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The week after Christmas Sarah and I went back into the kitchen to bake a few orders we'd gotten for New Year's. I can't believe we made it through Christmas. We got so many orders the week before that we were overwhelmed. We kept our cool and on the Wednesday before Christmas we baked and delivered about $1000.00 worth of bread, cinnamon rolls and dinner rolls.

I paid a price for all this work. I hardly did Christmas at all. For me this year there were no shopping malls, no traffic jams, no nightmares about forgetting one child's presents. My Christmas this year was about baking bread with Sarah.







Here's a Shoaf's Loaf getting ready to go into the oven. I scored it after prooofing. How bout that? I sound like a real baker. Scoring is slitting the tops of the loaves with a sharp knife or razor after proofing. Proofing is the letting the bread rise. Lingo. You gotta know the lingo.

On Christmas Day we went down to see Anne, Monte and Matthew. Anne is Billy's daughter, Monte is her husband. Matthew is our grandson. Matthew and I like to play together. He calls me Nonnie.

Here he is at the dinner table on Christmas Day. Can you tell that Santa came to see him? It was such fun being with them. Matthew and I sat on the floor and read books together. His favorite was the book "Corduroy." Christmas night when his mother was reading to him he told her he wanted to read, "Quarter Boy." Makes perfect sense to me.

On Wednesday before New Year's we drove down to New Orleans; Sarah, Billy, and me.

I got a new camera for Christmas. On New Year's Eve I walked around near our hotel, which was just outside the French Quarter. I couldn't believe how beautiful this church was. Look at that stairway in the middle.

I saw the church as I was walking down St. Charles. It was in a sketchy neighborhood surrounded by vacant lots and warehouses, so naturally I turned and walked toward it. As I got close I saw a bright blue house sitting under the wing of the church, and I thanked God for this city and its beauty that just seems to ooze up out of the ground.

There was a sacredness in this space, a sparse, distant beauty that called early in the morning and I was lucky enough to hear it.