Christmas 2009

While the majority of our friends flew to see and spend Christmas with family, PC, K1 and I stayed in Virginia and had our own little holiday celebration. Instead of buying gifts for each other, we decided to grab some 'angels' from an angel tree and buy them gifts instead. One of our angels said, "boys toys, ages 2-10". We had a blast with that one. We headed to Target and perused the toy aisles and made our selections. PC found a DeLorean matchbox car and I'm pretty sure he wanted to keep it for himself :). Blocks, Bananagrams, Legos, matchbox cars and art supplies littered our shopping cart. It was so much fun. We are hoping to make it a tradition to do something service oriented every Christmas with our family. It will be interesting to see how creative I can be to keep our children involved in our service escapades. PC and I dropped off the gifts and went home feeling pretty good.

The next morning we woke up to several inches of snow and more snow coming down. Choir practice was canceled and then church was canceled. I couldn't believe it. In my whole life, church has never been canceled. But I soon learned that Virginians don't know how to drive in the snow (since most don't have snow tires) and there aren't many snow plows to remove the snow AND the snow plows that are available are usually devoted to the freeways. It goes without saying that we stayed inside for the next several days. PC helped dig people's cars out on Sunday (for 5 hours!) and met many of our neighbors.
On Christmas Eve I decided to prepare a nice dinner for our family. I had a turkey in the freezer from Thanksgiving that I got out and defrosted. I've always felt like I could handle raw meat and not be squeamish, but pulling out the neck of a whole raw bird is NASTY. After the turkey was prepared, put in the oven and all the kitchen surfaces were sanitized, I started peeling potatoes, making jello, rolls, salad and all other yummy things for our feast. All the while not feeling rushed, but enjoying the whole process. Bliss. We sat down to our feast and enjoyed ourselves. Our turkey was a bit dry (we were paranoid about eating an undercooked bird) but anything can taste good with a fair helping of gravy, eh?After dinner we each opened our Christmas Eve ornaments. After which we read Luke chapter 2 and attempted singing Silent Night in German. Slightly embarrassing for me. I'll be better next year. We put K1 to bed and then watched Miracle on 34th street. A wonderful end to a wonderful night.
Christmas morning PC made a big breakfast and afterward we visited some friends. All in all, it was a lovely holiday and we feel we've started a few traditions that will hopefully continue in the years to come.