Happy Thanksgiving

I wanted to say Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. It's a few days late but the longer I wait to say so the less it will be Thanksgiving. I would guess that Thanksgiving lasts for these four days between Thursday and Sunday. Especially if you don't work on Friday and are around relatives for most of these days.

We went to Joy and Duane's house for Thanksgiving this year. [Reference my blog for some specifics.] Cyndi's parents came up for the holiday too. They came straight there from Melbourne. They stayed until Saturday. On Friday evening, Grandmother and Granddad came over to our house to have Thanksgiving leftovers. So there was another family gathering the following day. That day, we also put up some outside Christmas lights. There's also a photo of such on my blog. Ron was over most of the day that day and helped with the lights.

So for the past few days the routine has been out of the ordinary. And when you have the focal point of family and a holiday, that just makes the holiday seem more extended.

I heard that a lot of us were elsewhere for Thanksgiving. I hope you all had an enjoyable time with your respective family and friends. I have not had a Thanksgiving at home for many years now. It is getting familiar down here. The strange foods are not so strange anymore (though still not one's I would eat)! The people are whom I'm coming to expect and looking forward to see.

Happy Thanksgivng.

Love, Tim

happy to be a blogger

I'm not really that happy about being a blogger, but that i finally got accepted into the account. Dad and I have played our first Christmas music today. That was a very good blog you wrote Tim, about singing songs to Abby. I liked that. I'm looking forward to Christmas and the other holidays and having the whole family together. Those times are always the best for me.
Well, I'm going to sign off, but I hope there will be some other good things to read on the Barden Holiday Blog. Love you all! Mom

Christmas Hymns

I’ve meant to blog more on here than I have so far this season. Though I have thought about our blog now and then over the past couple weeks, I keep busy and don’t have a lot of time to sit down and actually write something.

Considering the Christmas season has actually begun now, at least by my estimation, I thought I should make some time to write.

I decided some years ago to observe Christmas from the day following All Saints Day to New Years Day. There’s something that really makes me happy thinking about Christmas and listening to Christmas music. So, I thought, if I extend the season, I get to enjoy it longer. I think I came up with this idea not too long after I learned about All Saints Day. I really took to the idea of an alternative to Halloween. As the holiday brings in the month of November, it and Christmas are like the bookends to the last two months of the year. We can begin this time of year in hallowed thought and close it out with the same.

All Saints Day is more antiquely known as All Hallows Day. I am not exactly sure what the Catholic church had in mind when the name was established, (of course the holiday is a rebuttal to the day preceding, All Hallow’s Eve … Halloween … just for explanation), but in considering the use of the word hallow – “to make holy, to keep as sacred” that is an excellent way to usher in the Christmas season as we celebrate the incarnation of our Savior.

Each evening when I rock Abby to sleep for the night, I usually sing her a few hymns. Some weeks before this start of the hallowed season, I started mixing in some Christmas carols for variation. Now that’s all I’m using. I think about the words to those seasonal hymns sometimes as I sing them. There really is a wonderful meaning in some of them. That’s part of what gives me that joyous feeling this time of year, listening to those songs. I recently purchased some carols from Fernando Ortega’s new Christmas CD. I added them to my Christmas Music playlist in my iPod. It’s up to 23 songs now, most of them carols. There is a place for the lighthearted music of the season, but there is so much more meaning in the Christmas hymns. I wonder if some people, never exposed to the Christian Faith, can really enjoy Christmas carols, or maybe have never even heard some of them. It’s so wonderful not only to enjoy the majesty and beauty of the melodies of the carols but also to sing them as praise for the message they bring.