to take us to get some ice cream. We weren't going to say no of course, so we let him speed us off to who-knows-where and hoped we wouldn't get too lost.
We got lost. How it happened, I don't know, but after about half an hour of dad repeating, "Oh, there's gotta be a place somewhere around here," us kids thoroughly believed that was a lie and were looking at our surroundings: Storrs. We'd gone from Vernon to Storrs. Dad, finally seeming to figure out that maybe it was dragging on a little, started rambling on about differnt places on our way back, and we stopped at all of them, and none of them were open...
So we finally wound up just going to McDonald's, the alternative to everyting. The McDonald's that was about 7 minutes away from Valley Falls.


None of kids said too much about it. We've never been ones to rain on our father's parade. No matter how illogical and odd the parade might be. We just stay quiet for the most part. Sometimes we threw, "Uh...dad, we're in Storrs," at him, and he would respond, "I know, I know. There's a place up at this intersection I think..."


But at the end of the day (because it was getting to be around 6pm by the time this pointless escapade ended) we had our McFlurries and were returning home to mom, who we would tell the story to when dad wasn't around.

I. Hate. Road. Drains.

Alright. So I've discovered another thing in my Connecticut area to despise:
road drains.
You see, most road drains I tolerate perfectly well. The one below isn't one I'd hate. It's placed nicely on the side of the road, where I firmly believe they should ALL go. Out of the way of pedestrian drivers. The road drain that has sparked such hatred in me is located on a little back road somewhere in Vernon. The drain is not on the side of the road NOR out of the way.
NO, THIS DRAIN IS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD.
And when you're having a nice little day drive, maybe talking with your mom cheerily about a book, or about some form of French cooking, all of a sudden you'll feel a horrible lurch as your cars front tires plunge 3 inches down into this AWFUL-Y placed road drain.
And then you'll have to go through it all over again 2 seconds later when your back tires go over it. It drives me completely insane. And you can't even try to swurve your car to avoid it. It doesn't work. You'll just run yourself off the road into a patch of christmas trees, hit another car, or wind up running over it anyways because the things is like 2 and a half feet wide.

I'm really considering going to the state whatever-their-names-are and saying, "You're endangering the entire United States with your placage of that drain!"

Maybe they'll listen to me. Maybe not.

candles

Candles ~ a furtive way of symbolizing an extremity of subjects, most of which contending to the concept of light imposing on and consuming an area of darkness...

we should strive to be like candles.