American Pagan Church Weekly Notices

Well folks, we're less than a week away from Yule and about a week and a half from Christmas! Hope everyone has their shopping done! Course, I'm not done just yet, but for me, that's expected!

This past Thursday is now being referred to (at least by me) as "Cookie Day". We decided, almost at the last minute, to gather items for our troops in Iraq and I baked, oh, about 5 dozen or so cookies for them as well, with the help of my wonderful husband Tim (aka the dishwasher) and one of our newest members, Ursula! Turns out, with everything boxed up, it was approximately 19+ pounds of cookies and toiletries all together! We sent, toothpaste, toothbrushes, sewing kits, babypowder, deodorant, wet-wipes, and batteries all in neat little airtight bags along with all those cookies. Lots and lots and ::sigh:: LOTS of cookies!! The worst part was, we weren't allowed to eat any the cookies as we baked (though we did end up with extras which we divied out amongst ourselves and the raw cookie-dough wasn't half bad either)!! Ross sent out everything today with the hopes that it'll all get to our guys and gals over-seas sometime this week.

We did not hold ritual (too many cookies to bake) but we did have a wonderful dinner quickly thrown together by Tim & Ross, consisting of cheesy greenbeans, mashed potatoes, and pork. Mmmm.... meat! I'm not really sure how they actually got dinner ready when I was hogging both the kitchen itself and the oven the whole time, but they made due with what little space I left them and even in winter, the bbq is a wonderful thing!!

Ursula's father made the church our very own Yule log along with a stand, and it looks awesome!! I was very impressed by his handywork!!! Ursula has also started to memorize our Yule ritual which as I told her is not only unnecessary, but totally insane as I haven't even begun to memorize a single line of it yet, cept for maybe the opening of the circle itself, which I've had memorized for quite a few months now! But overall we are ready!!