Evening Whisper
Art Print
McNaughton, Jon
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Rosen
Art Print
Kruger, E.
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Rosen in Silberner Schale
Art Print
Kruger, E.
Buy at AllPosters.com
There has always been a spiritual aspect in the duties of homemaking. Without it, jobs become only tolerable and mundane. Many women new to full time homemaking have difficulty grasping the purpose of homemaking. They see it as housekeeping only. They quickly use up their enthusiasm for the role, when they only experience the material things like cooking, cleaning, laundry, ironing, and general home care. They do not realize that there are ways of doing these important tasks that improve the mood, and make it home-sweet-home; the kind of place that memories are made of. When little symbols and touches are added to the hard work, a home develops a spiritual atmosphere
Cleanliness and orderliness at home is not enough, if you want to have a feeling in your home. This feeling is achieved by adding private symbols that have meaning beyond their mere existence. Someone collected a list of these ennobling things for me to put on this blog.
Our little-miss-critic, who comes on this blog regularly, reminds us that these are "drudgery jobs" and she hires someone else to do them. She only wants to do things she enjoys. She is missing the spirit of the home. She does not understand the ennobling effect of adding the private symbols while putting the house in order, cleaning things, arranging, or rearranging.
To add your own private symbols and create more warmth or excitement in the house, consider doing the following:
1. Collect a stack of letters from your mother or grandmother or a friend, tie them in a bundle with a wired ribbon and add a piece of rosemary or a rose from the garden. Place it on a shelf or table, to remind you of the person and their contribution to your life.
2. Bring in flowers from your garden, or buy just one exquisite rose from the grocery store, and place it in a bud vase or a narrow bottle from your kitchen.
3. Cut out pictures from catalogs and magazines, or print your own from the web, and put them in frames.
4. Display your favorite books embraced by pretty book-ends. You can embellish plain book-ends with all kinds of things, even potted plants, to give them a more interesting look.
5. Get out all the linens and doilies that you never use and put them under lamps, over picture frames, on tables, draped over curtains, and on little shelves. It softens the look of the home, and it somehow seems quieter when these linens are covering the hard surfaces of tables and windows.
6. Add sea shells, beautiful rocks, or colored bottles to your window sills.
7. A candle in a candle holder is a nice touch, and it reminds us that even in the age of electricity, we can still use the same kind of light that our forefathers used from the beginning of time. If you use scented ones, particularly those that remind you of homey things, like cinnamon, the home feels more homey.
8. Put a bowl of fresh fruit in the kitchen.
9. Fold towels with the folds facing out, and stack them in the bathroom on a shelf or bench.
10. Display tea cups in the dining room.
11. Handmade crochet rugs really make a sitting room look homey.
12. Have one of your children play the piano or sing, during the day, or play soothing c.d.s and tapes while you clean house.
13. Hang beautiful artwork, even if it is a print, in your home. It has a refining and nobling effect on the occupants.
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