Kristen Wambach Blog - KRISTEN WAMBACH

Day 23 | All Roads Lead Home

12/23/2022

Yesterday's words were powerful, a forward momentum towards grace and forgiveness opening the door of gratitude for today's offering. All roads do lead home. For most of my life, I am blessed to live within the luxuriant green of the Willamette Valley. From the age of five, Oregon has been my home.

From the Hill, my farm home.

Winter Farm Home, Artwork Design by K. Wambach

Day 22...

...Day 24 Christmas Eve

Mystical Tales @ Christmas

A few years of adventure outside its borders, living in San Diego California, meeting my husband Don, buying our first home, having our first child, and then, home called us home.

Our four sons have also chosen to remain within a short drive from Corvallis Oregon. Christmas and holidays are filled with short travels, good food, dogs, and the gratitude I feel that I love of all the business having family around provides. As we nostalgically venture to open the last days of our Advent calendar, we fill its content with the sounds and memory of home. It may find you miles from the memory or relishing the hugs of loved ones held in the heavens' arms. Home, easily found in the reset of the heart.

Credit The Vintage Kitchen

San Diego, a quick five-year excursion. My first married Christmas was still eighteen hundred miles from the Home for the Holidays. Memory doesn't provide why we didn't drive home this year, maybe we visited Dons folks in Colorado this year. But I was homesick. Arriving in the post just days before Christmas a small parcel half the size of a bread box. I think about that statement, you may not even know what a bread box is? In the days when fresh bread, the making or the walking to town to purchase the staple that soaked up the juices on your daily plate. The bread wasn't wrapped in plastic, freshness was authentically baked daily. We kept metal-type boxes on the counter or had a special drawer in the cabinet or hutch that was designated for our daily bread.

Peanut butter Blossom Cookie Recipe Link

as promised via Instagram post

Bread Bin History
ï»¿Bread stays far fresher in a bread bin or bread crock rather than a fridge. And before fridges were invented there was little choice. But for many of our ancestors the crock was a necessity against an invasion of the four-legged variety !
Early crocks were stoneware or terracotta, but by the 1920s, enamel was a way of keeping bread fresh and cool. Most were rectangular and could take four large loaves. Others were round and more suited to cobs. Whilst most enamel bread bins were white and trimmed with black or blue, cream and green became popular. Sometimes granite-ware ones can be found. Some bins linked bread to flour and portrayed flour windmills on the front.
By the 1950s, lighter weight tin was being introduced and roll top bins became popular. Some companies experimented with plastics and everything became more colorful with red, yellows and blues.

Change Happen with Intent

This treasure-filled little parcel, arriving on the wings of angels, so well packed, tissue and more tissue to cushion and protect the value of its contents. Not a gift but a loan, Rosebud. White glossy porcelain Reindeer, with a pink jeweled rosebud on top of her head. She sat year after year on the antique dark-oak china-hutch next to the nativity made by my eldest brother Mike.

My Mom sent Christmas to me that day.
I returned Rosebud to my Mom the Christmas after next, but with that return on her "loan," we moved our growing family to the Willamette valley.
All roads lead home.
PS. After researching "Rosebud," I think that a large majority of my Grandmothers angel collection were produced by Napco., Interesting trivia, again reminding me of home.