New Year's Eve at Our House

Our New Year's celebration includes puzzles

and camo duck tape

and flashlights

and big cardboard boxes with flashlight light fixtures

and hours of fun playing in a homemade clubhouse.

Hope your New Year's celebration is just as blessed as ours.

More Happy Pictures

The building they were looking at used to be Tirey Hardware.

Happy, TX

Before the snowstorm hit the Panhandle, my sister and I took the kids for a walk around town and took a few pictures.

The railroad tracks run through Happy, and grain elevators are situated along the tracks. In college, my summers were spent being a farmhand for my mom. My sister and I drove grain trucks full of wheat during harvest to the elevators.

This is the Happy State Bank on Main Street. I can remember going in here as a kid to borrow money to buy cattle. When my dad would get a load of cattle, he would let us get a few head as well. I think the process of borrowing money was a lot less complicated then.

Most of the buildings on Main Street are empty, but when I was little, there was still a grocery store and a few other businesses. My grandparents ran the Tirey Hardware. I can remember being at the hardware store with Grandma and getting to walk down to the grocery store to get a coke.

This is the Senior Citizen's Center. My grandma used to quilt there weekly.

This door is on a store that is empty, but my mom said it used to be White's Cafe when she was a kid.

This church was the Presbyterian Church for many years. My brother and sister and I were all christened in it. The Presbyterians quit meeting several years ago because their membership was so small (and elderly). Now the building is used by the funeral home in a nearby town when it is needed.

There are still 4 other churches in Happy...Methodist, Baptist, Catholic and Church of Christ.

My Aunt Judy works at the bank and has for as long as I can remember. She let the kids come in even though they were closed so they could see coins being rolled.

They still give out the same balloons that they gave out when I was little.

My sister also posted some great pictures of Happy here on her blog. She and her family live there and her kids are the fifth generation in our family to go to school in Happy.

Christmas

We spent our Christmas in Happy this year. Here are a few pictures of our trip.

Gamma's grandkids

Hanging our stockings

Cousins

Hunting doves

Four generations

We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!

A Weekend to Remember

Josie and I spent the past weekend with Granny in Dallas.
We visited the Galleria and the American Girl store. What a treat!

The Galleria is a fun place to shop, and Josie was also able to watch two Olympic skaters and the official lighting of this huge Christmas tree.

We had supper in the American Girl Bistro, where they have special high chairs for your dolls. The food was yummy, especially the desserts.

Staying in a hotel for a night was especially nice!

On Sunday, Josie and I ice skated on real ice! I was a little worried about ice skating, since I had not been in so long (and so many pounds ago!)

Thanks Granny for a wonderful weekend!

More Hometown Christmas

After the ice skating adventures, we went into Magnolia's historic depot to the Gingerbread Workshop. The kids all decorated their own gingerbread houses, and they turned out great. Jake's and Josie's houses didn't actually make it home before they began nibbling on them.

Hometown Christmas

This weekend is Magnolia's Hometown Christmas celebration. One of the main attractions is the "Ice Skating Rink," minus the actual ice. I'm not really sure what it is made of--it looks like a giant plastic cutting board made of big puzzle pieces. It skates sort of like real ice.

Josie and a sweet friend had a ball "ice" skating for the first time tonight. I had already spent most of the day with our 4th graders who got to take an skating field trip.

A very nice high school volunteer helped the girls lace up their skates and then skated with them the entire time. They also had snow flurry blowers and Christmas music to make it seem that we were in a winter wonderland. Jake did not skate, but he played on the nearby moonwalks while the girls were on the rink.