Thursday Thankfulness For So Much Christmas Fun!

 Oh friends, it's been such a whirlwind of activity around here this week! I'm SO thankful that I am finally all better from the walking pneumonia, and that I've been able to get back to living and enjoying the Christmas /Advent season again!  Thankfully I was able to go to choir practice on Tuesday night, as we are on the countdown to our Christmas Cantata, which will be presented in church on Sunday, December 21, but we will be recording it next Tuesday night at our rehearsal, so really this was kind of a "dress rehearsal" for the "Dress Rehearsal". I'll tell you more about that in a later post.

On Wednesday I was able to attend our annual Women in Faith Christmas Party/Luncheon. That is always a highlight of the year and I sure didn't want to miss it.  Here's a few snapshots from the day:

One special part of our celebration is that we have a special cake made especially to celebrate the birthday of our Savior, Jesus Christ. We sing "Happy Birthday Jesus", and rejoice that we are a part of His wonderful family:

We do have a gift exchange, which is voluntary if you wish to participate:

But every lady received one of these lovely little bags as a memento of our fellowship as "Sisters in Christ."

Here's a few pictures of the tables of happy ladies:

And here's my tablemate:   My sweet dil Rose was able to have the day off so she could attend:

And here's yours truly...someone took my camera away and took my picture. You will note that I am wearing a lot of different Christmas pins on my sweater. Many have been given to me over the years, and you can only wear them once a year, so why not wear them all at once? 

As you can see, we had plenty of good food

 And desserts...

And there was my JOY in the place:

And here's what I took:  Amish Fruit Salad

The recipe is below:

And it came from this cookbook:

Which I didn't remember until yesterday when I read this that my mother had given me this cookbook many many years ago!  We were living in Ohio at that time, but I know I didn't go to that restaurant.  I think she bought this when she was in Ohio visiting her sister down nearer to where this was, and then she brought me the cookbook when they traveled on up to visit us where we were living at the time, close to Cleveland. I was thrilled when I re-discovered this note in the front of the book reminding me that she had given this to me. So that made it extra special. I love the cookbook and have used many recipes from it over the years.

And speaking of recipes and also my sweet daughter in law...the "Kids" came over last night and Rose brought all the makings for homemade pizza!

We had fun patting out the dough...

Then we loaded them up with all kinds of good toppings that she had prepared to put on the pizzas:

After they baked to perfection...

we sat down to give thanks and enjoy them together!

And they were every bit as good as we anticipated they would be!

And why where they here for this particular evening? Well, it was time for our annual put the train village together event...Here's Rose helping out with putting all the little village buildings together, which is a major job, because most of them are very old "Plasticville" village buildings, and they have to be assembled, which, when they were new was probably not difficult, but over the years they have gotten a bit deteriorated in some ways by heat from storage, or little pieces broken, and they don't snap together like they should and it is very challenging to make them look good again, but every year we keep trying. Every year I say this may be the last time we do this because it is such a hassle, but I'm not quite ready to give up yet...

While we were working on the buildings, Benton was setting up the train tracks, with the help of our sweet Grandpups,  Sugar and Spice:

Then we had some technical difficulty in getting the trains, (again, very OLD Lionel trains), to actually run on the tracks.  Rose is the more technically minded of our group and she tried to figure it out, but still to no avail.

Spice looks a bit disappointed that she didn't get to see the trains actually running around the track. The pups love to bark at them as they fly by...

Finally we had to call it a night, and decided that perhaps when our son Scott comes home on the weekend he might be able to figure out why the train isn't working.

I wanted to thank Benton for all his hard work in getting the tracks set up. He was then busy getting the pups ready to go home...

You can see that once the word "HOME" was spoken, the pups were up and ready to go out the door!  

And so that was the end of that evening.  The little village is set up and ready for action, whenever the trains start to roll again...

And with that, I think I will close this chapter, because there's a Part Two to this story...but you will have to come back tomorrow to see what it is...

While we leave this little village to prepare for Christmas, here is a new version of the old hymn "O Little Town of Bethlehem" to get our thoughts on the real reason we are celebrating this special event...

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did.  Now please come back tomorrow for a special story...