The Black Christmas...

Here's how we're celebrating our Christmas. Last week, we celebrated Christmas as a family at home. It was a little bit different celebrating Christmas when it's 75 degrees outside and we're wearing shorts and a t-shirt, but we had a lot of fun.

For our "Black Christmas" (sounds pretty ominous doesn't it?) Taya made a special breakfast of overnight-egg-omelet and caramel french toast, it was excellent and with just the three of us it served as "Black Christmas Lunch" and "Black Christmas Dinner" too.


Next, we read the story of the first Christmas from the bible and tried to act it out using Isaiah's "Little People" nativity set. We got about two verses into it when Isaiah went running to his room and brought back two cars and a tractor to add to it, then a verse later baby Jesus was getting pulled out of the manger and finally one of the Wise Men went missing so we wrapped up the story shortly after that. Maybe next year...






We moved on to the gifts, which Isaiah really cared nothing about. The thing he was most fascinated by was the bows. What are they? How did they get there? What do they do? These were all questions we're sure he was looking for answers to. He took every bow off of every present and then peeled the little white sticky tag off and then carried them from room to room. In the absence of gifts next year, we're thinking of just getting him a big bag of gift bows.







Next, we started packing our suitcases and getting ready to head back home to Lynden to spend Christmas and New Years with Family. Isaiah is an old pro at flying now-at 19 months old he's been on at least 19 different airplanes.
We took a pit-stop at the Phoenix airport which has a great kids play area. It gave Isaiah a good chance to get out some energy and practice sharing his cars with the other kids.










Isaiah snuggled with Mom all the way to Seattle while Dad did some work.















Isaiah checks to make sure that our luggage gets off the plane safely-gotta keep an eye on how they're handling Teddy!

Our first impressions on flying back to the Northwest is the green (everything in Arkansas has turned brown by now), the ocean (we miss not being able to just drive out to the bay), and the cold (we definitely didn't pack warm enough clothes). Isaiah adjusted to the two hour time zone difference pretty quickly and he is loving spending lots of time with grandparents, aunts and cousins.


One of the highlights of coming back for Christmas was getting to help out with the free Christmas dinner that Dutch Mothers and our good friends Ladd & Katie put on for people in need here in the community. For many of these families this is their Christmas. It was an evening full of food, carols and Christmas cheer. After we served a good meal to all the families that came (over 250 people), their was a puppet show for the kids and they loved it! Next, we served dessert and there was a message on the gift of Christ and lots of door prizes for both kids and adults. It's always fun to see how these kids who don't have much at all instantly start sharing the gifts we give them with the other kids in their family and at the tables around them.

It says in John 3:16 that God loved us so much that he gave the gift of His son...God is a giver and he has made us in His image to be givers too. We love being a part of this dinner because it's always such a good reminder to us of the abundance of God's blessings to us and that when we share them with others we end up receiving the blessing ourselves.

Well that's a taste of our Christmas. So far it's been a great Black Christmas...in fact, we think that the only thing that would make it any better would be a White Christmas.