This is my second week of insane busyness and being in limbo with a cross-country move. I say “limbo” because one house has been packed up, but the movers haven’t arrived at the new house with all our stuff—including my computer. And so I haven’t caught a plane yet to make the move official.

While I want to be here in this space with you each week, you wouldn’t get my best right now. So I’ll remind you each week that my book is available—in paperback and as an ebook through Lulu—and would make a great gift under the tree (there’s still plenty of time!). Each week, I’ll also offer a popular repost from Christmas 2012.

And I promise to reply to your comments as soon as possible. Thanks for your grace and patience during this transition. Happy Advent!

Last week, I began a series for Advent on the colors of Christmas. This week’s focus is on the color red, one of the most traditional colors associated with the season. I remember a few years ago seeing a friend at church in November wearing a beautiful orange sweater, and she said she was trying to wear it one more time before December fashionistas dictated red as the “must-wear” color.

In Western culture, the color red has widely varying associations: blood, passion or love, danger, stop (like the color of most of the traffic signals I seem to see these days) and many things Christmas (candy canes, Santa’s suit, Rudolph’s nose, bows, holly berries).

Even our expressions use the color in varying ways. You don’t want to be “in the red” (in debt) at the end of the year. The parking deck at the mall may have you “seeing red” (feeling angry) as you struggle to find an open space.

“Red-letter days” are ones we anticipate for their celebrations and importance. We “roll out the red carpet” to celebrities and dignitaries. And we can even “paint the town red” on a fun night out. But we don’t want to get caught “red-handed” (in the act) when we’re snooping to discover the contents of our wrapped Christmas presents.

For Christmas reds, there is no end in what we can find in red. Let’s start with what blooms during this season:

A profusion of nandina berries in my yard

Read the rest of this original post.

Alas, while 2012 was a mild autumn and left me with beautiful geraniums (the ones I photographed for that post) to grace the front porch well into December, 2014 was harsher and forced me to chop off the geraniums even before the movers came to put the pots on the truck. I’m looking forward to planting geraniums at my new home, and maybe with a milder climate, they’ll last even longer than in my old home state.