Happy Holidays!

I hope you all had a very merry Christmas! And that you and your families will have a wonderful new year! I really love this holiday season after the crazy busyness and rushing around the weeks before Christmas. Now it is a time to slow down and reflect, savor and enjoy the wonder and peace and joy of Christmas! Our Christmas celebration is always spread out beginnng with two familiy parties earlier in the month. Then there were two Chrismtas Eve services at our church. What a beautiful night that was!

Joel and Ivy were involved in the Christmas Tableaux during the first Christmas Eve service. Joel was a shepherd boy and Ivy was a townsperson. Ivy also sang in the combined children's choir. Mark sang in the Matins choir. It was a beautiful service! Then we all went back to church for the late night Christmas Eve service, a beautiful candle-lit formal service with lots of music. Mark sang in the Senior choir for that service. Jaden went to church in his pajamas because the service didn't end until 11:30 PM.

Christmas was a nice relaxing day here at our house. My mom came over and we took our time opening presents, laughing together, eating a big dinner and just enjoying the day.

The day after Christmas, we all went out to eat at the Olive Garden for dinner and then to Sight and Sound's Millennium Theatre to see Joel in "Miracle of Christmas." That was a spectacular production and we were so proud of Joel! It is always such a joy to see him perform and of course, the shows are wonderful. Later this week, we'll all be going to the Living Waters theatre to see "Voices of Christmas" and hopefully I'll get to see Joel perform "Miracle" one more time this week before the show closes.

That night was the earthquake, which I already mentioned. Thankfully we've had no aftershocks that could be felt! Yikes! We drove by the epicenter yesterday which is 2 miles down the road from us.

Mark has off work all week so we are enjoying the week off, catching up on sleep, having fun and looking forward to celebrating New Years Eve. Next Monday, we'll start school again and ease back into the daily routine and rythyms of school days! I love homeschooling, but I also really love the breaks!

Family Christmas Get-togethers

What a busy weekend it was! Friday night was Mark's company Christmas Party at Willow Valley. Saturday morning, Mark's sister Hope and bro-in-law Chad came over for breakfast. They drove down from New York to spend the weekend. Saturday evening we went to Mark's cousin Brandi's house for the annual family Christmas gathering. There were 30 of us....aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and Great-Grandma! It was so much fun - especially for all the little cousins! There were 9 kids in all.






Then on Sunday after church, Nana and Grandpa came over and spent the day with us. They brought down presents for Jaden's birthday and Christmas presents too! We had cake and ice cream to celebrate Nana's and Jaden's birthdays.

Unusual Christmas Presents

At a Ladies Tea at our church, our pastor's wife told about the gifts that her husband chose to give their four young adult children last Christmas. He gave each of them and their spouses.... BURIAL PLOTS!!!! I'm not kidding!!!!

We have a wonderful pastor and this was a very generous gift - burial plots aren't cheap! Our church has a new beautiful cemetary and those lots were on sale last year. I'm sure to him it was a very good and practical gift. Not a practical joke, but a practical gift!

But it struck my funny bone for sure! One of his sons, after thanking his dad, said, "But Dad, how will I tell the guys at the office what I got for Christmas???!!!"

As my husband and I were laughing about this the other night, I said, "Only a Presbyterian pastor would give a gift like that!!! After all, Baptist pastors would never give burial plots to thirty somethings because the Rapture would make that completely unecessary!!!"

And then we thought about it even further, Baptist churches don't have cemeteries either!!

I hope that made you smile and didn't offend our dearly loved Baptists! But the whole thing made us laugh all week!

It's Beginning to Look a lot like Christmas!

On Saturday, we all went to pick out the perfect Christmas tree. We came home with a beautiful Douglas fir just like always. (By the way, Jaden's middle name is Douglas because he's our Christmas baby!)

Here is the tree all decked out with hundreds of ornaments.

The only problem is that our two cats, Sasha and Starlet cannot resist the temptation of all those ornaments! Each morning we wake up to find a couple dozen ornaments all over the living room floor! We can do our best to prevent the un-decorating when we happen to be home and awake and near the tree, but when we are gone or asleep or out of the room, they go after that tree with tremendous enthusiasm!

Here is Starlet planning her next escapade!