Skip to main content

Planning

Well, the Christmas cake is made, a nativity play has been written, and that all means it must be getting close to.... Advent!  In fact, closer than you might think; because Christmas Day is a Sunday this year, that means the first Sunday of Advent is the earliest it can be, on the 27th of November.  The church has to fit its four Sundays in, you see, even though the calendars limit themselves to 24 days.  Don't tell the kids, or they'll be wanting an extra five days of chocolates.

The main reason that all interests me this year is because I've decided to write a series of four Advent reflections, one for each Sunday.  So watch out for the first one on here in 10 days!  The theme is Jesus' incarnation, which turned into a set of rather neat prepositions:

Jesus came to earth -
  • to reflect God to us
  • to suffer with us
  • to die for us
  • to be glorified over us
If you or anyone you know would like a pdf copy, to print, email or otherwise distribute, please do get in touch.  I'd love for this to reach a wider audience.  These will be available a week in advance of being posted on the blog.

Also, if anyone remembers the daily Advent reflections from 2013 and would like their very own copy to re-read, this is also now available in pdf format.  Drop me a line at marthawhite656[at]gmail[dot]com and I'll email it to you.

So, sorry it's been quiet around here.  Things have been going on, just behind the scenes!  I'll try and post a few more pretty pictures before we hit the Christmas rush.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Growing things

For those of you who are interested in my attempts at balcony gardening, I thought I'd update you a little. For those who aren't, don't skip this post. You may find something else of interest. Apart from the ever-present herbs, tomatoes and cayenne peppers are on the go this year. The peppers are really on the go - we went away for a week and came back to find them twice the size as when we left. Now they're producing fruit which is growing at a similarly rapid rate, though none has ripened to red yet. I realised I should have given you some kind of scale, so I just went out and measured. They're about 22 cm long, or 8 1/2 inches for you non-metric types. I may have to find out how to dry peppers if they all ripen at once. A couple of tomato plants are looking pretty healthy and beginning to flower. A few died; one, apparently, by being eaten whole by a bird, a trouble I've never had before. I had two seedlings left so used those as replacements, b...
2 comments
Read more

Hosting Thanksgiving

OK, I have to confess.  This will be a very boring Thanksgiving story.  Everything went right and it was a lovely day.  For an interesting story you need a few things going wrong.  I heard a couple of interesting stories this year - like the one about mis-measuring bourbon to go in the stuffing.  Apparently if you put far too much in, all the alcohol doesn't boil off.  Or the one about going to cook dinner at an Asian friend's house, and discovering at the last minute that she doesn't have any baking trays, and it's quite difficult to roast a turkey in a wok.  But as I said, we didn't have so much as a lumpy gravy panic. Where's my food??? We're working on it, baby! So what do you want to know?  Well, it was my first Thanksgiving dinner cooked on American soil.  Back when I was free and single and shared a house with lots of people who liked to eat, I got into the habit of celebrating the American feast for a few years, until the...
2 comments
Read more

On having an accent

Back in the olden days, when it was a major undertaking to get from, say, Bristol to London, or even Bristol to Weston-super-Mare, and so most people didn't bother, it is said that you could place people within 10 miles or so by their accent. Now that we've built motorways and everyone spends their days whizzing up and down them, you have to go a bit further to get your accent noticed, but moving 3700 miles from Bristol to Texas certainly does the trick. Of course, I don't really have an accent - I speak quite normally, thank you very much, but everyone else talks funny around here, so naturally I stand out as different. It's been a strange experience to be marked out the minute I open my mouth. About the second thing everyone says to me is, "You're not from around here" or, "Where are you from?" Even though we talk the same language (well, almost), the way I speak says I'm a newbie, a stranger, something exotic. Fortunately the thir...
1 comment
Read more