Scotland, ho!

In other news, Debi's been sewing and blogging up a storm.

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We have so much to be thankful for, and we've been better about remembering to count our blessings, but it was great to have a night to appreciate all the great things in our lives, especially each other.


It's a little hard sometimes, being so far from friends and family, and we took great comfort in the fact that our American friends were all doing the same thing, wherever they were in the world. It was kind of like having dinner together, in a way.


After Thanksgiving, it was back to the grind.  A few weeks later, we began to turn our thoughts to Christmas. Getting a tree was a must this year, since we weren't allowed to have one last year, when we were living on campus. We were going to get one at the local nursery but we were uncertain of strapping it to our wee Micra, Bugsy and getting it home safely, so I researched some good ways of getting it delivered. There's a great organization here that uses the funds raised through Christmas tree sales to support local charities. Alas, they were swamped, so we found another service but we hope to buy our tree through Caring Christmas Trees next year.

Our tree arrived in a few days, and in the meantime, Debi and I went to St. Andrews to find some ornaments. I remember Grandma Jo's big box of ornaments; they were mostly handmade, some from India and Africa, from when she worked at the Mission office, and hand-painted papier-mâché balls, and Cloisonné, a few of which I inherited. I brought them back from our last trip to the States, along with some great wooden lantern boxes my brother and Lizz gave us.

I remember these great sugar eggs Granny had when we were kids that had windows and little scenes in them but haven't found anything like them anywhere. They kind of looked like this:


Debi bought me a really nice handmade heart ornament on her last trip to London, and the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.


While she was gone, I'd found her a star ornament. Yeah, we're made for each other, all right.


The tree was a bit too wide for our stand, so I had a bit of friendly persuasion to do on the base, but once that was done, we put on some Christmas music and had a great time decorating.


We also went to a Christmas concert at our local parish Church. Brass bands are a big tradition in the UK and many factories sponsored their own bands. The Tullis-Russell band goes back 90 years, and is still going strong. It took a few minutes to get used to the sound but we ended up really loving it. It was great to be in the wee church with people from our town, all enjoying the music and singing psalms.


Looks like it'll be a white Christmas. It snowed all day Friday, and it's begun again and is really coming down outside now. Speaking of which, we watched "White Christmas" with Bing Crosby, which will be a GrantFry tradition from now on. We saw it together two Christmases ago and loved it. We've been singing this song for the past few days now.

We took a nice walk yesterday, heading down to the fountain, then off to the estate. The Hill was lovely, and we got some nice photos of the snow-covered hills, with some fall leaves still on the branches. There are some hardy flowers blooming as well. Debi planted some of this at our front door: winter-blooming jasmine. But of course they have stubborn, tenacious flowers here. I love Scotland!