the green spot blog

A week and a bit ago, we had our annual Christmas Banquet. It was great fun to be joined for the evening by supporters, local friends and board members. We had a fun night! We were also pleased that our Christmas Banquet plans weren't mostly derailed by a snow storm, like they were last year ! In the kitchen, Ken had help from Jyle and Emily: making a delicious Christmas dinner, from the turkey to the stuffing to the carrots and the salad and fancy-pants homemade chutney! Jyle also devote great attention to the preparation of tasty Christmas baking! Colleen did a lovely job, decorating the dining hall in the manner of a Winter Wonderland. Kiah, Sydney, an armload of toque-clad teddy bears and our Evergreen moose all helped out. And our guests had a lovely evening (we think! we hope!) visiting, eating, playing Christmas games, carolling and playing board games.

If you live in Alberta, you know that the weather was not the greatest last weekend. The Calgary Police apparently responded to 110 accidents within four hours on Friday. The highways were ... scary. As a result, we cancelled the Christmas Banquet, sort of. Instead of our planned 60+ guests, we had a quieter night with 25 friends: of our neighbours, who all still came out, along with two Medicine Hat couples, one Red Deer family and a Coaldale couple. We salute you all for your bravery, and thank God you made it here and back safely! Even with a much smaller group than initially planned, we had a great night: yummy food (thanks, Ken!), good visiting, happy carolling (thanks, Colleen, Sydney and Kiah!) and some of us played fun games after dinner. Mmmm, dinner. Left: Sydney and Colleen lead Christmas carols. Right: Kiah joins the Reimer ladies to help with actions for "Away in a Manger" Since we didn't get to say it to everyone we'd hoped to at the banquet: thank ...

We woke up to a light cover of snow today; I was so excited. As much as I appreciate the slippery-free roads, it just feels to wrong to be without snow in November. (Plus, I've been listening to Christmas music, on and off, since late October ...) Anyway, the actual point of this post is to tell you that Julia and Colleen are prepping for our Christmas Banquet at this very minute! Colleen's office is turning into a miniature winter wonderland, sprinkled with gigantically oversized snowflakes. Now that we're talking Christmas, my uncontestably favourite Christmas album of all time is A Christmas Album by Amy Grant. I love it. And I just found this gem on YouTube (apologies for the poor sound):