Our family Christmas worship time began with Bible reading ~ we read the entire story of Christ being promised in the Old Testament, to His eventual birth as recorded in the New Testament. Three of the children helped with the reading, each with different parts. Son G read the angel parts, son L read the part about Simeon, and daughter G read all the Mary, Elizabeth, and Anna parts. Hubby was the "narrator." This is a treasured time that I always look forward to each year.
After a time of prayer, we got ready to open gifts, when suddenly we had a visit from St. Nick himself!! St. Nick was tickled just about as pink as his bag to be able to surprise the family with his appearance. :-)
Our second daughter H fit into the "flow" of our family time extremely well. I had prayed (and many others had prayed) that this would be so, and God answered abundantly!
I was thrilled to receive camping/Grand Canyon themed stickers and paper, plus an album, to scrapbook our road trip this past summer!
Showing off my new cross earrings from second daughter H. You can't see them very well, but they are very pretty!
Movies for dad from daughter G!
The always-wonderful lego sets!
This big one, The Battle for Helm's Deep, was for two boys. The lego figures of Frodo and Sam are soooooo cute!! And somehow those amazing lego makers managed to make the little plastic figure of Aragorn handsome!
Snowboard!
Madden 13!
Son L, building a small lego set from his brother while listening to his new mp3 player clipped to his shirt pocket. He has hardly had those earbuds out of his ears since he got them. Glad I sprung for a more expensive, more comfortable set! We loaded music from the WOW 2013 cd's onto his mp3 player so it was ready to go. This boy loves his music!
I managed to pull off another fun technology surprise for my hubby. I had secretly bought him a blu-ray player about a month ago, and on Christmas Eve I hid it in the family room. During the gift exchange he unwrapped the Star Wars complete set on blu-ray, but didn't notice that they were blu-ray. He thought they were dvd's. So I leaned over, pointed to the words "blu ray" on the top of the boxes, and said in a disappointed voice, "Oh no! I must've bought the wrong ones! I'll have to take these back and get dvd's." To which hubby jokingly replied, "I just thought this meant you had gotten me a blu-ray player." To which *I* replied, "actually.....I did!" and pulled it out for him. The look on his face was priceless!!! Soooo fun to surprise him. He never buys new gadgets for himself, but deserves them (and so much more). Love doing stuff like that!
Lord, thank you so much for the blessing of my family. And thank you for the joy of giving them gifts. And thank you for the best gift any of us could ever receive, which you gave to us when Jesus was born.
