Family - grace grits and gardening

Simple, Perfect Gifts

December 27, 2013 By Talya Tate Boerner

Merry Christmas from my family to yours.

Another Christmas has come and gone. Santa was good to me. Again.

I love Christmastime. All the hustle and bustle and decking of halls stirs memories of holidays spent with family members no longer with us.

But they are with us, especially at Christmastime.

Papa Creecy with his big red sack saying ho, ho, ho! Nana laughing about something. (She was always laughing.) Mammaw Ruby rolling out dumpling dough on her kitchen table. Papa Homer passing out sticks of Juicy Fruit to all the kids.

This year we made a few new memories playing board games, attending church services, cooking together, wrapping presents.

Ah yes, the presents can be stressful. But gifts are part of the fun, especially giving and receiving that perfect simple gift—not expensive or fancy—but chosen from the heart.

Here are a few of my favorite gifts this year.

Journals. Aren’t they gorgeous? A beautiful journal filled with blank pages represents such possibility…

A Zoku slush maker. This is exactly like the slush maker my sister and I had as kids. I am soooooo excited about this. See, it’s in the freezer ready to go.

Look at these adorable Mudpie Glittens (gloves/mittens). I wore them to the Dallas Mavericks game last night. (The Mavs didn’t win, but the family made more fun holiday memories…)

The Flavor Bible. I specifically asked for this. I heard it is life changing.

Of course the best gift of all was time spent with family.

What was your favorite Christmas gift this year?

talya

Grace Grits and Gardening
Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

a Christmas memory: buying the tree…

December 12, 2013 By Talya Tate Boerner

Keiser Supply Company, our small town hardware store, received its shipment of Christmas trees in early December. We weren’t allowed to buy one until Momma could borrow Daddy’s truck to bring it home. And since Daddy worked AllTheTime, it was almost Christmas before we finally drove into town for our tree.

Way in the back warehouse where it was chilly, fresh Scotch pines propped against the wall. Momma held tree after tree upright so we could see from every angle.

Momma said until the tree “fell” it was impossible to really know what it would look like.

I didn’t know what she meant.

I thought they were all beautiful.

My sister and I circled through the Christmas forest inhaling fresh, fragrant evergreen until we became so cold, we agreed on a tree.

Mr. Cunningham tied our perfect specimen to the truck bed so it wouldn’t flip out into a field on the way home.

“Momma, should I ride back there with it?” I stared at the tree, worried it would get smashed by Daddy’s tools.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll freeze to death.”

She wouldn’t let me.

nice little house on the prairie bonnets…

talya

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

What if Christmas doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more? – Dr. Seuss (How the Grinch Stole Christmas)

Nana’s little table

December 5, 2013 By Talya Tate Boerner

In October, in honor of Old Farmers Day, I wrote about Nana and Papa Creecy and how they set up housekeeping in 1936 buying the following goods: (Click HERE to read the original story.)

Somewhere buried within this original invoice included a side table. Although the little table wasn’t individually listed, it has been part of our family since day one of Nana and Papa’s life together.

Momma remembers when the table originally had a shelf around the bottom. She broke the shelf climbing and playing on it when she was a little girl. I remember playing underneath the table too when it sat in the entryway across from the front door of our house.

Lots of hair brushing took place in front of the mirror that hung above the little table. It’s where Momma wrangled our hair each Sunday morning, pulling and tugging it into a tight ponytail or some style appropriate for church.

Before bedtime we brushed our hair at the table—one hundred strokes to make it silky…

One summer Momma stripped the wood and antiqued it greenish-white (pictured below in this first day of school picture).