One of the unfortunate things about the holiday season is how quickly it goes by. I did not grow up in the Presbyterian tradition, so the practice of Advent has been a relatively new and welcome one for me that’s made the Christmas season more rich and, better yet, prolonged. Yet, here we are a week later […]
A New Kind of Christmas for the Toones
This will be a different kind of Christmas for my family. For the first time—ever—we will not be celebrating Christmas in our family home. Cyndi and I sold it last spring and,a long with a lifetime of memories, we also left behind the venue that shaped every Christmas my kids ever knew. We won’t have a Christmas tree […]
An Heroic Rescue
It wasn’t a great movie, honestly, but it was an inspiring story. The other night, Cyndi and I watched “The Finest Hours.” It was the account of an unbelievably heroic rescue story. On February 18, 1952, during a severe “nor’easter” off the coast of New England, an oil tanker, Pendleton, broke in half. The bow sank, killing all […]
Christmas Memories
Christmas begins in July for the Dickersons. Choir directors start music research, purchasing and rehearsing long before the average person even thinks about the holiday (unless you are like my grandmother who had her shopping finished by March!). The tree, on the other hand, doesn’t make an appearance until Thanksgiving weekend. This year, our sixteen-year-old […]