I do love this time of year. Starting with Thanksgiving and running right on through the New Year. I think the thing that I enjoy is that it’s a focused time of being thankful and spending time with those we love. Yesterday we got to work at our church’s annual bazaar. It’s one of my favorite things each year. We get to raise money for our church, and while we’re working we get to see lots of people that we don’t see very often. My favorite booth to work is the Christmas cracker booth. If you don’t know what a Christmas cracker is, you can watch this little video: We’re Crackers About Christmas Crackers. Christmas crackers are a great British tradition that we’ve incorporated into our holiday celebrations. I love working this booth and getting to explain to folks what the crackers are all about. Plus, I get to work with my husband and my friend Nicki, which is always fun. These are the crackers we bought for this year. I think they’re pretty. 🙂

This is my new olive wood mortar and pestle. I’m super excited about it! I’m not much of a knick-knack kind of person, so when we travel I like to get things like salts and spices from the area we’re visiting. I also have kind of a weird obsession with wooden kitchen utensils. Anyway, I’m excited about this because it reminds me of our trip to Greece, and it’s the perfect size to break down the salts and spices I have from our other trips. Plus, it’s just super cute!

On our shelf we have a photo album that has 200 love notes from my husband to me. A few weeks after we got engaged, he realized that we had 200 days until we got married. He decided that for each of those 200 days he would write me a note telling me one thing he loved about me. I love looking at this album. I love remembering the fun things we did while dating. I love remembering the things that made us fall in love. I love being reminded of what I can do to make him feel loved. I love being reminded of how unbelievable well he sees the real me. I love that some of the notes are silly, some are deep, and some still sweep me off my feet.

Well, I haven’t actually see any living animals the last couple of days, unless you count tiny bugs, so I decided to take a picture of a stuffed animal. This works out better with the gratitude theme anyway. This is a photo of my teddy bear. I’ve had her since I graduated from high school. She was a gift from my best friend’s mom who said that when I was sad or lonely, I could hug this bear and know that I was really receiving a hug from her. This bear has seen a lot of tears and hugging since then. Sometimes when I can’t wake my husband up after a bad dream, I still grab this bear. If Matt wakes up and sees me holding tight to her, he knows it was a rough night. She is faded and worn, and I love her a lot.

So, on our flight back from Athens I was a little pouty. Matt and I didn’t get seats together, and even though it’s only a two hour flight, I got a little mopey about it. Then a ridiculously drunk man sat next to me and proceeded to spill his beer all over while elbowing me in the ribs. What does this have to do with being thankful for technology. Well, in the midst of my moping, the Lord gave me this beautiful sunset to watch through my window. How amazing to have the technology of flying that allows us to see a sunset like this from ABOVE the clouds!

I love words! Living in Europe, I’ve become fascinated with taking pictures of street signs because I love to see the words written in different languages. Of course, without context and a lot of picture clues, I don’t always know what the signs are about. 🙂 This is a sign from a bakery we visited this weekend. When we finally got off the bus after being a bit lost, we were greeted with the unbelievable smell of amazing things being baked. It turns out the town we stayed in the first night has a bread bakery. Yummy! We saw an amazing bakery across the street and decided to treat ourselves to a couple of these things. They were full of honey and nuts. Unbelievable! I don’t know what the sign says in Greek, but I assume it’s something along the lines of, “Eat this because it’s delicious and will make you smile.”

Whew! We just had a whirlwind weekend trip to Greece where my husband ran the Athens Classic Marathon. Needless to say, being in Athens made it easy to photograph something old. This is a view of the Acropolis from the roof of one of our hotels. Amazing!