Christmas 2008

I have way too many pictures to put here so check out all the Christmas pics I posted on facebook :-)

Best Moments:

• Ella discovering a ton of present under the tree Christmas morning when there had been none the night before
• Continuing our tradition of making a birthday cake for Jesus together and Ella equating Christmas with Jesus' birthday much more than anything else (besides presents!)
  
• Ping (my SIL) discovering that Nancy (MIL) had spent a month learning a traditional, Chinese lullaby just to sing it to Silas (my 3 month old nephew)
• My Grandmother loving the hundreds of family pictures on the digital frame we got her so much she wouldn't get up to eat
• Me discovering that the big piggy bank my sister gave Ella has the name of our adopted Rwandan, Compassion child painted on it (that's who Ella always wants to save her money for but she only had a tiny piggy bank)

Worst Moments:

• Slight brawl when Ella started playing with Hannah's new dollhouse
• Having to take apart our kitchen plumbing to get out a clog of 16 egg shells (in between the trips to Chris' family and my family)
• The awkwardness of getting repeat presents and pretending you didn't
• Christmas being over :-(

I'm really thankful that I felt able to really savor the precious moments of this season (Luke 2: 19) in between the busyness. Also, in trying to teach Ella about the real meaning of Christmas, I was constantly reminding myself about that daily for the last few weeks also. My brother-in-law shared a few weeks ago about how "epic" is a popular word among the teenagers he works with to describe all kinds of things. He said it got him thinking about how really, it's the best word to describe the meaning of Christmas. Jesus' birth was much more "epic" than anything else that word could describe. Christmas celebrates the moment in time when God chose to intervene in human history in a totally unconventional, almost nonsensical fashion-through a feeble little baby. The fact that God could later offer salvation to the world through this once tiny infant, is amazing. What a sacred, holy-day to celebrate: God put on flesh so He could offer the world a relationship with Him. Wow. Epic.