Shortly before Christmas, I received a wonderful gift. My Grandma's kitchen table. Like so many kitchen tables, it is so much more than just a table. It's a table full of memories. To me it will always represent the love of home. You only had to walk a few steps into my grandma's home to know it was a house full of love. You could see the love of family. The love of funny little things. The love of making your home nice, a place where people want to be.
Her refrigerator always had pictures of the family. She had a timeout doll placed in the corner of the kitchen, just because it made her laugh every time she saw it. And the table, visible within the first couple steps of entering the house, the table now in my home, was always decorated for the season or the holiday (and the far corner was always scattered with cards and pictures ready to go in the scrapbook she was working on).
She loved to decorate this table. Always thrilled to show me the new item she had purchased and ready to tell me where she bought it from and how good a deal she received. It was so much more than simple decoration thought. It was filled with her love to do something nice in her home. To make it warm and welcoming. To make it special for all who entered. Not just special, but nice. My grandma appreciated the nice things in life, but not in a way that was covetous or prideful. She just wanted things to be done nicely and was always so kind to make sure to share those things with me.
More than decorating your home and making it nice though, this table represents the love of family. When I think about it, I hear my cousins laughing, the aunts and uncles discussing lively and loudly whatever current event was taking place. I see smiles all around. I feel the coziness that comes from family being close. I remember the lunches I ate with Grandma on my trips back into town. I can picture her having little conversations with Thomas and just smiling a smile that showed absolute joy as she sat there and just looked at my babies.
A kitchen table, this kitchen table will remind me always of the very essence the Lord filled my Grandma's character with. She showed me that my love for the Lord and His Word needs to flow out of me in a way that spills all over my family. She was just simply content with the life (the wonderful and the horrible things that filled it) she was given. She knew it was all a gift from God and she allowed Him to fill it, she chose to fill it through Him with love.
I only hope my grandchildren can someday look at my silly old kitchen table and think the very same things. That God would help me to be the mom and the grandma that just simply loves her family through and through.
My first opportunity to begin this came this year on Christmas Eve. My sister ironed my new tablecloth, a gift from a friend with a pattern similar to the Spode plates I know my Grandma liked, I placed her Christmas salt and pepper shakers (empty!!) on the table, pulled out her gold silverware, the glass bowl in the top left was hers, the place mates she gave me years ago and delicately placed it all on the table with her love in my heart!
My dad and my sister prepared the meal with fun, joy and love (as they are much better cooks than I) and we sat down as a family to enjoy the fun!
I'd like to think that my Grandma would be pleased to have seen this and even more pleased to have been there. She would have been tickled pink to know all her things she had passed to me were being used. I can see her now, in her famous expression, a tilt of the head, saying, "oh, well, oh my..."
I love you, Grandma!!
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