Tara asked me to make Kai’s 1st birthday cake. She had no real cake design in mind (how unusual!), she just mentioned that there would be lots of colors and balloons and that it should be “fun.”
There was to be a “small” cake just for Kai, his first indulgence in sweet cake, and a bigger one for the guests (most of whom were doing Paleo, anyway, so not much cake going on). Kai, it turned out, was NOT a fan, which I reported previously {here}.
I decided to do rainbow-colored cakes using a basic vanilla recipe, with a cream cheese icing. Very simple, stacked and pretty plain. The beauty, of course, would be when we cut inside the layers: voila – an explosion of color! But on the outside, very plain indeed.
Kai’s cake baked in 6″ pans, 6 layers (purple-blue-green-yellow-orange-red, bottom up) and was about 6″ tall. The guest cake, also 6 layers, was baked in 10″ pans and was about 8″ tall.
Since the inside was going to be such a color explosion, I decided the outside, with that delicious cream cheese icing, did not need a bunch of embellishments or fancy-tip and bag decorating. But it needed something….what was it?
I shopped for toys and looked in cake decorating sections at all the stores. Couldn’t find anything exciting or cute. Boo. I came home with a very small blue-sparkly #1 candle and that was about it. Except…
I had just purchased a multi-pack of craft foam at Michael’s for the grands, very fortuitously…
So, I cut 2″ x 2″ squares of various colors and textures of craft foam, which is a DREAM to cut, btw! Then I just cut rough letters out of them, basic shapes. If you wanted a certain style, I am sure you could draw it on first, but I just did very basic cuts in all caps and didn’t cut out centers. Then I cut some balloons (I did draw a circle using a lid for these and then left a little “triangle” attached) and fashioned a 8″ tall #1 with contrasting colors of the foam.
With the hot glue gun, I attached each letter to a white stir-stick (the ones you use for stirring coffee). I did the same with the balloons and the #1.
After simply spreading the icing on the cake, I was able to just stick the letters and other shapes right into the cake. SIMPLE!
The cakes turned out cute and adorned until they could be cut into to reveal the real wow factor. And I was thinking I just enjoyed the change from dragging out the all the usual cake decorating equipment. Also a great alternative if you don’t have that stuff – you can still produce a great looking cake in whatever theme and colors you’d like and even personalize with a name or message very easily!
Since I didn’t capture the actual process that day, I thought I’d replicate it yesterday to show more of the actual steps and seriously – I produced this little “hello” in five minutes flat!
I bet you could even cut scalloped edging to wrap the whole bottom of the cake. This craft foam is so versatile!
Select your foam colors and patterns
Cut some letters and shapes
Hot glue or tape to a stir stick (cocktail pics, skewers or disposable chopsticks would work, too)
Muriel Blandings: I want it to be a soft green, not as blue-green as a robin’s egg, but not as yellow-green as daffodil buds. Now, the only sample I could get is a little too yellow, but don’t let whoever does it go to the other extreme and get it too blue. It should just be a sort of grayish-yellow-green. Now, the dining room. I’d like yellow. Not just yellow; a very gay yellow. Something bright and sunshine-y. I tell you, Mr. PeDelford, if you’ll send one of your men to the grocer for a pound of their best butter, and match that exactly, you can’t go wrong! Now, this is the paper we’re going to use in the hall. It’s flowered, but I don’t want the ceiling to match any of the colors of the flowers. There’s some little dots in the background, and it’s these dots I want you to match. Not the little greenish dot near the hollyhock leaf, but the little bluish dot between the rosebud and the Delphinium blossom. Is that clear? Now the kitchen is to be white. Not a cold, antiseptic hospital white. A little warmer, but still, not to suggest any other color but white. Now for the powder room – in here – I want you to match this thread, and don’t lose it. It’s the only spool I have and I had an awful time finding it! As you can see, it’s practically an apple red. Somewhere between a healthy winesap and an unripened Jonathan. Oh, excuse me…
I thoroughly enjoyed it again. It isn’t the greatest of all Carey Grant movies, but it has some of the greatest moments. :) Borrow from your local library!
Wanted: Anyone who owns at least 40 acres, a house with good bones, a barn or two plus an assortment of interesting out-buildings, a couple of horses and some farming equipment (a great big tractor is a must) want to trade me for a suburban house in a small city just 20 minutes from the heart of Denver? Comes with a few garden squares, a pool pad, 3-car garage, and really {extraordinarily} nice neighbors.
Thought I’d ask just in case I am living in your dream – because YOU are living in mine!
I just KNOW there were literal handfuls of you who were wondering where I’d gone, haha!
It was? I don’t know what it was? It was like Thanksgiving went straight into wild Christmas prep and baby countdown into marketing a production into Baking Day which led straight (and I mean straight) into having a baby which led into tech-week for the play and the amazing production that was Jesus, Mary and Joseph! which threw me headlong into a final shopping frenzy for Christmas and then a wonderful, sweeeeeeeet Christmas with my family which morphed straight into 3 crazy-fun and super-exhausting days with the most delightful grandbebes in the known universe and then suddenly, feeling a little bleh on Sunday (which was my rest day) to full-fledged fever-achy-miserable-moaning-and-groaning-shivering poor-me sickness of some sort.
Better today. How about YOU!?? Are you and your familias staying healthy?
Six Things I am thinking about on the 6th Day of Christmas (after all – this is my *thought – collage*)
1/
Dave got me the Shauna Niequist book, Bread and Wine – A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes. I had borrowed it from the library and could not quit talking about it and now I have a copy I can read again and again and write notes in and underline for emphasis. It’s full of great quotes about the family table, eating together and food and it is just…delicious. Even as just a book, it heightens all my senses because of the words… And as I have written about food and meals together around convivial tables many times here at this very blog, always struggling to find the right/perfect words, it makes me happy that some one else has captured what I have experienced and felt and yet challenged me to embrace and pursue more of it – of the life around the table. She writes so beautifully, I wholeheartedly recommend it!
From my own “about page,” and you may quote me on this
“My true SOUL FOOD belief – breaking bread, enjoying even the humblest meal at a convivial table filled with love and laughter: The best meal you will ever eat. And may you have many of those in your lifetime!”
2/
Dave and I are in a bit of a Christmas compromise. There is a big cast-party at our house this weekend and while it is bright and sunny and a fresh New Year almost is here, I would love the feeling of packing Christmas away for all fresh clean surfaces and new beginnings. Yet he, Mr Christmas, well, he would leave it all up until truly, the 12th Day of Christmas (Epiphany, January 6). In my post-sick weakened state, I figured I’d have to give in and let everything remain, but he got downstairs before me this morning and packed away the Christmas art work and Santa collection and most of the Nativity sets and the kid’s Christmas books and games and cleared surfaces and made room and though the outside lights will remain lit until Epiphany and two gorgeous trees and a greenery-laden bannister remain, things still look fresh and clean and I didn’t even have to do a thing. How sweet is that?
3/
Anne Graham Lotzposted a blog yesterday called “2014: The Year of God’s Presence,” and that has just hit my heart with a breath of joyous, forward-leaning possibility.
4/
2013 was a year of such stripping away. I am not really one of those people who can seem to comprehend that God loves him/her just because He is love, gives love and not because of what she/he does to earn it. Even though I know technically we are saved by grace and not our works, I still have the old “consider the ant and don’t be a sluggard” mantra playing in my mind at all times. Also that scary picture of Jesus cursing the tree that didn’t bear figs. I have always struggled with working my ever-loving behind off trying to force the fruit so I don’t get kicked out (or cursed for eternity, as it were). But the truth is, fruit comes cyclically, in seasons, and then the tree has to go dormant to prepare for the next season.
I asked God, somewhere near the beginning fo 2013, to give me a symbol of my life, some sort of motif that would help me understand the purpose of my very existence and He gave me the tree. A tree. A tree planted by the waters. And at the time it didn’t seem particularly exciting, but later in the year, when I found a note I had written to some one else at a time of despair in their life, I was encouraged by this passage from Job 14.7-9 that I had shared for them:
“At least there is hope for a tree:
If it is cut down, it will sprout again,
and its new shoots will not fail.
Its roots may grow old in the ground
and its stump die in the soil,
yet at the scent of water it will bud
and put forth shoots like a plant.”
And I can tell you that trying to remove a tree from your yard is hard work. I tried this summer with several seedlings that had self-planted and it was an ongoing battle. And that is how the devil should see me. At the scent of water…
5/
God can make all things new. He can redeem any situation.Anything! What the enemy means for evil, God uses for good to accomplish His plan and His purpose. His ways are mysterious and too wonderful for me to comprehend. I don’t know how He will fix all the broken pieces or heal the bloody parts in the messiest parts of our lives, my life, but we have this hope –
Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53.4-6 NKJV
6/
My dog is old, going blind, losing her hearing and pretty arthritic, but when I give her the tiniest bit of attention, pet her and love on her, she leaps and twirls and wags her tail, acting just like a young pup. That is what a little time showing love can do – for anybody, really. We should all do it more for the people and pets in our lives, shouldn’t we?
I leave you with this, today’s verse-of-the-day from Bible Gateway (because it is so perfectly perfect):
This is what the Lord says— he who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” Isaiah 43:16, 18-19 NIV
Good-bye, 2013. Thanks for the stripping away, for the renewal and growth of our familia – for the 3 beautiful new grandbebes, and for the time with my love. And now – for the new thing to spring up… :)
Last year, Dave’s cast and crew fromMerry Gentlemen ~ A Christmas in Mediocrity, gave him a John Deere tractor and a little guy with a cardboard box on his head. There was such a character in his original play and it is a treasure to him now at his desk.
They also presented him with a lovely, blooming Christmas Cactus and on cue, when the holidays pass, the flowers fall and red balls form, later shriveling and dropping to leave a plain green plant for the year. Throughout the spring, then summer and into fall when I totally ignored it and wondered if it would even live took GREAT care of it, it didn’t have much going on. It just sort of sat in the corner, in natural light or not, depending on my mood. Since Thanksgiving, it had been tucked into the corner near the fridge, out-of-the-way, thank-you very much!
But the other day, while Christmas decorating, I moved it out thinking perhaps it could use a drink since it has been a couple of weeks. And voila! It is full of buds waiting to unfurl and several beautiful cactus flowers (which reminds me of Goldie Hawn, whom I adore).
And I just wondered – how did it know? How did the Christmas Cactus know that Christmas is almost here and it was time to bloom again? I didn’t feed it. I didn’t tell it about the snow and cold. I didn’t try to decorate it with bulbs. I did not once mention Christmas to this Christmas Cactus, yet on cue – it knew!
It turns out it is thermo-photoperiodic and likes long, dark nights and colder days. It actually emerges in it’s’ fullest beauty when the rest of the world has glazed over, sleeping through the winter, looking like death. Perfect!
Being thermo-photoperiodic, I suspect, my little Christmas Cactus knows by Whom and for Whom it has been created and is slated to rejoice wildly {and with colorful beauty} along with the rest of us during the Christmas season!
Glory to God in the highest! Peace on earth, goodwill toward men, on whom the favor of the living, loving God rests!
Well – have you heard? Our home was featured in a Houzz Ideabook. Yes, it happened. Thank-you. Thank-you very much.
Saw this in my inbox this morning!
Nevermind that it was only a photograph and “fix” we used to stop a roaring vibration sound from the microwave temporarily and is being lightheartedly referred to (by some Houzz users) as a “hillbilly fix.” Also pay no mind to the title of the whole Ideabook including the words “nutty,” “home,” and “fixes” in it. Yes, just nevermind those things.
Instead bask with us in the warm glow of our delighted surprise upon discovery this morning that one of my top two Houzz contributors chose to use our little image at the top of her Ideabook. Thank-you, Becky Harris.
I get melancholy in the fall. I fall in love with the smells and sights and sounds and the changing leaves. It is ridiculous. But true. Below are parts of a few different things I mentioned about fall and the autumn leaves along the way…
Glory. That is the color of fall. What started green and bright and light, unfurling after a stark winter, now reaches its’ full and most beautiful stage, and having held on with strength and determination throughout the summer, through both drought and drenching rains, now falls, now tumbles. Now, peacefully and content with itself, dances right down before me, a gift. Glory. {{READ ENTIRE POST HERE}}
I feel things more deeply at this ripe and fruitful time of my life. I feel like a full-grown woman, as opposed to some foolish girl, a woman who knows her mind and risks her thunderous-beating heart to more vulnerability and tenderness than I’d have allowed when younger. And my experience in life and love and heartbreak and second chances have made me more deeply passionate and compassionate and warm. I’m old enough now to understand the rich treasure my nurturing provides for those who are lucky enough to be planted in my heart and the wildly increased ability I now have to love. {{SEE FULL POST HERE}}
I have chased autumn into a Missouri mood that lingers like musk on my skin. I have escaped to turning-leaves on proud trees and the deep intensity of autumn colors that hold both the memory of exuberant youth with its’ fresh, green-spring growth, and the exploding red-to-the-core ripeness of the late summer tomato, now seasoned to a complex beauty, indisputably richer and wiser for the aging. The blazing urgency of the season, so much to experience before it all passes into winter, is salty on my tongue. I inhale the cinnamon-scented air, and taste the pungent, spicy and intangible gift of the equinox while the crickets sing that haunting song I have always loved.
Burnt sienna and ochre rustle restlessly as autumn falls and the cool night air sprinkles wet diamonds onto my keyboard and into my mouth filling my lungs with cool, brisk air and enduring toasted warmth at once. Halley’s Comet spilled burning meteor fragments in the wee hours, punctuating the night sky with light, a spectacle for late-night lovers young and old. {{SEE FULL POST HERE}}
Hey, remember the meteor showers that year? CLICK HERE
I got to spend the weekend at the Powers family cabin near Peaceful Valley in the Rocky Mountains (thank-you! thank-you! thank-you!). For over 11 hours on Saturday, I sat near the rushing river tumbling down boulders and powering it’s way through fallen branches and sharp rocks in dappled sunlight that warmed my skin while the gentlest of breezes brought cool refreshment. I read and sang and thought and rested and listened and wondered and cried and smiled and prayed. In that setting, you cannot help but be drawn into spontaneous conversations with God. The evergreens, greatly varied in their hues, all strong and tall were punctuated by Aspens I am certain I could actually see changing color before my eyes – a bit more colorful hour by hour.
The underbrush, having gotten an earlier start is already deep oranges and reds, even browns and purples. Brilliant berries are being found out by small birds which, having swiped a treasure as such from the bush quickly flies to a needle-rich pine branch nearby and looks for all the world as if I have just opened a Christmas card…”Oh! May the God of green-hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing-lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope!” (That’s in The Message, Romans 15) {{SEE ENTIRE POST HERE}}
Then just some miscellaneous quotes about the fall season from various blog posts:
“I like October for the crimson and pumpkin, for the eggplant and rust, and all the colors of the deepening, mature, lusty, whole and passionate part of the year when the autumn moon hangs heavy in the sky like the warm embraces of a tattered, weighty quilt sewn years ago for the need of heat and not some contest of a county fair. Have you ever been covered in one of those?” {{10.22.13}}
“Today is mostly yellow with a smattering of red, turning into deep wine by late afternoon. A steady falling of leaves with a call for possible white-flakes on Thursday afternoon and a blast of cold-blue air which will effectively ruin the perfectly coiffed-in-color hues for Autumn 2012.” {{10.23.12}}
October is orange. Of course. But it is also a red that is so full of depth and dimension and fiery-variance it can hardly be described.
My neighbor’s Maple has languoriously (not a real word, I know), gone from deep late-summer green, the leaves still fully affixed due to mild fall days and nights, to a light-to-deepening golden peach-to-orange over the past week. Then yesterday, I swear, as I walked back into the family room with a hot cup of coffee, it went red. Just like that, before my eyes. It nearly took my breath away. Moments before, a glowing, lovely amber-rusty orange, then, poof.
Red. A fully florid, cherry, sanguine scarlet. A puce, a rufescent russet, a bloody, blushing, gushing, infrared hot pink mixed with flaming chestnut and rubies and gleaming copper, all at once. It is shimmering and iridescent fuchsia, yet dense and heavy garnet, a ruby. It is bittersweet in both color and the evoking of raw autumn melancholy. [So, it’s red, right?] {{10.17.11}}
My mom and I were drinking coffee on the deck this morning and enjoying the rustling leaves in their fall coat-of-many-colors. Autumn is romantic. This is from my mama’s heart and mind:
“The butterflies are taking one last dance across the meadow. Please hurry back, I’ll see you in the spring…” -Norma Moslander {{10.21.09}}
I quite obviously become a waterfall of words come autumn. This year has been splendid! Good job, Autumn!
You lucky, lucky people, you. I am going to share how you can bake and enjoy three amazing cakes that are so easy to make (because you get to start with a boxed mix), and yet so moist and rich and dense and tasty ~ people will think you’ve been mixing an old, secret family recipe and baking all day long.
I like making cakes from scratch…sort of. Developing unique flavors and pairing them with tantalizing fillings brings me a special joy – way more so than “decorating” a cake does, which actually gives me anxiety hives – even when they turn out really well. I have found that using a Duncan Hines mix and adding a special ingredient or two gives me something a grocery-store bakery cannot hope to achieve.
Here are three yumm-il-i-scious (and I do not use that word lightly) cakes…
Pumpkin Spice Cake
I first created this one for Audrey’s wedding a few years back. She requested 3 off-set square tiers, each a unique flavor and custom filling. Like this: cake-filling-cake-filling-cake-buttercream x 3 tiers! She allowed me to test out a cake dream I was having based on a very fortuitous mistake I’d once made on another recipe and a pumpkin-spice cake with cream cheese filling family-recipe was born! It totally turned out, scrumptious!
1 box Duncan Hines Spice Cake made according to box instructions, except, add an additional egg and use milk in place of water. Then add:
1/2 teaspoon almond or coconut extract
1-3 teaspoons cinnamon (you might think it is overkill here, but I love cinnamon with a passion, so mine gets 3)
1/2 teaspoon each of ginger and nutmeg
1 15 oz. can pumpkin
Blend well with an electric mixer for 3 minutes. Pour into prepared pans. I used 3 9″ rounds. Bake for 30 minutes.
I basically doubled Martha Stewart’s Cream Cheese Frosting recipe, so I’d have lots for filling between the layers, but for Jovan’s birthday I also added a few drops (just a very tiny bit) of orange extract and it was so so so good. It added just the right twist of fresh and tangy and sweet and surprise.
Aunt Dawn’s Banana Cake
The one thing I missed on my last visit to northwest Indiana (in the greater-Chicago region), was my sister-in-law’s rich, dense, but somehow still light banana cake.
Basically, Dawn just prepares a boxed banana cake mix and adds a mashed, ripe banana and bakes it in a regular 9 x 13 cake pan. That is what makes it denser and so moist. Then she whips up a simple buttercream, made with real butter, please. Use about 2 sticks of softened butter, 3-4 cups of powdered sugar, which is about a pound (sift this in as you beat the butter), a teaspoon of vanilla or almond extract, and 3 tablespoons of milk (more if you want it softer). Dawn says she is still tweaking the icing recipe, but all I can tell you – I still think about how good it tastes and want to make one soon!
There is no picture because – well, we ate it. Fast.
Aunt Robin’s Chocolate-Cherry Cake with To-die-for-Frosting {the quick, “cheater” version}
There is no picture of this one, either and Stormie just made two last week for her workmates. But no evidence can be found…
Since the official Ross-and-Norma-Moslander Family reunions got into full-swing in 1995, Aunt Robin has always been our go-to dessert and baked goods specialist. She has surprised us many times with fresh-baked cookies and a variety of cakes and this Chocolate-Cherry Cake with a cooked icing you just cannot get out of a can, people! So- well – it’s a treat! On my recent trip to Indiana, my sweet-niece-Elise replicated her mom’s amazing cake using a boxed mix and it was still, as ever, amazingly delicious! Because anything you spread that icing over is crowned with royal goodness. DO NOT let the fact that it is cooked scare you away. Make this and serve it warm from the oven the next time you have company and they will talk about you behind your back for days to come – really good things about how amazing dessert was. :)
Cake:
1 Betty Crocker Super Moist Chocolate Fudge Cake Mix
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla or almond extract
1 20 oz. can of cherry pie filling
Mix well and put in a greased, floured cake pan. Bake at 350° for about 30 minutes. While it’s baking, make frosting on the stove.
Frosting:
5 Tablespoons of butter
5 Tablespoons of milk
1 cup of sugar
1 cup of chocolate chips
Bring the first three ingredients to a boil for one minute. Remove from heat and stir in the chocolate chips.
Want my advice? Double this recipe so you can just eat some of this frosting because it is soooooooo good!
There you have it: 3 amazingly delicious, scrumptious cakes.
If you’re very sweet, I may try to get some of Patrice’s cake recipes to share, too. One year Patrice made a different cake every single day for a week for the staff and leadership at the church where I worked. Everyday she increased the WOW level!
Bonus:
And just for good measure, don’t forget the world’s moistest, richest, creamiest, richest Coconut Cake by Heather, see {{HERE}}.
During an agonizing {excruciatingly painful} Broncos versus Patriots game (the very reason I do not want to watch football), Guini and Gemma and I made 33 air-dry clay wishbones for Thanksgiving.
Since the turkey can only provide us with one, and everybody always wants a chance to make a wish and win the contest ~ well, we are solving the problem by providing every single family member a wishbone of their very own.
While a perfectly sweet, light snow is drifting down this morning, the wishbones are just drying in the air (www.sculpey.com). Tomorrow I’ll spray paint them…gold, maybe. They are very magical wishbones, you see. For, no matter who gets the bigger piece after they are broken, both contestants will get their wishes! Who says so? Guini, Gemma and me. That’s who.
Here is how I have decided to see the cooking and food consumption for Thanksgiving Day:
Cook one day, eat 7. Yes, seven! You know – like those blogs and cooking shows teach? You can cook big one day and prepare lots of meals ahead? Well, break out the Tupperware, my friends. Let’s just admit that three major meat offerings (turkey, Texas brisket and a spiral ham) plus dumplings and mashed potatoes and gravy and 37 other sides, not to mntion a half dozen desserts and asssorted appetizers = this is what you’e going to be eating for a period of {safe, of course} time.
This was actually part of the dessert buffet at Dessa’s wedding two days after Thanksgiving 2011, ahh…good times
Prepare for it, Dave. It’s all leftovers until December 5…or so.
“My needs are small, I buy them all at the 5 & 10-cent store. I’ve got plenty to be thankful for!”
Bing Crosby sings those words in Holiday Inn, 1942
The video wasn’t embeddable, but fun scene. Watch it! CLICK ABOVE.
A November Space
It’s November. I don’t know exactly why I tend to so expressly observe times and seasons and months like I do. I just need to understand the time I am in…what is it for?
They taught us that in elementary school: in September it is yellow school busses and rain galoshes and sharpened yellow pencils and cursive handwriting practice. Then came the jack-o-lanterns of October, coloring spooky houses and friendly ghosts on math worksheets.
“Over the river and through the wood to grandmother’s house we go,” got trotted out each November in music class. I couldn’t have dreamed I’d ever be a grandmother and to this day I trace my grandchildren’s hands and make “turkeys” just the way I learned to do it in Kindergarten a hundred years ago. November was thankfulness and cornucopias and the browns and oranges and deep golds of crispy leaves blowing along the curb while we walked to school.
I like to mark the times, the days, the seasons and this IS a month for gratefulness. So many things should be marked with an official “thank-you,” and sometimes in the hurried months we forget. So November comes and reminds me. That is what this time is for.
O God, you have been good. You have been faithful to all generations.
It’s November.
It’s topaz and crisp mornings and where did all these falling leaves come from? It’s pumpkin-everything and Thanksgiving time and ok to start watching Christmas movies now. It’s All-Saints-Day (count me in!) and sweaters and scarves and good friends and coffee and building altars of remembrance. It’s a good time to rest and enjoy from the abundance of the storehouses the blessings of God on the year.
It’s taking a deep breath and leaving a space for quietness and reflection. It’s leaving a space to live today, in this moment and not already stressed about the holidays and the crazed shopping and every possible thing that must be completed before the year comes to an end. You know that will just take all your joy, don’t you? It’s November – leave some space, just wait a bit…
The earth sinks to rest until next spring…
“November comes
And November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.
With night coming early,
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.
The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And earth sinks to rest
Until next spring.” – Clyde Watson
Be careful, my sweets, not to rush into 2014 – not to begin making lofty plans or elevated goals for next year. This one isn’t over yet. November serves a purpose. It is not a month without noble intendment. There are things that need to rest until spring. Let them rest…
Happy November, one and all. Be sure to leave some space in your November…and be filled with thanksgiving. This is the time for it.
