A Joy-Filled Christmas!

"Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists,

a pure addition out of nothingness."

Rainer Maria Rilke, 

Ahead of All Parting:

The Selected Poetry and Prose

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/joy?page=12

from: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis

“It was a sledge, and it was reindeer with bells on their harness. And on the sledge sat a person whom everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him. He was a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as hollyberries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest. Some of the pictures of Father Christmas in our world make him look only funny and jolly. But now that the children actually stood looking at him they didn’t find him quite like that. He was so big, and so glad, and so real, that they all became quite still. They felt very glad, but also solemn.

“I’ve come at last,” said he. “She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The Witch’s magic is weakening.”

http://simplehomeschool.net/christmas-literature/

(the photo shows a small hand-quilted and appliquéd mini-quilt, a piece of magnetic foil is attached at the back, so that this piece can be used as a magnet)

Happy Grace

“The rapid nightfall of mid-December had quite beset the little village as they approached it on soft feet over a first thin fall of powdery snow. Little was visible but squares of a dusky orange-red on either side of the street, where the firelight or lamplight of each cottage overflowed through the casements into the dark world without. Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered round the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture--the natural grace which goes with perfect unconsciousness of observation. Moving at will from one theatre to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulness

in their eyes as they watched a cat being stroked, a sleepy child picked up and huddled off to bed, or a tired man stretch and knock out his pipe on the end of a smouldering log.” 

- Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/december