Sunday Paper Tidbits

It's been almost a year since my last post, but I just love a couple items I saw in the paper today.

- A cabin in South Jersey was built between 1638 and 1643 and is designated the oldest standing wooden structure in North America.  The couple that owns the cabin live in a newer part of the structure that was built in the 1900s. Visits to the cabin are free and will be for as long as the couple owns it; tours are available by appointment but they won't turn anyone away that just shows up. The husband is 85 years old and still repairs the cabin by hand using clay dug up from a farm in a nearby county because it was identified as being similar to the clay originally used to build the cabin. The couple is hoping to find someone willing to take over the cabin when they can no longer take care of it that will care about it as much as they do and keep it accessible to anyone that wants to see it.

- What is gleaning?  Volunteers go to farms after the commercial harvesting has been completed and collect the surplus crops left behind. The farms always plant extra crops and hate seeing them go to waste. So groups like New Jersey Farmers Against Hunger coordinates between farms and volunteers to get that surplus food donated to food banks from June to December. From the 40 farms they partner with, about 4,000 pounds of produce is collected each week. They help feed about 7,000 people each year.

So a little history and a little volunteerism - much nicer to read about than Ebola

Real vs. substitute

A simple but striking thought hit me as I was packing up Christmas decorations.  As I was tying 24 buttons back on to the button Advent calendar, my mind started thinking about how this isn't the "real" button calendar, which of course is reserved for the one at my parents' house. This one is just a substitute for the real one - a very good substitute, but not the real thing. Much like the little ceramic nativity scene is a substitute for the big glazed white one. And the quilted stockings are substitutes for the felt(?) ones with the embellished pictures on them.

Then it hit me - to my kids, these ARE the real things. And they will always have the memory of the specific decorations we put up each year. There is some overlap - the little felt wreath hanging in a doorway used to be in my parents house, as did many of the ornaments on the tree from my childhood. But even the magnetic-mitten-on-the-metal-picture-of-Santa Advent calendar we have is now a "real" decoration. My kids don't know I picked it up on a whim a couple years ago when I saw it at a Hallmark store. It's now something that they will remember doing every day leading up to Christmas.

It made me very happy to stop for a minute and remember that we are every day making memories for our kids. And the tradition of putting the same things out every year is part of what makes our house a home, and becomes what our children will remember long after they have moved out and created homes of their own.