"Instant Festive"

Today is my birthday, and this morning my acts-of-service-love-language self was overwhelmed by the food spread waiting for me when I rounded the corner to the dining room after our morning gathering as a family.  The food was delicious and the company delightful, but I realized that half of what is so special for me was the fact that it was pulled off without my involvement at all.  I didn't have to plan it.  I didn't have to shop for it.  I didn't have to cook it or execute it in any way.  And it was beautiful.  It was delicious.  It was festive.

As I've contemplated what made it feel so instantly festive as I came around the corner, I've come up with several things.  Some are not surprising.  One--of course!--is the fact that there was a candle.  Candles create "instant festive," in my mind.  I had a special china plate and cup and saucer.  Nothing quite says, "You're special" like bringing out the good dishes! But another thing that I think creates "instant festive"--and this surprised me!--is a pedestal bowl.


I absolutely love my little pedestal bowl!  We bought it just before Thanksgiving for $10 and the local TJ Maxx Home Goods store.  I wanted something to house the tossed salad (yes, tossed salad) my sister-in-law had requested with the Thanksgiving feast.  (I made a layered salad in the miniature trifle bowl, and it was delicious and beautiful!)  For the Christmas season, we re-purposed it as a centerpiece decoration on the dining room table with colorful glass ball ornaments of different sizes in it.  And now here it was, on my birthday, housing an exotic-looking fruit salad.  Festive.  It instantly added class and importance to the table, in my silly mind.

The breakfast was delicious.  There are plans for lunch out with my father and kids for lunch.  Tonight my husband and I will have dinner together at a favorite local restaurant.  Clearly, we celebrate around here around the table!

And if there's a festive bowl involved, all the better!

Acts of Service

I have had graduate coursework to complete since I enrolled in the classes last summer, but the busyness of homeschooling and life kicked in before I finished, and I've been slowly pecking away at them all semester in the stolen moments I could find amid our gloriously busy life.

This day was the absolute, "I must finish these papers and get them to the instructor" day.  My husband set me and my trusty laptop up in the guest room, where I was to shut the door and not come out until they were done.

This is what I found that he had set up to be waiting for me in there:

In case you can't quite see it in the larger picture, I'll give you a closer look:

Yep!  Candles and tea!  How wonderful it is to be really known!

And, in addition to feeling very known, I felt very, very loved and supported.  You see, I'm an "Acts of Service" love-language girl, and it is sometimes ridiculous to me how happy I am and how loved I feel when someone does something for me.  And it doesn't have to be thoughtful and special, either (like candles and tea and a quiet room to do the must-do work).  It can be something as mundane as changing the light bulb before I get to it... vaccuming the floor you noticed was a mess... cleaning up the dishes in the kitchen that I didn't quite get to yet...

Yep, it is pretty easy to make an acts-of-service person feel loved... just look around and do something that needs to be done.  She'll melt like the gift-receiver-love-language girl will melt over flowers... or the quality-time girl will melt if you'll just sit with her while you both read... or the physical-touch girl if you hold her hand for no apparent reason... or the words-of-affirmation girl if you write her a love letter.

Don't get me wrong!  If you do any of those things for me, I'll feel special--but not as special as if you clean out that plugged drain when you notice you're standing in water so I don't have to.  Silly, yes!  And I often watch in wonder at my own emotional reaction to acts of service, thinking how ridiculous it is!  But it is really quite undeniably true.

If you aren't familiar with the Five Love Languages, I'd highly recommend that you read about them.  It may just transform how you love each other!

...You Would Even Say It Glows

This post is pure "practical" and "pragmatic"... a follow-up to my previous post about candles.

First of all, since it was Christmas dinner at my mother's house, it qualified as a special occasion... and thus warranted candles even in Mom's book. We ate by candlelight--festive red tapers burning brightly at each end of the table. It was lovely!

The amusing part came later. One of my fun "happy" gifts to my parents included Yankee Candles: a large "First Down"--yes, as in football--candle for my father, and a couple of small holiday-scented ones for my mother, stuffed down into some Santa pants that Yankee Candle had had as part of a special promotion for Christmas. When they opened them, my mom said, "Well, in light of that, you should open this present!" and proceeded to hand me a Yankee Candle as well!

When I tried to get my father to light his candle--wanting to smell this warm, comfortable "man-scent" actually burning and not just while sniffing the lid--my mom piped in with something to the effect that we needed to light my pine-scented one since it smelled so wonderful and Christmas-y. (She had bought the same Balsam & Cedar candle for my sister, who had ignited it immediately and left it burning most of the day during their celebrations in Atlanta.  Love that girl!)

Happy to oblige--but unwilling to let the opportunity go by to actually get their candle burning, too, instead of sitting there as decoration!--I lit mine and got Dad to light his. We kept one in the living room and took one to the kitchen.  I proceeded to explain to them that they needed to allow the candles to burn until the wax had melted to liquid all the way across the top so as to maximize their life. They had never heard of this "rule" of cande-burning, even though they had bought their gift candles at the Yankee Candle store, which is where I first heard of it, I'm sure. (I think they told me it usually takes the large jar candles about two hours to get melted evenly across--I find that it doesn't take quite that long, but we usually burn them for at least that long at a time anyway.)

Mom wanted to make sure that my sister knew this rule and asked me to call her to tell her.  I did, and she did--and, in fact, her wonderful pine-scented gift of a candle is already gone, burned frequently throughout all the days of their December to brighten their home and make it festive and warm.  She's a candle-burner, too, and had loved this particular gift from my mom!

So, since my mom--a newbie to actual burning of the candles--didn't know this, I figured I'd post it here in case someone else doesn't know it. Here's the "practical" and "pragmatic" I promised earlier...

Here's a picture, from their website, of a Yankee Candle--and indeed, it would apply to any other chunky candle, as well-- improperly handled in the burning department:

Notice how it has burned down into a tunnel, leaving much of the candle unburned at the outer edge of the jar. This is caused by lighting the candle for just a little while and not letting it burn until the wax melts all the way across. Once that has been done even once, you're on your way to a ruined candle--do it multiple times and you really will get about a fourth of the life out of the candle as you should have.

Here's a picture of a Yankee Candle almost burned all the way across, but not quite. Notice the little unmelted "lip" of wax on the inside of the jar, off to the right side?  That needs to be allowed to melt, too, so that the melted wax is straight across and liquid before it is blown it out.

So, really, in the midst if all the wonderful and profound things that could be being discussed as we
ponder the reality of Emmanuel, "God with us,"
how to properly burn a candle seems banal and mundane, if not downright trite!

But I love that the Light of the World was born, and lived, and died, to bring us to God!

And I love the special little reminders that bring us joy amid commonplace, everyday living... including--for me--burning candles!

Thy candles shine out brightly...

I miss my dear, sweet mother-in-law in so many ways. It will be strange not to travel to her home  this week--we've usually ventured their way sometime during the twelve days of Christmas for many years now.

My husband's family is old-world European. So many things that took getting used to at first are now precious parts of my life, adopted into the life of our little family from his. Perhaps I'll write of all of them sometime, but for today I'm thinking about candles. Sweet Tiiu changed my life regarding candles.

I grew up in a home where candles were decorations. They were carefully chosen for their visual appeal--never their actual scent when burning. Why? Because they were never actually burning. In fact, most were never even lit. A candle's visual appeal was, apparently, marred by a black wick. Every candle in our home growing up had a white wick from having never been lit.

I never saw candles burning, save for three notable exceptions. One was the several-times-a-year round of little candles on the birthday cakes. A second was the yearly lighting and passing of the flames during "Silent Night" at the Christmas Eve service. And a third was the times company came over and my mom lit a little votive candle in the bathroom. I remember going into the guest bathroom and just sitting there, watching the pattern of color that would dance on the walls through the sides of the little stained glass votive holder.

So the message I subconsciously got growing up was that candles were for decoration or special occasions only.

Then I began to visit the Sitterdings' house. I remember walking in, and there was always a candle burning in the entryway. There were candles on the coffee table. There were candles burning on the table during meals. At first I associated it with the "guests are here" category of candle-burning, but I soon realized that this was a common thing--an everyday thing. I so loved the feeling of warmth it gave--all welcome and comfort and home and "you are special."

I realized that it made me feel so special, this extravagant act of "wasting" candles in the everyday. It spoke to me, straight to my heart, that "today is special enough--this ordinary, daily-day moment together--for burning candles." So burn them I did.

It took a little while to get used to, for sure--I was conditioned to think this was excessive in the everyday--but only a little while! I loved how it made the house feel--how it made the house smell. (Somewhere on the list of favorite, memorable things ever said to me is a friend's pleased utterance of, "Your house smells so yummy and welcoming!")

And so, as I light the yummy-smelling pine-cone-and-lime Yankee Candle this morning--and, indeed, every other candle in the house!--I remember my sweet mother-in-law, and my dear sleeping children upstairs, and my dear husband out running the dogs, and I prepare my heart to celebrate the wondrous fact that today is anything but an ordinary day!

*From "O Christmas Tree"
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
Thy candles shine out brightly!
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
Thy candles shine out brightly!