After purchasing items for my shoeboxes to send out through Samaritan’s Purse all year, the time to pack and deliver the boxes has finally arrived! National collection week is November 12-19, so you still have time this weekend to collect your gifts if you’d like to participate.

I set a goal for myself this year of packing 10 boxes for $100 or less. I met my goal, but it was not a cakewalk! I literally have kept an eye out for deals pretty much since I sent off my boxes last year. As I am wont to do, I got a bit obsessive about it as a project. But I had a heart check last week when I was at Target maniacally debating over spending my last $12 on some extra little trinkets. I was looking at this as a shopping challenge, and I found it very satisfying to get great deals. I had to remind myself that the end product is not about me. It’s about the children who will receive my boxes, and who will hopefully receive joy from the items inside. It’s about sending the Christmas spirit to someone who likely has little else in the world. And so what if I didn’t get the absolute best deal on toothpaste that I could have? Once I realized that, it became fun again: I pictured the kids and wondered what country they live in. I thought about the girls putting on the stretchy plastic bracelets I bought them and the boys trading the bouncing balls. I said a little prayer for them all and tried to be mindful as I finally packed the boxes. That’s what this is all about.

But given how caught up in it all I got, I’m not sure I’ll pack boxes again next year, at least not on this level. I couldn’t afford to do 10 boxes if I didn’t find deals, so it was a great experiment to try that allowed me to potentially bless more children than I could have otherwise, but I didn’t go about it in the right mindset. I might try to find a local ministry that does something similar and perhaps volunteer with them, so that I’d get to spend time with some kids and be reminded of the bigger picture. We’ll see. But for now, the boxes!

I came in right under budget at $98.50.

I didn’t buy the plastic shoeboxes at Target this year, in order to save those $10. I found 3 shoeboxes in our closet, and then conveniently, Andy and I both got new running shoes recently, so I snagged those as well! I as able to pick up 5 pre-printed, foldable boxes at the Becoming Conference to round out my 10.

I packed 5 girl boxes and 5 boy boxes for the oldest age group, 10-14.

There’s a fair amount of overlap, though the girls got jump ropes and bracelets while the boys got slinkies and bouncy balls. Both got socks, but I found Hello Kitty socks on clearance for the girls. I tried a different tactic this year and wrapped some of the shoeboxes (which, sidenote, was HARD!), along with tying things inside with ribbon to make it more festive!

Each child will also get an Atlanta postcard with a note from me.

I love picturing the kids’ faces when they see the picture of all the big skyscrapers downtown. It was a bit difficult to know what to write. I tried to keep the language simple, imagining that they might be only fledgling English readers (if even that). I mostly just said Merry Christmas and that I hope they enjoy the gifts, but I varied it from card to card. This is something I haven’t done before but that Samaritan’s Purse recommends as a nice touch!

Here they are all ready to go:

I used the relatively new feature that Samaritan’s Purse offers of making your donation (they suggest $7 per box to cover shipping) online. Then, the labels you print have a personalized barcode so that they can track your boxes and send you an email letting you know where they go! This would be particularly cool if you have kids, because you could turn it into a mini-geography and culture lesson. (Though, not gonna lie, I find that pretty fascinating, too.) So soon enough I’ll know what country my humble little boxes end up in!

Samaritan’s Purse offers helpful guidelines for packing boxes, and you can follow along with the things I’ve bought and check out last year’s boxes in these posts:

• Operation Christmas Child Deals
• Nearly Free Shopping Trips
• 2011 Operation Christmas Child Finale

Jenny at Southern Savers is a big supporter of this ministry, too, and she usually posts some last minute deals, so click on over to her site if you’re planning on doing some shopping this weekend!

It seems so early to be getting in the Christmas spirit, but I’m sending these boxes out into the world with a hearty dose of love and cheer.

A couple of weeks ago I was selected through Rachel Held Evans’ blog to be part of the launch team for her newest book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood.

The book officially launched a week ago, so you may have heard about it by now. Rachel has appeared on numerous talk shows and been featured in magazines and on radio segments. The book is currently #2 on Amazon in the “Theology” category and not far behind that in Spirituality and Christian Living. It’s making decently-sized waves in evangelical as well as more liberal Christian circles.

I’ve been reading Rachel’s blog for several years now so was able to follow along with frequent posts as she executed the project. Here’s the gist of it: Rachel grew up in a conservative Evangelical church where women were not allowed to preach and were encouraged to assume traditional roles in their homes and marriages. Rachel grew up and started asking hard questions. She got married, and she and her husband Dan found that they somewhat inadvertently eschewed all the traditional roles they had assumed they would embrace and created for themselves an egalitarian marriage. Rachel started delving into these issues and found a whole wealth of literature espousing the “Biblical womanhood model,” which she came to view as a misinterpretation of the Bible she loves. So, she embarked on a somewhat kooky project: for one year, she would follow every edict in the Bible that said something about women. She ended up doing things like wearing a headcovering, calling her husband Master, praising him at the city gates, cooking through a Martha Stewart cookbook, and caring for a computerized baby. (You can read more about it here and check out some FAQ’s.)

I expected to love the book. I really did. I was excited about it from the first wind I caught of it on Rachel’s blog. It seemed like a really interesting experiment that could make a lot of bold claims about the role of women in Christianity. But honestly, I had trouble getting through it. First of all, the projects Rachel chose seemed odd to me. Many of the rules she followed were from the Jewish culture, and she even made an orthodox Jewish friend who directly guided her through many of them. Yes, I am well aware that Christianity grew out of Judaism and that the culture in which Jesus preached and lived was Jewish. I am well aware that the entire Old Testament follows the story of the Jews. But to me, if Rachel was trying to refute the likes of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, choosing Jewish customs was not the track to take, because I don’t feel like these are the scriptures that people get hung up on.

Secondly, while the projects themselves were fascinating, in practice the book felt disjointed to me. Rachel tried to tell us about so many projects that I felt shorted on most of them. An entire experience had to be boiled down to just a page or two. Perhaps I’m spoiled because in reading her blog I’ve gotten a more fleshed out, longer term view of things, but I wanted more detail about fewer projects–maybe the ones that impacted her the most, for example.

And my final concern is that this is not the book that is going to convince a Christian who ascribes to a patriarchal worldview to change his or her mind. I expected to have a lot of “ah hah!” moments while reading this book, but in fact I had very few. And if that was my experience, as someone who already mostly agrees with Rachel’s stance, I can’t imagine what someone deeply entrenched in the notion that she has to be a silent wife and homemaker would make of it.

Here’s where I often run into problems with feminism: if the point of feminism is to allow women the freedom to choose what they want to do with their lives, than what of the women who decide to be homemakers and stay-at-home moms? I often feel like those women are belittled by the staunch feminists as simply being part of a partiarchal hierarchy that they need to escape. But you know what? I believe, as unpopular as it may be, that men and women are different. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be paid the same or have the same rights, but I think that at root, we have some fundamental differences, and I also believe that’s Biblical. And I think that a woman choosing to live out what she feels to be her deep calling is beautiful. Just because men and women are different doesn’t also mean that all women and all men are the same as each other, but I think there are things we each are better suited for. Not all women who stay at home or choose to be the primary homekeeper are doing it out of a sense of obligation to the patriarchy or because they’ve been forced to. I work, but I also cook dinner every night, do all of the laundry and much of the cleaning, and pour Andy a beer occasionally when he gets home from work. I do these things because they bring me great joy and because I feel that I am well-suited to keeping our home pleasing. Am I less of a woman because I have chosen to be this way? I don’t think so. So I’m tired of feminists making me feel like I should want more for my life. I have crafted a life that makes me happy, and will continue to craft it as my circumstances evolve, and I don’t think it’s worth any less just because some of my choices happen to line up with a conservative viewpoint of marriage and the family.

So, all that said, I think A Year of Biblical Womanhood is a great rallying cry for a specific subset of people: women who grew up in conservative churches or families that they’ve since pegged as oppressive who have changed the way they live to a more egalitarian position for women and men. Plenty of bloggers and tweeters that I follow are in that category have shouted hoorays over this book. But for people like me who perhaps straddle the fence, and especially for people who haven’t toed up to the line at all, I’m not sure what the book will do.

I’m sounding terribly harsh, and I don’t particularly want to be. I’ve come to feel that I know Rachel from reading her blog, and I like her, and I think she’s doing great things in the world. The writing in the book has moments where it absolutely shines and passages that assert truths in a manner that can’t be ignored.

And some of her conclusions are absolutely irrefutable to me: that “The Bible does not present us with a single model for womanhood, and the notion that it contains a sort of one-size-fits-all formula for how to be a woman of faith is a myth.” She also writes, “If love was Jesus’ definition of ‘biblical,’ then perhaps it should be mine.” And this: “We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible to our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we reading with the prejudice of love or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed?”

But to be honest, this book has me all confused, because I’m finding myself typing this post out of a much more conservative stance than I thought I had in me. When I read the section of A Year of Biblical Womanhood that dealt with Proverbs 31, rather than feeling freed by Rachel’s conclusions about it (“The woman […] in Proverbs 31 is not [an] ideal […] she is present in each of us when we do the smallest things with valor”), I felt cheated. I thought, “But wait a minute–I kind of WANT to be that woman!” So now I’m just all in a tizzy and I’m not sure what sort of woman I am, or why. If nothing else, the book has got me standing back at my proverbial drawing board of Self, and that can’t be a bad thing.

I guess I can rest in one of Rachel’s conclusions, that “One does not have to understand to be obedient [to God]. Instead of […] that intellectual understanding which we are so fond of, there is a feeling of rightness, of knowing, knowing things which you are not yet able to understand.” Hopefully, with the “prejudice of love,” that will get me somewhere.

When fall comes around, I go pumpkin crazy. I’ve always loved the pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, but I’m not sure I ever thought about enjoying pumpkin outside of that one day a year until Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes came into my life. Now, I’m one of those people who gets excited when it’s featured on their menu again every year (though one of my coworkers reminded me that you can get whatever flavor drink you want at Starbucks all year round). Even though we don’t usually get much of a fall in the South, once the calendar hits September, I have pumpkin on the brain. When I realized I had a preposterous number of pumpkin recipes pinned, I decided to share them here. Here's the 7th of 10 different pumpkin recipes for your gustatory pleasure!

Scones have been oversimplified for me by the "just add water" mixes we've gotten from Andy's family in Ireland, but when I told my mom I was making these pumpkin scones recently, she reminded me of the couple of scone fails she and I have had. Oh, right. Scones are not the simplest baked good! And yet, with this recipe from The Shoebox Kitchen (originally on http://sweetpeaskitchen.com/) I was able to easily turn out a batch of beautifully glazed, light and fluffy scones. Success!

The cast of characters looks pretty familiar by now:

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 6 tablespoons cold butter, cut into 1-inch cubes
• 1/2 cup canned pumpkin
• 3 tablespoons half-and-half
• 1 large egg

Coincidentally, I had EXACTLY 3 tablespoons of half and half left in my carton, which I hadn't known until this point in the recipe. (I was going to substitute milk up to the right amount if needed.)

Spiced Glaze

• 1 cup plus 3 tablespoons powdered sugar
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• Pinch of ground ginger
• Pinch of ground cloves

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. (I never actually do the preheating bit until later on. I'm not sure why. It just stresses me out a little bit if the oven is hot and I'm not ready to put my stuff in it yet!)

In a mixing bowl, whisk together the pumpkin, half-and-half, and egg.  Set aside.

There's that beautiful orange color I've come to know and love!

Sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger together into a large mixing bowl.  Add the cubed butter on top. (I don't actually have a sifter, so I rigged the contraption below. Worked just fine!)

The recipe I followed called for the mixing to be done with a pastry blender, stand mixer, or food processor, but I happen to know that your fingers can work just as well (which is good, since I only have one of the above electronics and didn't feel like getting anything else dirty by using it). With a light hand, pinch the pats of butter between your fingers until the dry ingredients mixture begins to stick to them. You eventually want a coarse mixture of butter and bits of flour, etc.

Gradually add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix gently. You want to stop mixing as soon as all the dry ingredients are moistened--scones get tough if you work the dough too much!

This batter is STICKY! I started mixing with a spatula and then tried to use my hands, but I got so much goop on my fingers that I ended up washing my hands and switching back to the spatula.

I don't have pictures of the next few steps because, well, my fingers were covered in the aforementioned goop. Having a co-pilot might be helpful if you decide to make these scones, because it's awkward when you need to grab something but your hands are all batter-y!

On a well-floured surface, flatten and form the dough into a 12″ x 4″ x 1″ thick rectangle. (Emphasis on the WELL FLOURED, and you'll probably want to flour your hands, as well.) Using a sharp knife or pizza cutter, divide the rectangle into three equal pieces, then slice each piece into four triangular pieces by making an “X” through them.

My rectangle didn't quite make it to 12", and it was thinner than 1" thick, but I decided that having it not quite the right size was better than working the dough too much. (And I see now that it was probably more than 4", so that was my problem! And yes, that's a ruler you see over there. I measured...but clearly only one direction! Whoops!)

Place the triangles of dough on the parchment-lined baking sheet and bake for just 15 minutes, or until light brown.  Remove to a cooling rack and let cool before icing.

I mixed up the sugar glaze while the scones were baking. The original recipe called for a double glaze: one plain sugar and the other spiced, drizzled in a nice little pattern. I decided for simplicity's sake to just make the spiced glaze and use it as the primary. It's amazing how easily powdered sugar and a little bit of milk mix together to make a liquidy glaze!

Not the prettiest color, but it tasted delicious!

 The scones turned out beautifully, and thanks to the parchment paper there was neither sticking nor clean-up. :-)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're all slightly different shapes...

I let them cool for a bit and then used this weird plastic brushy thing (I guess maybe it's a pastry brush of sorts, or a grill basting brush? Whatever, it worked.) to slather the glaze all over them. I put some newspaper under the wire rack at this point so that my counter wouldn't become glazed in the process.

After a little more cooling, the glaze hardened up nicely. The scones themselves aren't super sweet, so the glaze adds a nice bit of sugar and spice. I think the pumpkin makes these a bit cakier than your typical scone, which is perhaps why they seemed easier. No dense, dry scones here! I enjoyed one as an evening snack and one for breakfast the next morning, which was delicious reheated for about 20 seconds in the microwave.

Bon appetit!

Until recently, I’ve always thought of my crockpot as a weekday timesaver. I’ve been using it at least once a week lately to have a great dinner ready when I get home from work with little to no fuss on my part. But I recently signed up for a volunteer role at church on Sundays that keeps me at church until about 1:00 on the days I do it. Couple that with doing a weekly Bible study at 7 PM on Sundays, and the day often gets away from me! It struck me one week that I could set the crockpot up before I headed to church and then I could grocery shop and do all my regular Sunday afternoon activities and STILL have dinner on the table in time for us to eat together at 6 before I needed to leave! (Though, funny story, the first Sunday I tried this I got home from church and FREAKED OUT because I couldn’t figure out why the apartment smelled like something was cooking. Oh right! It’s because something WAS cooking! It was Brunswick stew, to be precise.)

You might be thinking, “DUH!” but it was a bit of a revelation for me. It’s also nice if you have some activities keeping you out of the house on a Saturday but still want to have a fun dinner to eat while watching a football game or movie. I always feel this compulsion to make weekend dinners “special,” but there’s honestly often not much more time to cook on the weekend than there is during the week! Plus if I’m in the middle of other things, it’s not always fun to have to drop everything and get immersed in cooking. So AS I TYPE THIS (it’s Saturday), I have these crockpot enchiladas going to accompany our football watching this evening!

Crockpots also tend to get a bad rap for only allowing you to cook unhealthy things, but they’re really quite versatile. Sure, Velveeta Rotel dip is delicious, but you can also make things like this healthy black bean soup or another one of our favorites, lentils and sausage.

Here are a few of my favorite game-watching, crowd-pleasing, weekend-worthy crockpot recipes:

• Slow Cooker Babyback Ribs
• Crockpot Barbecue Chicken
• Crockpot Chicken Taco Chili (also happens to be pretty healthy!)
• Slowcooker Cheesesteaks

And a few that I’m looking forward to trying:

• Crock Pot Turkey White Bean Pumpkin Chili
• Chili Colorado Burritos
• Sweet Potato and Black Bean Burritos with Lime

I’m so glad I realized how nice it can be to use the crockpot as a conduit to having a tasty meal on the table even on the weekend! It makes my leisure time feel much more enjoyable, and leaves me time to make pumpkin scones if I happen to feel like it…(more on that later in the week).

Do you have any time-saving weekend trick? How do you use your slow cooker most often?

  I’m linking up to Works for Me Wednesday at WeAreThatFamily.com!

In theory, I support local bookstores.

That’s right, I said in theory. In practice, I buy most of my books from Amazon or from Better World Books (or from thrift stores, but that’s a slightly different story). Kindle aside, if I want a physical book, the prices on these two sites can hardly be beat. We have Amazon Prime, so 2-day shipping is free, making the convenience factor hard-to-beat as well. (Coincidentally, Better World Books also offers free shipping, but I don’t have an account with them, so I still have to fill out some forms, unlike with Amazon.)

I realized my hypocrisy recently when I wanted to buy Gretchen Rubin’s most recent book, Happier at Home. I knew this was a book I’d want to underline in and possibly pass on to other people, so I didn’t want just the Kindle version. I decided ahead of time that when I was in Asheville before the Becoming Conference, I would pick it up at the local bookstore I planned to visit there. Well, after having to ask for help finding it, imagine my awkwardness at noticing the $26.00 price tag and going through an intense internal debate over whether or not to actually buy it. At that time, it was under $20 on Amazon (I knew because I had checked. And actually, it’s down to around $15.00 now.).

I ended up putting it back on the shelf. My frugality won out over my desire to support the local bookstore. But I felt like a fraud! How could I say I supported local bookstores when I couldn’t even bring myself to buy one measly book from one?! If I of all people, with my shop local, love books sensibilities, wasn’t buying, then how could I expect the masses to do it? And if the masses aren’t buying, how can we expect local bookstores to stay in business? I would be sad if local bookstores went out of business…so I would think that means I have a responsibility to actually shop at them!

I like the vibe of local bookstores. For all I love my Kindle, there’s still something about the feel of a book, and the beauty of the cover. I love walking around bookstores and pulling books off the shelves somewhat at randomly, checking out the artwork and touching the pages. I like the personal attention you can get at local bookstores, the knowledge of the staff, and the sense that they love books as much as you do. Local bookstores offer some great programs, too. Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, GA has camps and story times for kids, book clubs for adults, and they participate in local “Big Read” events. They’re active in promoting literacy in their area. I haven’t noticed that from, say, Barnes and Noble.

But even given all of that, I’m still torn. Frugality has come to be as much a part of my life as reading, and it feels like I’m doing a disservice to that value if I support my other value of shopping local. I don’t want to stop saying I support local bookstores, because I still do…in theory. I’m not sure if supporting them in theory matters, but I’m also not sure what would help convince me to spend more of my book money at them. So I’m at an internal impasse. I guess I’ll just have to live with myself and keep trying to figure it out.

Where do you buy most of your books? If you have a set of conflicting values, what helps dictate which one wins out in a given situation?

(Oh, and by the way, I ended up buying Happier at Home when I went to hear Gretchen Rubin speak at the Margaret Mitchell House. Yes, I paid $26 + tax. I decided it was worth it.)