Katie Allenbach: December!

Saturday, December 3, 2011

December!

It's my birthday in one week. I guess you could say I'm excited. December is my absolute favorite month of the whole year, and not just because it's my birthday month. My mom and I pulled out the Christmas boxes from the garage and decorated the house while listening to FM 100.3 (you gotta listen to Christmas music while putting up decorations, even if most of the songs are extremely nerdy and repetitive). The tree is up, our stockings are hung, and the lights are on the house outside. I love the cozy feeling of the tree plugged in and being snuggled up in a blanket.

I love this time of year, it brings out the best in some people. I love hearing people say, "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays" to one another. I love the spirit that Christmas brings. What I don't like is going to Walmart and walking into a madhouse of mothers dragging their five crying and whining children with them as they fill their shopping carts with a bunch of junk (toys, big stuffed animals, giant chocolate Santas that actually taste terrible, etc.) that they really don't need. It's almost laughable to watch.

These past few years I have really realized that Christmas isn't about spending a bunch of money on presents that we don't really need. It's about helping others and giving our time to serve those who are less fortunate or that need help. On Monday, I spent the day with my Grandma. I helped her make applesauce, and we decorated her house for Christmas. It felt so good to help her.

I'm crossing my fingers that it snows for my birthday. I'm also hoping someone buys me an ipad. Ha! Just kidding.

1 comment:

AubreyDecember 4, 2011 at 8:11 PM
Those giant chocolate Santas are the worst. I am excited for your birthday!
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{Notable Quotes}

“The hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection, and not a fountain; to show them we love them not when we feel like it, but when they do.” - Nan Fairbrother

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.” - J. D. Salinger

“It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Love is my religion...I could die for it." - John Keats

“Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.” - David Grayson

“If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.” - Michel de Montaigne

“The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.” - George Edward Moore

“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” - Daphne Rae

“I don't wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone.” - Javan

“We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.” - Benjamin Disraeli

“When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.” - Natalie Clifford Barney

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.” - Henry Van Dyke

“You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.” - Henry Drummond

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.” - Zelda Fitzgerald

“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” - James A. Baldwin

“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.” - Harvey Fierstein

“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.” - Erich Fromm

"May you live every day of your life." - Jonathan Swift

“All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” - Henry Ellis

“When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me".” - Erma Bombeck

“I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.” - John Burroughs

“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” - Emily Dickinson

“Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.” - Mel Brooks

“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” - Robert Kennedy

“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.” - T.E. Lawrence

“No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to fly high. No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should never agree to surrender your dreams.” - Jesse Jackson

“I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams.” - Madonna Ciccone

“I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night.” - Bill Waterson

“My mother said to me, "If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope." Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.” - Pablo Picasso

“If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.” - Honore de Balzac

"Forgiveness means letting go of the past." - Gerald Jampolsky

“You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.” - Lewis B. Smedes

“When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.” - Lewis B. Smedes

“The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.” - Oscar Wilde

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.” - George Washington Carver

“Life has loveliness to sell, all beautiful and splendid things, blue waves whitened on a cliff, soaring fire that sways and sings, and children's faces looking up, holding wonder like a cup.” - Sara Teasdale

“I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.” - E.E. Cummings

“Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.” - Anthony J. D'Angelo

“For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.” - Martin Luther

“In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” - Albert Camus

“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.” - Dale Carnegie

“By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.” - Thomas Merton

“The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.” - Galileo Galilei

“And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” - Williams Shakespeare

“Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.” - Joseph Conrad

“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” - Frederick Douglass

“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.” - Claude Monet

“Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.” - Langston Hughes

“Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.” - Kahlil Gibran

“Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?” - Rose Kennedy

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” - John Lubbock

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead

“I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things... I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind.” - Leo Buscaglia

“When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.” - Vincent Van Gogh

"No one is that powerful to be able to ruin something God created good. The Devil can try but he can't triumph."

Fall On Your Knees

"...there comes a point when you just love someone.

not because they're good, or bad, or anything really.

you just love them.

it doesn't mean you'll be together forever.

it doesn't mean you won't hurt each other.

it just means you love them.

sometimes in spite of who they are,

and sometimes because of who they are.

and you know that they love you.

sometimes because of who you are

and sometimes in spite of it."

"Remember what you've been given... give without remembering."

“You cannot save people, you can only love them. Love them unconditionally.”

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need."

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

Saturday, December 3, 2011

December!

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