It’s snowing in Libertytown, Maryland. My sister and I had a phone date this morning. After my morning devotions, while I fixed oatmeal pancakes for my little bunnies, I got to talk to Jenny. Her study today was canceled because it is snowing. Oh how my heart ached to look out the window and see that magical sight of snow fluttering down and dusting everything, then coating everything in a glittery white blanket. Jenny told me about the episode on Christian radio from Family Life Today on the stories behind various Christmas carols. The story behind Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer moved me to tears twice–first when Jenny told it to me and then hearing it again over the internet! Who would have thought there could be such meaning in Rudolph! After talking to Jen, I got to download the episode from the internet and was thinking about how David and I got married in August and used Handel’s Messiah for our Processional and Recessional. That is so appropriate considering how we love Christmas and love listening to and playing Christmas music all around the year. Handel was a very famous musician, however, it was late in his life when his popularity had waned and he feared debtor’s prison that he wrote the Messiah as a response to a moratorium request by a simple person. God inspired Handel with the Messiah and the king loved it. Handel was able to live out his years as a free man without debts after writing the Messiah!

Jenny and I both expressed our very strange desire to be able to set foot outside in our pajamas without having to worry about people seeing us. A couple days ago, I went to a mom’s Christmas brunch with my sister-in-law, Emily. We were asked to tell our most memorable Christmas gift. My mind clicked back to the Christmas Eve I was nine years old. My mom and Grandpa Hake walked across the front lawn with a white pony named Cashew. Living on a 126 acre horse and Christmas tree farm, I certainly didn’t think that this pony had much of anything to do with me. I couldn’t believe my ears when I discovered that this pony was to be ours! She was mine to care for and “play with” and ride. There were so many other memories associated with that snapshot. We performed plays on the chicken house roof. We went toboggoning down the hills in the fields behind our white farmhouse. We spent days loading wood onto a pickup and then stacking it neatly beside our house. Then we enjoyed hot wassail with orange slices floating in it with cloves poked into them, that had been simmering all day on our woodstove. One New Years we tried to crack a pinata that wouldn’t budge. We had made the pinata from a balloon and newspaper strips and wheat paste over several weeks and filled it with candy. At last we tore into it and the candy burst out! We went canoing on our pond and one time just as we were about to board the canoe, we discovered a snake sunning himself in our boat. One year when our cousins were visiting from Taiwan, we played a modified version of capture the flag in the snow. Each team built little snow fortresses and mounded piles of snowballs behind our walls.

Oh how I hope there’s snow when we go back east for Christmas! Joel is quite smitten with the love of snowmen lately. He’s always asking us to draw pictures of snowmen and model play dough into snowmen with carrot noses and scarves. I so want to enjoy the snow with our kids. Last year I was talking to a sweet friend who grew up in a small castle in Germany. We were reminiscing about our childhoods together. Her husband is now stationed in San Diego. She could so completely understand my longings in lieu of such beautiful childhood memories. It is so hard to think of raising your children in the city when you grew up with safe rolling green hills to run through and creeks to get dirty in and a lamb that followed you everywhere and horses to ride and fields of Christmas trees and the simple pleasures of rural living. Hopefully our little family can fly back this New Year with an airplane full of two weeks of happy memories that will last all year long!