First Real Snow of the Year, In Town (2009)

Here is the snowfall in town. I think this first picture is pure magic.  Early morning nearly always has a bit of magic, even without snow and fancy camera settings.

This picture is more true to the actual colors:

 

I was thinking how cute this little evergreen would look with colored lights strung around it.

K-10 was not especially sure he wanted to go out at first. He whined at the door, then bounded into the snow, and immediately raced back in, with a confused look on his face.

 

 

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A Real Snow at the Homestead (2009)

This morning was our first “real” snow. After enjoying the beauty of the snow built up on the trees and buildings in town – the stillness and magic of the snow continuing to come down, and turning the air to a dancing, freezing wonder – we went out to the farmstead to check a (humane) skunk trap.

We had only smelled the critter so far, but weren’t waiting for a face-to-face meeting, as a high percentage of skunks in this area carry rabies.

We left the kids with a friend and took the Jeep work truck out. The snow in town was 8″ to a foot deep, but out at the homestead, it was in places 2′ on the level.

K-10 had a blast!

He made trails hither, thither and yon, rushing up at intervals to say hello and see whether we were enjoying the landscape.

We were.

 

 

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Advent and Beyond – “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening”, a poem

I thought I’d share this lovely version of a Robert Frost poem.  A sort of soundscape, for a tranquil moment. It makes me want to go walking, when the evening is all blue and white, and the dusk is almost thorough.

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Advent Day 10 – How to Cut and Fold Snowflakes, a guest post

A guest post by Christa Dovel, of Keeping the Home Fire…

Snowflakes have always been a favorite of mine. As a child, I would pull out the Encyclopedia and look at the few lovely casts contained therein, dreaming of the day when I would be a scientist, and collect my own snowflake casts, setting up great displays for museums. Though I no longer dream of being a scientist, or of collecting casts of real snowflakes, I still love looking at them, and imitating God, by designing my own.

“Snow forms crystals which always have six rays, but the designs are always different. No two snowflakes have ever been found to be exactly alike. Large snowflakes are combinations of these crystal fragments, and have been known to measure four inches in diameter. The elaborate designs in snowflakes may be seen by collecting some flakes on a black surface and examining them under a magnifying glass.

The white color of most snow is due to the reflection of light be the tiny surfaces of the crystals. Red and green snow have been know to fall in Greenland and a few other arctic regions. These are colored by tiny living things in the snow.”

-The World Book Encyclopedia, 1951

Pulling out the ‘S’ Encyclopedia, turning to this well worn page, it was like visiting an old friend. These flakes have been my inspiration year after year, reminding me that there is no one ‘perfect’ design.

Folding a Six-Sided Snowflake:

Materials:

• Paper
• Scissors
• Imagination

For this illustration, I began with a piece of 8.5″ x 11″ copy paper.

Six-sided snowflakes are made from squares. To obtain a square, fold one corner down, to the perpendicular edge. Crease. Cut off the excess paper.

To Fold:

Place the triangle in front of you. Fold in half, to mark the center of the snowflake. Place one finger of your left hand on the center mark, and pull the right hand corner up, as shown. Crease.

Fold the left hand corner up, to meet the right edge. Folded correctly, all edges are equal. Finally, fold in half. You are now ready to cut.

I like to start by shaping the outer edge, then I work from the center out.

When cutting snowflakes, one can cut any shape or design they fancy, as long as they leave some of the folded edge on each side. Some like half shapes, such as the Christmas Tree and gift, seen in the first one illustration. Some like random designs, as in the last illustration. My favorite is to use a combination of geometrical forms, leaving as little paper as possible. Any way you cut it, the results will be wonderful!

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Advent Day 8 – Beginning to make ready for a Swedish Christmas, from “April Snow”

These were busy days. Every bit of the house and barn must be scrubbed clean before the Christmas season. There were the candles to be dipped, candles for the Yule table, and seven smaller candles to fit the crown of Santa Lucia.

Sigrid looped the wicking over a stick about a foot and a half long but left a space in the center for the hand to hold, long loops on her stick and shorter loops on Elisabet’s shorter stick. They dipped them into warm melted tallow, drew them up and let the wicking drip, dipped them again and let them drip, until they were of the desired thickness. On [ten-year-old] Elisabet’s stick were seven wicks.

…

They hung the candles to cool and harden. Sigrid had butchered a seven-week calf and the boar whose head would grace the Yule feast; and they added to the stores, blood pudding and pigs’ feet stowed in brine.

What wonderful smells hung in the air!

Karl proudly announced he had located the finest fir tree in the forest, to be cut on Christmas Eve and brought in with ceremony to be trimmed. And Maria and Johann had stumbled onto a perfect log for the Yule fire. And they all stopped working, Sigrid and her children, to play in the houseyard and build the snow tableau.

Between cooking and cleaning, for days they worked rolling balls of snow at Maria’s direction, placing them here, placing them there; all the others doing the crude preliminary work and Maria, with the help of her mother, doing the finishing – the fine touches.

Now, in the dusk of early afternoon, they saw the Tomte gubbe [troll] peering from behind the aspen tree and seeing an almost life-sized horse, with reins held taut in the hand of a man who stood on the little step at the back of a low, small sleigh. Shafts led from the runners to the horse’s sides, and they were long thin branches from the floor of the woodlot, covered with snow packed firmly to the bark. The front of the little sleigh was rounded like a blanket over the feet of the rider, a woman with a “fur” turban on her head, icy ear muffs, and a huge snow muff covering her hands and the front of her.

Black buttons from Sigrid’s sewing basket were the eyes of the lady, the man, the Tomte gubbe, and the animals. With a stick Maria drew double lines in the snwo in back of the sleigh to mark the path it had left behind, and the print of the hooves between the sleigh marks.

And here was a hare, undecided whether to jump or run or stay where he was and watch. An icy owl sat in the crotch of the aspen tree, and the dusk threw a shadow from the perfect shape of a reindeer – still, regal – its dignity, stateliness, nobility, reflrected in the blue-gray shadow on the snow.

From April Snow (a novel) – by Lillian Budd

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Advent Day 4 – Angels in the Snow, from “April Snow”

“Angels in the snow!”

Sigrid very carefully raised herself from where she had been lying flat on her back with arms outstretched on the pure white sheet of newly fallen snow, carefully, so as not to disturb the outline formed when she had lain sprawled full length, spreading her legs wide apart to make the impression of a long skirt and moving her arms up and down on the snow to mark the contour of wings.

She leaned over Elisabet and grabbed her hands and with a quick pulling movement raised her from the imprint she had made; went to Karl and Maria and Johann with the same nimble assistance, and picked baby Herman up under the arms and swung him high into the air and then held him, with his red-cheeked face close to hers, as they looked at the “angels in the snow.”

They restricted their footsteps so as to keep them all in the “floor” on which the angels ‘stood” – the mama and five little angels – steps in height, from Elisabet who was almost ten to Herman Nikodemus who was not quite one.

– From April Snow (a novel), by Lillian Budd – one of my favorite books

This is the kind of mother I strive to be – someone who takes time to play with her children, and become as one of them long enough to find delight.

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Firewood Blessings

We got a lucky break last September. Actually, I don’t believe in luck, so let’s call it our Creator’s interest in us.

An acquaintance offered us a great stack of firewood for cheap – cheaper than we could have cut it ourselves, accounting for time.

The man we bought our German Shepherd stud dog from had a micro-burst go through his yard, and it knocked down several old elms. He cut and stacked the wood, and all we had to do was to come pick it up within a given length of time.

We arrived, and there was much more than we could fit on one trailer:

We had to leave almost half the pile there for somebody else. Still, it was a great start to stocking up for the year, and everybody got into the act.

 

Tyger helping to stack the wood on the trailer.

Firewood is such a big part of the way we live, that I find it difficult to tell how much of a blessing this was. We have two wood stoves in the house, and they provide virtually all our heat. Besides this, we were swamped with construction jobs toward the end of September, and the Creator knew we could not take a lot of time to gather wood. We had been using our cookstove off and on for a week already.

We managed to get about half of the trailer load stacked, clean and dry, in the wood room downstairs.

It is a bit messy – but then, it’s not a parlor. The beams are necessary to stabilize the flood-damaged walls. (That’s why it’s not a parlor. 🙂 )

By the 23rd of October, we were glad to have done this, as (one of my favorite things!)… we had a blizzard:

 

 

 

 

 

Hardly enough snow to go sleighing…but it was beautiful.

By the next afternoon, it was nothing but mud and memories. Still, we’re ready for the next one.

P.S. – We had ice on the insides of the windows yesterday morning…even the one near the kitchen stove pipe. Jack Frost in residence makes me feel ready for Thanksgiving…and at long last – Christmas! If I didn’t have so many crafts going already, I’d find some wrapping paper and make some new snowflakes for my windows. Oh well – Jack Frost will have to decorate by himself for a few days.

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