Second Sunday of Advent

 Well, church ended up cancelled today. No pageant practice, and no hosting coffee hour. The story was that the roads up the mountain were icy. Or, they might become icy. Living half an hour south-ish, in the foothills, it is hard for us to judge whether or not they are being big wussies or not, but we give them the benefit of the doubt. And many in our congregation do live up steep, twisty roads, and, given the size of our congregation, we can't afford to lose anyone!
At any rate, I now have a whole lot of hard boiled eggs (I was cautious and waited until this morning to make the egg salad, so I didn't), and mountains of delicious baked goods. The frosted brownies suffered some losses in their transition to the freezer, but otherwise we showed restraint. And our pageant director has promised to e-mail Katie's shepherd lines (in this play, apparently, the shepherds speak and the Holy Family keeps quiet).

I had mentioned to Travis, a week or so ago, that there would be a parade in town at 3:00 today.  Given the drizzly weather, though, I figured it would be cancelled and forgot about it. At 3:05, however, Travis said that he really wanted to go to the parade. We were already planning to go to the Community Christmas Concert at 4:00, so we got dressed and zoomed in to town. I didn't really expect there to be a parade, but there was! Sort of.

The saddest Christmas parade ever. No people to watch, and no one on the floats. Well, almost no one. There were a few intrepid souls, and I was awfully glad we went, just so they didn't feel entirely neglected! We wished them a happy Christmas as loudly as we could (pretending our best to be lots of people!), and they threw us very generous handfuls of candy. There might have been a couple other people lining the parade route, but mostly it was just us.

 (You probably can't see it in the picture, but that float has supporting handgrip things all over it, for the float riders to hold onto. Like Tiny Tim's little crutch! Sniff!)

 And here is Santa, and his two most dedicated elves! Yay!!!

The parade took us all of fifteen minutes, which left us fifteen minutes to get to the Methodist church for the Christmas concert. It was lovely! The music and the decorations were just what I needed to put me in a more festive mood.

(I should have taken one with the choir standing, so you could see how nice they all looked in their robes, but I'm always shy about taking pictures in church.)

Pretty good, for an "ice storm" day, eh? But Saturday was great too! My parents came over for dinner, and Travis made his signature dish -- Chicken Pesto Pasta. This time he made it especially jazzy (with black olives!), and it was delicious! My parents were properly admiring, and my olive bread came out nicely too (I'd been a little uncertain about it.) We had our first book discussion (Emma), and that went well also! And Katie won the game of Clue! (She was silly and admitted that her victory was through dumb luck, but still...!)

I tried get a picture and make our Christmas cards last night. 

Shutterfly's big discount turned out to be only on their more pricey cards, so I didn't get the cards ordered, but at least now I'm ready, should they send a good coupon! Now we just need to get a tree, decorate, bake cookies, and we'll be just about ready for Christmas!