respublica

Rose Parade 2013

A tradition for many families on New Year's Day is watching the Rose Parade and then syncing seamlessly into football. The best station on which to watch the parade is HGTV because they show the entire thing without commercials. 

The entire lineup for the parade is found here if you have one certain float or band you want to see and we always look forward to seeing the Lutheran Hour Ministries float. This will be the 62nd year the Lutheran Hour has had a float in the parade and the only Christian float participating.

A sub group of LHM is the Petal Pushers, 4000 volunteers who decorate not just the organization's float but at least 5 others. Those volunteers come from all over the country, taking turns during the time before and after Christmas to make the trip to Pasadena to push flowers into chicken wire and work up high to get the animated figures working. When Dale was the Lutheran Hour Speaker he road on the float at least twice and our whole family went along. The process of building those floats in a giant warehouse is amazing, colorful and fragrant. 

There's Dale. 

This year LHM's float will be 33rd in line out of 97 entries. Riding on the float will be Faith Spellbring,the wife of one of our former students here at Concordia Seminary who works for Lutheran Hour Ministeries while living in Southern California. We look forward to seeing Faith this morning.

There's Faith during the float judging which took place yesterday. And Paul Koch in the background playing Jesus and giving Faith bunny ears. I don't know if that will help or hurt during the judging. 

Christmas 2012 part 3 Christmas Day

So here we all are, the day has finally come. Everyone in the family gathered wherever they gathered, from Chicago to St. Louis to New York to Virginia to Kansas.

Our back room was ready for the onslaught of present opening, all that was left was for the little boys to arrive.

Ferdie's ready, where is everyone, he was staring at his package.

Waiting is so depressing.

Uh oh, I think they're here.

Christian is out of the car first anxious to show his present from Santa, a box of 120 crayons.

But where's Connor?

Ok who's first? 

The grownups eat some Christmas breakfast while the boys go at it.

Where's Ferdie?

He took his present and left the room. He loves stuffed toys and is very caring with them.

Then Dale brought in his present to me, frankly I would never have guessed this in a million years.

A set of very old Pullman train cars made by Lionel back in the late 20's or early 30's! Wowser. There's a long family story behind this, but without going into it, let's just say this made me very happy.

It's under the tree with our more modern train. The cars are a bit scuffed, but who isn't after all those years? It has the engine which we can't run until we go back to the train store and get few more pieces of track and another transformer. The cars are much bigger than the other train which I thought was good sized. This is such a thrill.

Later on in the day Ruth and Mary came by to spend the rest of Christmas day with us. 

While we were eating Ferdie took a hearty liking to Mary.

Then he went over to Ruth

Meanwhile back in New York Katie and Charlie are with Charlie's twin brother Dan and his wife Hannah and two boys.

Drew got a Thomas the Train, so this was a year for riding the rails.

Come see me Drew and we'll play trains.

Jake got something from Mizzou

He better be happier about this than he looks.

Today they headed back to Maryland and found themselves in a snow storm. Katie emailed while they were driving "We R literally the only people on the road." No one was out in the storm but them. Thankfully they made it home safely and I am sure they are very content in their own house tonight.

Solo Dei Gloria Christmas 2012.

 

Christmas 2012 part 2 the Eve and the day

Like many people we spent most of Christmas Eve day baking and wrapping and giving the house a final once over-i.e. dusting, vacuuming, decluttering. At 4 we headed over to Lizzie and Darren's and as we were at a red light at the corner of Clayton and Bellevue a car pulled up next to us and we saw...

Jennifer, Phil, Emma and Lillian and their most fantastic dog, Murphy. They were headed to their own church for the early evening childrens' program. 

At Lizzie's the stockings were hung by the chimney with care

While Christian and Connor watched NBA fare.

The adults settled in to eat and talk

When all of a suddent mama made everyone balk.

It's time to get changed for church.

She brought out the pants which brought on such chatter

that we all called in, "what is the matter?'

Hint. Mention pants around small boys and you get silly willies

Then more rapid than eagles into their new clothes they flew

Because someone said, time to open a present, you two.

Basketball pj's for Christian and 

Dinosaur pj's for Connor

Then it was to Christmas Eve services

Meanwhile out in New York State Drew, Jake and their Bailey cousins were getting ready for church as well.

4 Bailey boys. 

 

 

 

Christmas 2012 part 1 the week before.

A look back at the past few days which had us and Lizzie/Darren and boys in St. Louis and Katie/Charlie and boys in New York. 

I'm doing this ever since I realized how important it is to keep a record of things we want to remember and a blog helps with this. Some photos I have had over the years are gone as computers crashed and were replaced. I now use various means of saving picures beyond the hard drive, but still, you never know.

Christmas sort of began on December 16 with a visit from my sister who came over from Kansas. She brought the boys their gift..."A Rum Pum Pum Pum"..a drum set. A beautiful drum set, yet loud. Actually she knew we'd be ok with it because our grandfather was a professional drummer back in the 20's and 30's, playing in a band which headlined at various legal and illegal places during prohibition. He was a contemporary and acquaintance of Gene Krupa, probably one of the more famous drummers of that era. So we have some family sentimentality about drumming.

Anyway...

First she put it all together

Then the boys came over

Wowser!

And that was the beginning of a night of drumming. Pretty cool, actually.

A couple days later a number of faculty homes held open houses for seminary women to come and see the different ways people decorate for Christmas.

A few days of finishing up then followed

Merry Christmas

God bless all who have come here since 2004.  

Speaking of 2004, here are two pictures from that Christmas. As you can see Darren was here but Charlie was not. I doubt Katie and Charlie had even met and, it's amazing to count how many more family have been added since then. 2 son in laws, 4.5 grandsons, one great niece and a great nephew. 

One of the girls gave me a Barney dog that year, remember Barney the Bush family's dog who was a regular media presence? He met our dog Speaker. I still have Barney and he's still looking as new as Christmas 2004.

Certainly things have changed, we only live in that house occasionally and it looks totally different now. Speaker is gone and Ferdie has taken his place. One constant is the family dog.

That Christmas night we piled in the car and drove through the Way of LIghts at Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville. How do I remember this? I blogged it. Blogging is a nice trip down memory lane.

Here's a look at Christmas 2005, family may find a sweetness in this.

Toys that may have been part of your past

BuzzFeed compiled a list of 50 things you'll never receive as a Christmas present ever again, the author seems to be hearbroken about this. If you were a child in the 70's or 80's, this is a walk down memory lane. If you are a parent of kids in the same years, you remember your Christmas shopping list. Some of these items predate even the 70's and are still sold today.

It must have been a guy writing this because notably absent are Cabbage Patch Kids.

Christmas Eve boys-St. Louis and New York

First the St. Louis boys, dressed for church and more than excited about tomorrow.

The the two DC boys Christmasing in upstate New York

Dudes, all of them. The best part of Christmas is knowing they want to see the Christ child. Come and see.

Lackluster shopping season?

Lots of stories right now on the less than stellar numbers of people Christmas shopping, business observers are calling it lackluster. Fewer shoppers, more stock in stores, now big discounts. If I had to guess as to why the stores haven't seen as much traffic since the Black Friday weekend, it's because so many of us are now shopping online. We did as much online this year as ever before and if you know what you want, it's so much easier than schlepping store to store. We'll see when the final numbers come out.

But here's an item that struck me funny this morning. The Post-Dispatch did a front page story on the lackluster shopping and reported on this:

"One holiday product line that did receive considerable buzz this year was the designer gift collection rolled out by Target and Neiman Marcus. But the collection appears to have fallen somewhat flat. On Thursday, Target slashed the prices on the items, which include Judith Leiber compact mirrors and Tory Burch lunch boxes, by 50 percent."

First of all I don't think of Target and Neiman Marcus in the same breath, I mean, are they selling the same things now just with different price points? But I laughed at the idea that anyone believed compact mirrors would be a big seller and designer lunch boxes? Seriously? Someone has been living on the upper east side of New York too long.

A Christmas quiz which isn't the real Christmas

Diane Toroian Keaggy of the Post-Dispatch created a column titled: How Well Do You Know Christmas?

I was seduced into clicking the link to see what question were asked, thinking it would actually be questions about the first Christmas which is Christmas...you'd think. But no. First of all it isn't actually a quiz because the answers follow each question. The questions, however have absolutely nothing to do with Christmas except maybe in a very secular way.

Sadly, I'd wager after seeing enough of Jay Leno's man on the street questions to average Americans, most people could probably answer the P-D's questions than some on what Christmas actually is and was.

 

We need a little Christmas

Jerry Herman wrote "We Need a Little Christmas" for the the broadway play, Mame, in 1966. How true that sentiment still is.