Winter Wonderland

Well, "wonderland" might be a little strong, but we did get our first snow of the season last night. And thanks to the single-digit temperatures, it's staying around. We have a nice, white dusting on ground and houses.

Since last Thursday, I've been busy with Christmas preparations. Beyond cleaning up around the house, I made four trips to Target in three days. (This is the kind of gripping news only The Elkridge Hollerer brings you.)

We finally got our Christmas tree last Thursday. After looking around for a couple of years, we've concluded that Home Depot is clearly the best place in the area to get a tree. We set a new standard, though, this year for non-Currier & Ivesness: we arrived at Home Depot some 15 minutes before closing time to pick from the dozen or so trees they had left. There were actually a few decent ones left, plump and bushy like we always seem to get. It's not taking much water, so it's probably just as well that we got it late.

We had a beautiful service at Glen Mar yesterday morning. It was sort of a lessons and carols format, with lots of music and four short messages, versus a full sermon. All of the elements of the service were wonderful in their own rights, and they complemented each other perfectly. It was one of those services where you could feel the congregation responding. Everyone seemed to float out of the sanctuary. I wanted to find everyone in the service to thank them for giving us a superb conclusion to our Advent Sundays.