Slicing Turkey & Skipping "Wocks"

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. Now, in spite of what the merchants have been promoting for two months, I'm ready to think about Christmas. Our neighbors put up their extensive outdoor decorations over the weekend, and since the glow from their property can cause a tan in ten minutes, we plan to put our decorations up today to somehow fight back and create a cross lighting dimness that allows us to go outside at night without sun glasses. Just kidding! They actually have quite beautiful decorations that really help me get into the spirit of the season. I'm glad they like to spend the better part of a weekend putting up thousand of lights on their houses. My goal is to just not look like a dark hole in the neighborhood. We put lights up so that the passengers in the string of cars touring our street will have to look to both sides of the street. If we do get our decorations up today, it will be the first time in our life that we actually put them up before the first of December. Usually it's the middle of December before we put them up. In fact, for a lot of years the goal was to get them up before the kids came home from college. That's really the biggest reason for me to decorate the house. Special days or seasons of the year are all about family. I'm so thankful that we got to have most of our family with us for Thanksgiving. We ate too much, slept too little, laughed too hard, and loved every minute of it. We thought about Jonathan and Holly and prayed that they had a great time in spite of not being with loved ones. Love doesn't need a holiday and it's not restricted by miles and schedules. Still, it's wonderful to get hugs from little arms, hold hands for prayers, and play games around the dinner table late into the night. Maybe putting up the Christmas decorations will remind me that it can happen again in just a few weeks. It's amazing how Thanks-giving becomes thanks-blessing.