Christmas

January 28, 2018

Christmas

I am so far behind on this blog. It's almost February and I haven't even posted about Christmas. It was a good holiday. I tried not to have the holiday be too busy but we still had a full, good holiday. We started the season out by going to see lights on Piper's birthday (December 1st). We did some other normal holiday things (had a party where Santa visited, hot chocolate bar, etc) as well but my favorite are always our Christ-Centered dinner, our Christmas Eve gift, and our letters to Jesus.

This year our Christ-Centered Christmas Dinner didn't seem as stressful to prepare for as usual. I had the boys help me and each of them helped set the tables, cook the food, decorate, etc. I loved it this year because they are finally old enough to really participate in putting in the thought and time to celebrate the family we chose. We chose the Baird's. Brother Baird is the counselor over Will in Young Men's and he is a kind, funny, happy guy. He is a pilot who flies private jets for customers and on one trip to Dubai he saw some origami paper for Will and brought it back as a gift. That is the kind of person he is. He puts so much thought into the boys in his quorum and is a really good counselor to Mike. Sister Baird is equally as kind and thoughtful as her husband. She is a wonderful mother to their daughter and a gentle person. One of the first things I noticed about Mikael is that when it was her time to do Sharing Time she didn't have any gimmick or games. She just calmly and quietly told a story. She didn't need extra things because the testimony she shared was sufficiently powerful to keep their attention. There is much more I could say about them both but we felt really good about having them over for our dinner. We made another ornament but this time we used acrylic instead of wood. We cut out a silhouette of Christ and put their name at the bottom.

For our Christmas Eve/Laila Gift we gave each of the kids a stained glass heart to hang from their windows. I was given a stained heart prism from a dear friend as a going away gift and we have it hanging in our family room and I wanted each of the kids to have something similar as their own to remind them of Laila.

I always love getting the box out with our letters to Jesus from the previous year. The kids always enjoy reading what they wrote and I think it's good for us to try and decide if we improved on the thing we "gave" to Jesus. My gift this year is optimism. It might take me work but I've been praying for the spiritual gift of optimism and hope to improve in that area. It's funny that I've been praying for the gift I want to give as a gift. haha.