I have to say that being in Germany for the Christmas season has been a delight to the senses. We did not travel far and wide to get to Christmas markets this year, but we thoroughly enjoyed the ones in Tübingen and the surrounding area.

What I loved about attending the local markets was watching communities gather around these events. Children playing music. Families shopping together. Friends standing around outdoor fires. Everyone drinking Glühwein.

Christmas Markets definitely bring tourism to Germany, and they are worth the trip, but more importantly to me is the sense of local folks doing something they have done for a long, long time: gathering in the streets to welcome the Advent season.

The fact that Christmas Markets are a beautiful gathering for families and friends during a season of peace and joy makes the fact that someone would use that gathering as an opportunity to display hate and evil so abhorrent. In the face of that darkness this week (a man drove a truck into the Berlin Christmas Market as an act of terror), I thought it would be appropriate to share my collection of photos from our visits to Christmas Markets.

Always light in the midst of darkness.

Merry Christmas from Germany friends!

The post Snapshots of Christmas Markets in Germany appeared first on Alison Chino.

It’s been exactly a month since Christmas. The holiday season already seems like a long time ago, but it was such a special time that I wanted to dedicate a post to its memory. I don’t have photos of all the bits I want to remember, but this collection of random snapshots captures a lot of what I loved about this year’s sweet season.

Preparations for a girls’ movie night to watch my favorite movie of the year, Far From The Madding Crowd. Lots of laughs.

Simon and his glee over all things Star Wars. (also, his shirt with “homemade thumbholes” which my friend Diane did for him because he wanted one with thumbholes like his brothers)

Daily Christmas readings and coloring Jesse Tree ornaments.

Running a gingerbread man table at a ladies’ craft night.

A winter hike around Crathes Castle with friends.

Kids being silly.

Hot mulled cider.

Baking with my kiddos.

The kitchen covered in treats.

The Christmas tree at Kings College. (and gray December days)

Sharing our favorite Christmas stories with some of our favorite people.

Our two favorites are The Last Straw and The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey.

I made a point of finding some wee ones to read to this year because I do miss having little ones around at Christmas.

Taking my four loves to be around these four little munchkins makes me super nostalgic for those crazy toddler days.

Lemons and lots of lemon zest. For lemon cakes and apple pies.

Making lots of batches of winter punch that could be served to the kids or added to alcohol for adults.

Going to the beach to see the sunset on the shortest day of the year.

Fires in the backyard on cold nights (with marshmallows and whisky).

Taido and his mama having lots of time together this year. (Before she arrived for Christmas, they went on a Danube River Cruise!)

Taido in the kitchen. Doing his thing.

Christmas Morning at church with Harriet and Koko (Taido’s mom and sis).

Jigsaw puzzles on the table.

Taking Koko (my sister-in-law) to Stonehaven for the day.

Seeing a rainbow on the way to the castle.

Sitting in one of my favorite pubs after a misty walk to the castle and back. Warming up with pints + Cullen Skink (a Scottish seafood chowder) and talking for hours and hours.

Also, here’s Koko sneaking over the fence to retrieve her dropped glove.

The white foam on the North Sea looking like snow.

Days and days and days of rain and flooding.

Out for a walk all by myself in the rain, to see how high the river was and to breathe deep after Cole’s departure to America and all our visitors had come and gone.

I’m smiling at you and wishing you a happy 2016, friends.

The post Snapshots of Christmas in Scotland appeared first on Alison Chino.

Happy December Y’all!

Already this week, we have put up our tree and covered it with new silver-spray painted salt dough ornaments. They are the easiest + happiest Christmas craft ever. Do it this weekend and you’ll have big smiles, I promise.

Last night, I introduced 30 sweet gals to the joys (and the mess) of decorating gingerbread men which was ridiculously fun.

I attended my first choir practice this week because this is the year I am going to learn to sing some Scottish/English/European tunes at Christmastime (rather than just mourning my hometown hymns).

We always have a little trouble figuring out when to do our family Christmas reading, so this year we’ve settled on the minute the kids get home from school, which means Taido is missing out but since Ann Voskamp is a little fru fru for him, it’s all good. Which brings up something about this Christmas I’ve been thinking about.

Sometimes the people in my house don’t embrace all of my holiday plans with squeals of joy.

But I’ve decided that I’m getting on with it.

Christmas Music + Homemade Cookies + Scripture readings + Twinkle lights in every room! = Happy Christmas To Me.

And I’m trying to give everyone else in my house the grace to embrace what I’m doing when they want to and roll their eyes when they don’t.

Because you know, teenagers.

(I’d love to hear about how you’re welcoming Christmas into your house this year for YOU!!)

Anyways howzabout some LINKS?

I put my list of favorite Christmas Children’s Books up on Medium this week, in case you’re looking for a new story to read this year.

Books for the nerds in your life.

I finally saw Inside Out, and I am so grateful for the little blue Sadness character. Now I have a vernacular for what happens to my heart in winter. When Sadness touches a memory, she turns it blue, making it sad.  I can just picture Sadness rolling her fingers over all the little bits of my heart and turning them blue. (And if you find that thought comforting rather than depressing, then please come sit by me, my fellow melancholy friend.)

Ben and Mary Polly went on a field trip with their French classes to the cinema (translation: to the movies) to watch La Famille Belier. They loved it so much that they talked us all into seeing the next weekend. Mary Polly keeps singing this song. It’s so lovely! The English translation of the lyrics might make you cry, but don’t read them until you’ve seen the film.

Every day you can get a new Christmas Song + Story in your inbox from my home church in Arkansas if you want. So lovely! (PS I wrote one of them!)

We are fighting off colds with our favorite Garlic Soup. (I swear by this stuff.)

Well, that’s a beautiful way to celebrate the birth of a child.

This bag looks like the answer to all your travel needs.

One of my favorite gifts to give to children for Christmas is TRAVEL. If you’re wanting to give your kids a vacation instead of stuff, you might appreciate this vacation countdown I wrote a while back for The Huffington Post.

Speaking of the gift of travel, um, this Yoga Retreat in Italy would make a dreamy Christmas gift for the yogi (or yoga wannabe) in your life.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for stories full of hope because those are the kinds of stories I want to write this month. They don’t have to be happy stories, but I want read and write words that help me see the hope in the hard places. This story from a gal working to bring the light of the Gospel of love to the Middle East was one of those kind of stories.

Taido sent me this video of Tim Keller talking to Wheaton students about identity and I thought it was going to be boring but nope. Good stuff.

Oh that we could all be this kind of teacher.

If you live in Portland, Oregon, you should TOTALLY go to this!

The Guardian released a sweet video story as part of their appeal for refugees this Christmas.

That’s all for now. I hope your first December weekend is full of hope + love + twinkle lights.

XO

Alison

The post In The Pipeline: December appeared first on Alison Chino.

Hello friends!

We’re excited to be wrapping up 2014 in Arkansas.

Since I’ll be visiting with friends and family, the blog will be a bit quiet for the rest of December, but I wanted to take a minute to say thank you so much for reading and walking with me this year!

I hope you have a beautiful Christmas season and I look forward to sharing adventures with you again in 2015.

Happy Christmas with SO MUCH LOVE from all the Chinos!

Thanks so much to Whitney Loibner for our gorgeous family photo, taken this past summer in Switzerland. 

The post Happy Christmas appeared first on Alison Chino.

12 Homemade Treats for the Holidays!

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you might have heard me engaging in battle with my current nemesis, Tiny Oven. I have admitted Tiny Oven is suffering mostly in my eyes from an unfair comparison to Dream Oven, my industrial wonder from Christmas Past.

One of the many facets of Tiny Oven’s personality, apart from a propensity to burn everything, is that he is not a multi-tasker. He just does not like to take on multiple projects at one time. Or multiple baking trays.

If you are satisfied with cooking one small tray of cookies at a time, Tiny Oven will do the job. He is happy to perfectly brown 6-8 cookies. But don’t even think about stacking trays of cookies to try to cook 18 at one time. Tiny Oven and I get along better if I just try to forget that Dream Oven would happily bake 48 cookies at a time to perfection. And we’re not even going to talk about cupcakes. Dear goodness, it’s like that girl who used to buy 25-pound bags of flour and sugar to make 800 cupcakes at Christmas is from another lifetime.

If I tried to bake at that scale today, I would also have to contend with Tiny Fridge and Tiny Freezer.

Even though I will not be churning out the sweet treats like I would from my Arkansas kitchen, I am determined to make a few Christmas goodies. In very small batches.

However, if you are fortunate enough to have a regular sized oven or dear goodness, a chest deep freeze, you can spend a day baking and filling it up to be ready for the holiday season!

I LOVE to freeze cookies at every stage. I freeze dough in balls to be baked and served warm. I freeze sugar cookies cut out and ready to be baked, or already baked and ready to be iced. There is nothing that makes you feel on top of the holidays like having several different kinds of cookies frozen and ready to pull out to put together a platter for a party or a box for a friend!

So if you are planning a baking day soon, here are my:

12 Favorite Holiday Recipes for Baking and Gifting!

Cellophane Bags + Curling Ribbon + Baked Goods = Christmas Presents Sorted!

Candied Nuts

Snowball Cookies

Christmas Sugar Cookies

Gingerbread (bake in small tin loaf pans)

Almond Biscotti

Pumpkin Bread

Raspberry Rugelach

Molasses Spice Cookies

Homemade Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups

Dipped Pretzels (easy to adjust this recipe for any holiday!)

Oatmeal Cookies

Chocolate Pecan Cookies

Happy Baking Friends!

PS Anytime you bake one of my recipes, I would LOVE to see a picture, so tag me on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram!

Did you enjoy this post ? Maybe you’d like to subscribe to the Chino House via RSS feed or by email.

The post Homemade Treats = Perfect Gifts appeared first on Alison Chino.

A dear friend of mine, Jerusalem Greer, wrote a book that was published last spring called A Homemade Year.

It is a lovely book of of stories, photos, recipes and craft ideas for celebrating the Christian liturgical year.

The recipes and crafts are wonderfully practical for giving your family ideas for celebrating some of these traditional days, and the gorgeous images by her sister, Judea make the book beautiful, but the reason I love this book most is not the photos, the crafts or the recipes. I love it for the stories Jerusalem tells.

Like any good book, this is one you can curl up with in December. Jerusalem has invited you over for tea and coffee in her cozy kitchen, and I for one, was delighted to pull up a chair.

I assumed from the beginning that my favorite chapter would be the one about Michaelmas, a feast for Saint Michael the Archangel that falls at the beginning of autumn. I thought it would be my favorite because in it, Jerusalem tells the story of meeting a group of mothers one autumn of which I was a part. I still remember sitting by the creek that ran through a park a couple of afternoons a week while all our kids played after school. They were lazy autumn days filled with picnic blankets and bowls of fruit and pretzels. I miss those days a lot.

But my favorite story turned out to be the one Jerusalem tells about her mother the year her family moved to Alaska.

I can’t imagine why a story where a mother of four children endures the short days of a northern winter had any appeal for me.

The celebration in that chapter is Candlemas which is the end of Christmas, when all the wonder has come and gone. When Candlemas arrives, we are in the deep of winter, and we have to hold on to the light and hope of Christmas to press through the rest of the dark, cold mornings to Easter.

Lighting candles at the very end of the Christmas season when everything has gone dark is a tradition I am definitely going to begin this year.

And therein lies the beauty of A Homemade Year. You can take a tradition this year and leave it the next, or try a new recipe, or just open your heart to a new story. There are so many different ways you could use the pages of this book to enrich your family life and faith, but Jerusalem makes certain that you are free from feeling you have to do them all. No, she is a busy mama herself and she understands what it is like to already have too much to do. She is all grace as she invites you into her book of ideas, reminding you to take from it only what brings you joy.

Jerusalem and me at Moss Mountain Farm

I have saved this post for December because in the flurry of Holiday Gift Guides on the interwebs, I have to put in a word for books at Christmas. They are still my favorite gift to give or to receive, and this book would be a treasure for any family.

To celebrate Christmas on my blog, I have decided to give away one copy of A Homemade Year as a gift to you, my dear readers! I am so thankful for you, and because you come back again and again for my stories, I know you will love reading Jerusalem’s!

Happy Christmas, Friends!

This giveaway is open to anywhere Amazon delivers. So that’s pretty much everywhere, right? Just leave a comment to enter! Tell me a treasured Christmas tradition, or share a favorite holiday story!

(I will choose a winner on Friday and notify by email!)

The post A Homemade Year + Merry Christmas Giveaway appeared first on Alison Chino.

I made these ornaments as a child with my mother. I think we made 56 snowmen one year.

I have been homebound with sick ones this week so instead of attending Christmas school parties we stayed in our pajamas for four days while sorting legos and making ornaments.

And watching The Lord of the Rings.

I’ve never noticed before how many parts of The Lord of the Rings remind me of my Grandmother.

It’s been a productive week around here. (sarcasm)

There is a shocking lack of baked goods and wrapped presents, but no shortage of silver spray painted ornaments.

I’m pretty sure that in some small way this is bringing balance to the universe.

In other news, my sister opened a restaurant this week. Now there’s something you can’t do in your pajamas.

You should go and visit her at Blackberry Market if you live anywhere near Glen Ellyn, Illinois.  And if you aren’t staying home in your pajamas.

However, if you find you are staying in your pjs sometime soon, you can probably make these salt dough ornaments without leaving the house.

Salt Dough Ornaments

2 cups flour
1 cup salt
3/4 cup warm water
1 tablespoon oil

Shape, mold or roll out dough. (bring on the cookie cutters)

Bake on cookie sheets for 1 hour (or until hard) at 325 degrees F.

Allow to cool and paint as desired.

Enjoy!

The post Salt Dough Ornaments appeared first on Alison Chino.

Here are my Advent Readings for this year.

My six year old, Simon, is counting down the days until December 1st.

He remembers fondly that even though there is currently no evidence of the coming season in our house, we usually start Christmas on December 1st with the opening of advent calendars.

I have an activity advent calendar that I fill up with plans for December.  And I have another one that sits on the table with daily readings.  However, Simon is more concerned with the advent calendar that comes filled with tiny chocolates that he gets to eat before breakfast for the entire month of December.

His daily reminders that DECEMBER IS COMING are also serving to creak open the part of my heart that is hoping for Advent.  If I am still for a minute, I can admit that I am also longing for a coming.

Before I can pull out the Christmas boxes, I am looking to a familiar place to answer the cries of my heart.  To words.

If a word is helpful to you in preparing for Christmas, here are a few tried and true places I am going.

Preparing for Christmas by Richard Rohr

This one is new this year.  It is a tiny collection of daily readings for December that I can carry in my pocket or purse.  I came to love Richard Rohr when a friend gave me Falling Upward, so even though I have not yet read this selection, I feel certain it will become a treasured addition to my Christmas.

Watch for the Light

This collection had been a favorite for a few years now.  Filled with 40 essays and poems by all different writers, these rich reflections are a feast for the soul.

Good News of Great Joy

This might be the easiest addition to your Advent collection.  It is a free download of daily readings from Desiring God Ministries.  I’ve already read through the first few days and they are beautiful.  Now on my phone and Kindle, a word for today could not be more easily accessible.

WinterSong  by Luci Shaw and Madeleine L’Engle and A Widening Light by Luci Shaw

These are Christmas poetry collections I found a few years ago through another blogger.  I love to gather them up and sit with a cup of mulled spiced wine under the Christmas tree lights and read.  (This image is almost the motivation I need to get my Christmas tree up.)

Christmastide: Prayers for Advent through Epiphany from Phyllis Tickle

I go in and out of seasons of praying these Divine Hours.  When I come back to them, it is like coming home.

What the Land Already Knows by Phyllis Tickle

My friend Jerusalem introduced me years ago to these winter stories.  They are now both a yearly favorite and a reminder to me that I want to write down my own family stories according to the seasons.

Going back through my Christmas books is just what I needed to start to long for Christmas.

I found this quote in the second reading from Good News of Great Joy about God’s word, the words I most need at Christmas and always:

“Is not my word like fire, says the Lord!”

(Jeremiah 23:29)

Gather ‘round that fire this Advent season.

It is warm.

It is sparkling with colors of grace.

It is healing for a thousand hurts.

It is light for dark nights.

Do you have a favorite book of Christmas readings?  Please share it in the comments!

The post Advent Readings appeared first on Alison Chino.

My kitchen is covered in cookies today.

If you need a few all wrapped up for gifts, give me a holler.

Or you could make some yourself!  They are so yummy and happy!

Tomorrow I will be turning all my baking efforts solely to…

the cupcakes!

Over half of our cupcakes are already sold, so get your order in soon!

alisonchino at gmail dot com

Martha Stewart’s Sugar Cookies

Makes about 16 large cookies

Ingredients:

4  cups sifted all-purpose flour

1/2  teaspoon salt

1  teaspoon baking powder

1  cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter

2  cups sugar

2   large eggs

2  teaspoons pure vanilla extractor 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice and zest of 2 lemons

Directions:

In a large bowl, sift together flour, salt, and baking powder. Set aside.

Use an electric mixer to cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Beat in eggs.

Add flour mixture, and mix on low speed until thoroughly combined. Stir in vanilla or lemon juice and zest. Wrap dough in plastic; chill for about 30 minutes.

Heat oven to 325°. On a floured surface, roll dough to 1/8 inch thick. Cut into desired shapes. Transfer to ungreased baking sheets; refrigerate until firm, 15 minutes. Bake until edges just start to brown, 8 to 10 minutes. Cool on wire racks; decorate as desired.

Enjoy!

The post Christmas Cookies appeared first on Alison Chino.

I did a demonstration on Monday for an appetizer you can take to a holiday event that requires no cooking.

Just chop and assemble.  So easy.  And it’s Christmas colors!

Shrimp Dip

Ingredients:

8 oz cream cheese, softened

10 oz shrimp cocktail sauce

6-8 oz already cooked salad shrimp

½ green bell pepper chopped

2-3 small tomatoes, chopped

8 oz shredded mozzarella cheese

Directions:

Spread cream cheese on a platter.

Layer other ingredients.

Begin with shrimp and cocktail sauce.

Add bell pepper and tomatoes.

Top with mozzarella cheese.

Serve with Ritz crackers

The post Shrimp Dip appeared first on Alison Chino.