Still snowing. Still snowing. Still stuck.

OK, first let's go to the good things. I have this fantastic family full of fine young men and a fine husband and a very, very old dog who is thrilled to have new sausage-y treats for Christmas.

We live in a house with a fireplace. I LOVE fireplaces. I grew up with three of them. This is our first house with a place to make fire inside. I love it. I'm a cave girl.

We have plenty to eat and a nice place to cook it and we get to sit down together and eat it and we're all able to eat and laugh and just be a family.
Even though our kids are old and have lives of their own, they still hang out at home, and they read together and tend the fire and do the dishes. All good.
Cookies. We can all always be thankful for cookies.

And we have good friends who came to our cookie exchange party and brought their wonderful special cookies to share and I was able to hide them well enough from the masses that some of them, most of them even, survived to Christmas Eve. It wasn't easy, either. Look at them! But, it's all good, all lucky. All blessed.

But I am sick and tired of the snow. Not the beauty of the snow. That's a good thing, it is beautiful. We're feeding the birds and we've had chickadees, flickers, robins, sparrows, juncos and even the big bully crows. That's beautiful to have a whole flock eating together.

But I am done with the rest of it. The slippery roads and having to miss so many of the big things that make Christmas special is getting old. We called off the Solstice Family Service. We called off Christmas Eve Service. I didn't go to the Candlelight Family service at one of the local big churches because it was just so snowy and slippery. And now I'm missing the big Christmas Day open house at our friends' house because it's not here on my hill. And I'm not so sure I want to venture out after sun down on those awful hills that have been icy for weeks. People have been stuck in front of our house all day long on a tiny itty bitty hill.

I love my family, and I'm very lucky in so many ways.

But I miss church.

I miss the rituals around the holiday; the singing of Silent Night in a big circle, the basement full of sugar-high-Christmas-hyped children who cannot wait for church to be over so they can go home and put out the cookies and milk for Santa, the organ and the bell choir at the big church, the set-up crew for Christmas Eve consisting of our minister's mother our minister and her husband and my little family and our lefse and krumkake and Christmas carols. I miss friends, parties, gatherings. Everything.

In St. Paul, Minnesota they have a winter carnival where the "Vulcans" bring the fire that symbolizes summer warmth to melt the winter ice and snow.

Maybe we could work out some deal where they stop here first. Bring 'em on, bring on the Vulcans. PLEASE!!!?