Christmas Holidays

It's a very quiet day today. My family keeps itself busy with reading and resting and the house is almost utterly silent.
I enjoy every second of this peace.

It began on christmas eve. We gathered our closest family to eat potato salad with eggs and cookies for dessert.
We also made children's punch, the recipe is easy and it tastes good:

 Children's punch

Make some tea out of hibiscus and red fruit.

Mix sugar and some christmas spices* into it and cook everything for about ten minutes.

We attended the evening service with a little choir on the gallery.

The priest had brought a light from the next cathedral. Every visitor got a candle and lit the candle next to him or her. It was beautiful and I liked the symbol very much.

 One of our presents was this delicious little house from Grimm's fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel".

I can't wait to nibble from it but I have to wait for the consent of all family members.








On the next day we met our bigger family and there was a feast of fondue and raclette with little bowls full of different kinds of groceries, salad, meat and cheese.
As a side dish we had potatoes and bread and as dessert tiramisu and cookies. It was the perfect combination to meet all different tastes and diets.

Before gift giving, we started singing christmas songs, some of them self-composed and it was pure joy to merge our voices into canons and part music.



* (rose hip, clove, star-anise, orange, cinnamon, currents, vanilla - or you can just use convenience blends)

Take a deep breath

 There is nothing more valuable than the moment you have right now. Take a deep breath. Taste the air. Close your eyes and feel your existence.

This is what life feels like. Breathing. Feeling. Being there in the present moment. You cannot change your past and you can only restrictedly control what will be. But you can live. Every single moment. In the now.

It's christmas. The time of the year where we remind ourselves of our beloved ones. Love means life. Love is about special persons and about all people, the earth and life at the same time.

Be good to yourself.

Take a rest.

Meet people.

Get inspired.

I wish you all a merry christmas.

Pre-christmas post

I know I won't be able to write for the next ten days and there has been so much. I'm not the kind of person that longs for these full and chaotic days but somehow the last two months were exactly that kind of days. I have had loads of wonderful and inspiring moments, conversations, time with friends and family.

There was the last Hobbit-movie on Thursday evening and although I usually hide my face when there are fights, I was totally okay with the dead orks. We were a fun group of people and I talked to a good friend of mine for a long time until it was at least 2 a.m. in the morning.

And I watched Interstellar on Friday night (after a long day and doing sports, wow, where did I get my energy from?).
I loved this film. Not only because of the immediate bond between Cooper and me of being an engineer, but also because of the high emotional parts. I wanted to call my family right during the movie. And at the end of the movie tears came into my eyes and I secretly wiped them away. This movie was an artwork.
Of course the depiction of several dimensions and some other physical relations can be questioned, but this was just a perfect piece of art.

And then I went christmas shopping.
I'm really inspired to do something creative this year and I was overwhelmed by the ideas on the internet. I got to know that those little jars and fairy lights aren't expensive and I can turn them into personal little presents which means it's not only fun to give them to your friends or family but also to create them.

In the evening, I made christmas cookies with a good friend of mine, and we put a lot of effort and love into it, and decorated them with chocolate, sugar icing, nuts and little sugar beads.

Today I attended the evening service. My choir sang and some of my close family and friends came to listen, I was very grateful to see them there.

How do you spend your last days before the christmas holidays begin?