Holiday Gifts from Your Garden

GARDENING

Holiday Gifts Made From Your Garden

Personal, handmade gifts are always the best, and as gardeners, we have many options to choose from. Of course, the more you plan ahead, the more materials you’ll have to work with. Here is a selection of garden gift ideas sure to please everyone on your list.

Use your herbs. Dried herbs packed in pretty glass jars are a welcome gift for the foodies on your list. Easy-todry favorites include bay leaves, tarragon, sage, and thyme. Stored in a cool, dry location, these herbs will hold their flavors for a year or two.

Teas can be made using herbs harvested from your garden. Dry the leaves by bundling and hanging them, or spreading them out on a piece of cheesecloth or an old window screen.

Popular tea plants include holy basil, also known as tulsi (Ocimum tenuiflorum), Lemon verbena (Aloysia citrodora), lemon balm (Melissa officinalis), mint of any kind (Mentha spp.) and anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum). Package a couple of bags of dried tea leaves with a tea strainer and voilà! — a perfect gift for a tea lover.

Herbal vinegars are versatile and easy to make. Start by packing a glass jar with fresh herbs, stems and all. Basils, rosemary, tarragon, lemon thyme or garlic chives all make flavorful vinegars.

Heat a mild type of vinegar, such as rice vinegar, almost to a boil and pour it over the herbs. Cover and store your infusions in a cool dark place for 2 to 4 weeks, then strain and pour the flavored vinegars into decorative bottles.

A holiday wreath, made using natural materials can last for weeks if hung on an outside door. You can start with a basic purchased wreath and augment with a variety of greens using a hot glue gun. From there, the list of possible adornments is endless. Cones, cayenne peppers, Thai peppers, okra pods, broom corn, dry wheat or rye stalks, coneflower seed heads, acorns and gourds are popular embellishments.

Grow gourds. Not only are they beautiful and interesting as is, they can be dried and decorated for use as holiday ornaments. Cut gourds from the vine when they are mature, leaving an inch or two of stem, and wash and rinse them. Place them where they will get good air circulation and turn them every week or two. Or, hang them from a fence or from tree branches.

Succulents are easy to propagate. Simply take a cutting and poke it into moist soil, keeping it moist until the

Herbal tea cutting develops roots. With many succulents, this happens within three to four weeks. Transplant your cuttings into small clay pots for attractive, easy-care gift plants.

Seeds from your garden, placed in envelopes decorated with a photo of the plant, are great gifts for gardener friends. Let a few of your plants go to seed for this purpose.

Keep in mind that the seeds of flowering plants that are insect-pollinated may produce flowers or fruits that differ from those on the parent plant.(Home Garden Seed Association) 

PUZZLES

SOLUTIONS

Opinion Unless otherwise stated, the views and opinions expressed are those of the respective authors and do not necessarily represent the views of The Signal.

READER LETTERS If I Am a Liberal...

So let me get this right. If I am a liberal, after this last election, I believe that people of all ages can’t make a decision whether to vape or smoke flavored products (Proposition 31 passed with almost two-thirds of votes) yet across the land we are being pushed to believe that 12- and 14-year-olds should be able to decide what sex they want to be. They can’t think for themselves about smoking, but can make a sound decision changing their sex! Hummm!

You can go to war for this country at 18, but can't buy tobacco products. Hummmm!

If I am liberal, I voted to have the personal right to have an abortion at any trimester, yet I voted to give the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors my vote as to who or who may not be sheriff of L.A. County! I gave them the power to fire someone I voted into office! Hummmm!

Eighteen is when most states say you are an adult. After that you should be able to make decisions about smoking, abortion, voting and sex changes by medical measures! Period! Wake up people! We are giving away all of our individual rights and giving those in government the right to make all those decisions for us.

Wake up soon, or you will be living the nightmare. Ronald Perry Canyon Country

An Interesting Overlap

Millions of otherwise sane people were vexed by Donald Trump enough to vote for a corrupt, creepy, incompetent alternative who, in just one month, asked to speak to a dead woman, claimed he was raised by Puerto Ricans, had to be escorted off stage, wandered off during a hurricane briefing and claimed his son “lost his life in Iraq.”

Consider further that millions of otherwise sane people were vexed by COVID — a germ rarely fatal even to the elderly or infirmed — enough to stand on dots, trust in Plexiglas, follow arrows around stores, wear worthless homemade masks, close down schools and businesses, force an experimental drug on everyone (including immune people), close parks and beaches, fire nurses and doctors, issue vaccine “passports” for something that prevented neither infection nor transmission, borrow and spend and inflate the currency unconscionably, and then fear/hate/muzzle anyone who dared to disagree.

Next: Consider how much these two groups overlapped.

Lastly: Consider how much the senile guy in the first paragraph advocated for all of the mindless madness in the second paragraph, and how major media, tech giants, and government bureaucrats censored and advocated for both. Rob Kerchner Valencia

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ETHICALLY SPEAKING

It Matters How You Christmas

Ican remember back in 1994 when, for the first time, a family asked the question, “Will you be holding services on Christmas since it falls on a Sunday?” When I assured them we would be gathering for worship, their response was “Oh good! We’ll be there!”

Since then, in 2011, 2016 and as recently as a few days ago, that same question has been raised with increasing frequency. But now, my response of “Absolutely we will be gathering to celebrate the faithfulness of God the Father in sending God the Son!” garners a shocked response. “Really? Don’t you know families have important traditions on Christmas morning?”

Turns out I do know about family traditions. Growing up our Christmas season was all about certain gatherings we attended, special goodies we ate, beautiful songs we sang, and most of all, a certain baby we celebrated. I still insist Jesus was born on Christmas Eve, clamor for stollen and springerle, and I even remember some of the words to “Stille Nacht,” and “O Tannenbaum.”

We celebrated on Christmas Eve, and as children we struggled to contain our energy as my father would read several Old Testament prophecies and their New Testament fulfillment texts before we could open our gifts. And yes, we also attended the Christmas morning service at our church even though I had a hard time listening knowing that new basketball was waiting for me at home.

But somehow, despite the joy they brought, those traditions never replaced what they were meant to celebrate. After all, Christmas in our home was always about the faithfulness of God the Father in fulfilling his promise to send God the Son into the world to save his people from the power and penalty of their sin.

So, when folks ask if we’re having church services on Christmas Sunday, I know a couple things. First, I know they really don’t know me, or our philosophy of ministry at Grace Baptist Church. If they knew either, they’d know the answer without asking. And second, I understand the tension families today face when it comes to making a sincere religious ethic a life priority.

At the risk of offending some, here are a few reasons we’ll be gathering and celebrating the birth of Jesus on Christmas Sunday this year.

First, as I’ve already said, Christmas is – and has always been! – about God’s gift to us of a Savior. That doesn’t mean family traditions aren’t important, but it does mean that exalting Christ in those traditions must always be our priority. As Kevin DeYoung has said, “Family is a gift, not a god.” Second, in a time when our society is lurching away from a theistic worldview and the truth of natural law that flows from it, and our children are being bombarded with the images and ideology proclaiming that the psychologized, me-centered self is now sovereign, the way families celebrate Christmas matters. As a country we are reeling from the pervasive absurdity that has so recently become dogma. The effects of removing the guardrails of truth and love that have historically been derived from a theistic view of the world are clear for all to see. Natural law and its undeniable facts have been thrown out with yesterday’s trash and it feels like we’re all living inside a perpetual episode of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Spoiler alert: The emperor is naked, and so is the progressive ideology of wokism that is, for some reason, threatening to make cowards of us all.

I’m not suggesting that celebrating Christmas for what it really is and has always been will stop the this flood of silly irrationality. But I do believe putting some historical reality into our lives and those of our children will help us find some stability in the foundations of truth and tradition.

How you and I do Christmas really does matter. For almost 2,000 years, the world – not just us! – has taken time to build traditions, write songs, hold festivals, and engage in joyful celebrations to remember and commemorate that night outside Bethlehem when the most significant event in human history occurred. Are we really ready to say those who do so both intentionally and reverently are “on the wrong side of history?”

Because Christmas falls on Sunday we’ll be open for the business of worship, reverence and celebration. Join us if you can, but whatever you do, take some time to reflect on the historical reality that makes Christmas, Christmas. And when you do, you’ll be joining with millions around the world who are doing the same thing.

Merry Christmas!

Local resident David Hegg is senior pastor of Grace Baptist Church. “Ethically Speaking” ap-

pears Sundays. 