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Showing posts with the label Christmas

Christmas Cards through the Decades

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First Christmas Card Have you ever wondered when Christmas Cards started?  It all started when Sir Cole and J.C. Horsely got together and sketched out a  triptych showing a family at a table celebrating the holiday flanked by images of people helping the poor.  At the top of each was the salutation, "To______" allowing Cole to personalize his response which included the generic greeting "A Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year To You." The first Christmas card originated in the United States in 1875 from Louis Prang, a Prussian immigrant who had a print shop near Boston. The modern Christmas card industry, according to Smithsonian Magazine, began in 1915, when a Kansas City-based fledgling postcard printing company started by Joyce Hall, later to be joined by his brothers Rollie and William, published its first-holiday card. During late 1910s J.C Hall put "hallmark" used by goldsmiths as a marking quality. In 1928, the company began marketing its bra

A Match Made at Christmas by Patty Blount Excerpt and Giveaway

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SYNOPSIS This book was formerly entitled Goodness and Light Thirteen years ago, two teens met on the ramp to Ground Zero, on a cold and snowy day, strangers bonding in a moment of grief. The boy pressed a crystal snowflake ornament into the girl’s hand and disappeared into the crowd, unaware that his simple act of kindness saved her from the guilt that threatened to consume her. Since losing her mom, Elena Larsen hasn’t set foot in New York City -- until now. Agreeing to help her sister prepare for her baby’s birth seems like a good way to spend Christmas and Elena vows not to let the monstrous guilt that weighs on her heart ruin everything. But those plans go awry when she meets Lucas Adair, a man whose own grief and guilt just might rival her own. When Elena discovers Lucas is the boy who gave her that crystal snowflake all those years ago, she can’t accept it as the sign Lucas believes it to be. For her, it means only one thing --- even beyond the grave, her mother ca

Silver Ballbarians Christmas Cookie Decoration Tradition

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Here is a funny family tradition that has been past down from one generation to another.  When my mom and my Aunt were little kids my grandma would make sugar cookies and have them decorate it. They would put those really hard silver ball sprinkles that would break your teeth. Once the cookies were decorated with not just one silver sprinkle hard balls but dozens of them on one cookie my grandpa would eat them. Guess what!!! Grandma taught me this tradition as well. A couple of weeks before Christmas I would go over to their house. Grandma would make her special homemade sugar cookies. I would always help her make it dough as well as eat it too.  Then we would mix up the frosting. While the frosting was in the refrigerator getting cold and the cookies in the oven, we would set up the newspapers on the floor, put up the card table in the kitchen and set up all the decorating sprinkles. I loved decorating the cookies because every cookie I made was very special especially to my grandpa