Letter From the Editor

Transcription

1 Letter From the Editor Come inside where it s warm, where the fire is crackling and where we have hot chocolate and cookies waiting. We have cozy, warm slippers for your cold toes, and soft tissues for your red nose. We welcome you to the kitchen here at Ruby, where we ve gathered to share our Thanksgiving and Christmas ideas and thoughts, recipes and crafts, and best of all - the friendship of all the Ruby Women. Come on in! We ve been waiting for you!

2 Karen Gass Editor-in-Chief toc Margaret Bucklew Downloads Editor Flat Sydney Shannon Smith Editorial Assistant Le-Teisha Robinson Cooking Amy Cavaness Home Susan Peterman Devotions Rochelle Martin Paper Dolls Coloring Pages Cala Martin Music Laura Day Story Karen Gass Hobbies Bridgett Stemplinger Ruby s Closet Beth Brubaker Fun Aunt Dots Gardening Melissa Warren Homeschool Katie Cunningham WAHM s Scheduled Events... 4 Home with Amy Cavaness... 5 Fashions of the Era s Rochelle Martin - Gina Ross Coloring Pages Cookie Cutter Placemats Hobbies with Karen Gass - Digital Scrapbooking Fruit of the Spirit BOM Gardening with Aunt Dots Flat Sydney Adventures - with Margaret Bucklew WAHM s with Katie Cunningham Ruby s Closet with Bridgett Stemplinger Cooking with Le-Teisha Robinson Devotions Introduction - with Susan Peterman Beth Brubaker - Puzzles Footprints in the Mud Ask Mrs. Beth Music with Cala Martin Secrets About Love by Laura Day Floral Alphabet Poem Homeschool with Melissa Warren Favorite Christmas Memories Stationery Answers to puzzles Closing All of us here at Ruby wish you a very happy Thanksgiving and lovely Christmas. We ll see you again in January of 2010 and we re all looking forward to a bright New Year. See you next year! Credits & Copyrights All stories and articles are copyright to the authors. All pictures are copyright to the authors. Stock photo s are from istockphoto.com Nothing may be copied or shared without permission from the author. Subscriptions run for 1 year for 6 issues & cost $ Single Issue price is $2.75. Purchases may be made on the publishers website - and on the Ruby Blog - magazineruby.word press.com/subscribe/ Questions? Karen Gass at editor@cottonspice.com

3 Scheduled Events Join us on the Ruby Blog for the Days of Christmas. Several of the Ruby Editors have prepared a variety of quick projects, some downloads and other goodies. Days of Christmas starts on December 1 and a new goodie will be posted every day until we run out! Fruit of the Spirit Stitchery BOM - You ll find Month 3 in this issue and at Ruby Women. Month 2 is also available at the Ruby Blog. Join us on our Squidoo Page for unexpected goodies and articles. Drop by and leave a comment or add to our Homemade Christmas Book List. Are you a Subscriber? All subscribers are invited to our private, social networking site - Ruby Women. Lots of things going on there - tips and ideas galore, prayer requests, encouraging devotional bits, and just plain fun. The perfect Christmas gift is a subscription to Ruby! Go here to purchase a subscription and in the notes box, just tell us who it goes to (name and address) and if there is a message you d like to send with it. Their subscription will begin with this issue...the November issue, so it s really a Pre-Christmas gift!

4 Our Home Editor, Amy Cavaness welcomes you to - Our Home at Christmas This is our home last Christmas. Lots of greenery and decorations from nature. On the Jacobean chest, a handmade Christmas stocking has a cuff made from a vintage handkerchief. Our large fireplace opening has been filled with a wood burning stove insert, saving us a great deal on natural gas.

5 This antique English Yorkshire cupboard is always fun to decorate for the holidays. The upper shelf has sprays of evergreens, artificial fruit and pine cones. A collection of pewter vessels have been transformed into candle holders, each garnished with little sprigs of greenery and berries.

6 A New Old-Fashioned Christmas I ve been using the same Christmas décor for quite a while. I ll add something new here or there, maybe (finally!) get rid of something, but each year I haul out the boxes and spread the stuff out all over my house. My mother and grandmothers had pretty homes at Christmas time. I have memories (reinforced by annual pictures) of many of their decorations, and felt a certain comfort when we came home for the holiday. I saw the nativity set out on the old desk, and the blue lights on my grandparents tree could be seen clear down the street. Familiarity and family are nearly the same word, aren t they? So I think there is something to be honored in developing your own style of holiday decorating and using it year after year. Some of those special things are only out for a short time and anticipation builds upon seeing those familiar decorations. On the other hand, they say, familiarity breeds contempt. Well, I didn t hate my old decorations, but I did feel pretty tired of them by last year. Additionally there were new influences in my life. My family now lives in a heavily forested area we can touch the trees from our decks and the deer graze in our front yard. Going green is emphasized in all aspects of our lives now. The over-commercialization of Christmas has impacted many of us and caused us to take another look at our priorities, and certainly the tough economy has done the same. Simplicity holds a new appeal for me. Less clutter. Less stuff to get out and put away. Feeling closer to nature made me want to bring more of the natural world into my home. Shiny, glitzy things don t convey that natural feeling to me. So I embarked on giving my home a different look for the holidays. First, I DID get out all the boxes, but I was pretty selective about what I unloaded. Of course, we set up the tree. And I do like my plain artificial greenery, so I used it. Otherwise, I only got out my real favorites those things that hold sentimental value. I was inspired by a photo I d seen in a magazine (and tore out and saved in my Christmas idea binder.) My theme for our Christmas tree was to decorate with fruits and other natural (looking) things. Among my Christmas stuff was a set of bark covered Styrofoam balls. I acquired these in a box of decorations I bought at an auction. I didn t know what I would do with them at the time, but I kept them. So, finally, this year I used them. I also had some little artificial apples and oranges that I hung on the tree. In the magazine picture, they had dried orange slices hanging on the tree. They were rather pretty with the light coming through them. Orange slices can be dried on a cookie sheet in the oven set at a very low temperature for a few hours. I have a box full of medium to large sized pine cones that I usually use in tabletop decorations. This year I put a lot of these on my tree. I didn t need to hang them they stuck easily to the branches. To hang them, it would be simple to wrap a little picture wire around them and make a loop for hanging. I did buy a few simple ornaments at a craft store. They look like they re