Tag: christmas
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To Long For Belonging
Land has this mysterious way of pulling at your soul, of beckoning you home, and for our young daughter, this land is Germany. The longer we expatriate in China, the mightier that tug. She dreams of the family, the colors, the fresh air, the sounds and smells of a land she feels a strong belonging to despite…
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Slowing Down Time with Crafts
In a world of texting, emailing, and ‘elf yourself’ video cards sent around for Christmas, it is so amazingly soothing to go back to basic crafts and to spend hours cutting, coloring, gluing and handwriting Christmas cards for loved ones. I suspect that as we speed into the future, taking the time to be invested in…
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as it should be~ New Zealand
Being in New Zealand feels as close as I can imagine a healthy planet to be. I visited and was enchanted with this beach at Karekare about 20 years ago and coming back to it now, it still is as clean, as unpolluted and as undeveloped as it was back then. What a stark contrast…
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Day Three Hundred Forty Seven, January 4, 2012
The one theme throughout Lea’s letter to Santa this year centered around magic. She asked to become a “Hexe” (German for witch), to have a “Hexenbuch”, “Hexenkraft”, “Hexenbesen”, fairy dust, the ability to fly, … you get the idea. From all of this list, she received a book and some crystals from her cousins and…
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Day Three Hundred Thirty Seven, December 25, 2011
Christmas day always seems to point to the next highlight or important event, the arrival of the new year in only a week’s time. This new year has been heralded all over the place as a possible end, a new beginning, a major year of unusual events according to the Mayan prophecy of the shifting…
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Day Three Hundred Thirty Six, December 24, 2011
For Lea, Christmas is all about cousins. The highlight of her whole holiday time away from China is spending time with her cousins (and she has quite a few!). It is about being silly, naughty, conspiring, playing games, sleepovers, trips to the forest, eating chocolate and simply enjoying every second of that time. It is…
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Day Three Hundred Twenty Nine, December 17, 2011
Today, was a day of preparation to head west for a few weeks. No matter how long an expatriate lives in and makes China their home, the sense of belonging somewhere else is always prominent. Tomorrow my little family crosses a large part of the planet’s surface to get a dose of Western tradition for…
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Day Three Hundred Eighteen, December 6, 2011
Today was the day Nikolaus comes to see German children and they get ready for him by cleaning their boots (Nikolaus Stiefel) and setting them out at night to wake up to sweets and presents if they were good the past year or a tree branch in the boot if they were not. Lea lives…
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Day Three Hundred Seven, November 25, 2011
Another orbit around the sun is about to be completed yet again and I have the sense it is moving too fast. I don’t know if you measure the year like Lea and I do with events, important happenings, like birthdays, first day of summer, school beginning and ending, Christmas… But having these markers along…