Merry Christmas!

The last completely "normal" Christmas for me was in December 2015 albeit I had no idea at the time that my mom's quality of life was going to drastically change in a matter of days or that she had only a little more than six months left to live. The pattern used to be that we'd celebrate Christmas with our immediate family on Christmas Eve, spend Christmas Day at Paul's parent's house with his side of the family, and then drive to Maryland to spend a few days with my side of the family. December 2017 was the last time I celebrated Christmas with Maurice as he didn't join us in 2018 and he passed away in the early part of 2019. In 2019 we only celebrated Christmas with Paul's side of the family. In 2020 we didn't see anyone outside of our immediate family. Today I'm hosting Christmas for Paul's side of the family. I believe it's the first time I've hosted them for this holiday, but I'm grateful for the change for this year because I think it would have been very, very hard to celebrate Christmas this December in what is now Al & Millie's house because I'd be thinking about how much we miss Paul's mom. This is her first Christmas in heaven. Aside from the absence of Maurice, my mom, and Paul's mom, this Christmas will be a lot closer to normal than the past two Christmases because we'll celebrate with both sides of our family.

The plans for today include the kids opening their gifts from us, eating pumpkin bread for breakfast (we usually have monkey bread on Christmas morning but we're waiting until tomorrow morning for that this time), eating a big meal with Paul's family, exchanging gifts with them, and finally my sister and her four kids are due to arrive around bedtime this evening. Tomorrow they'll go to church with us, have our main meal, and then go to an ice-skating party. My Dad and Margie plan to arrive at our house tomorrow evening. The kids decorated gingerbread cookies yesterday. Earlier in the week we made lemon cookies and pumpkin cookies. Today I'm planning to make sugar cookie dough so that it will be ready for my kids plus Wendy's three girls to use to make cut-out sugar cookies either tomorrow or Monday. We're also planning to watch Encanto on Disney+ at some point while they are here with us. I think my dad, Margie, and the Benners plan to leave on Tuesday afternoon. I think we'll have a total of eleven extended family spend some time at our house over the next few days which is a big change from zero last year due to COVID. Susie, Adam, Dad, and Margie will be meeting Milo for the first time as the last time Dad and Margie were at our house was in August 2020, and the last time Susie and Adam were at our house was August 2019.

One thing that has remained constant through the years is going to a candlelight service at church on Christmas Eve. Our church has services at 3pm, 5pm, and 7pm. Because Paul took the day off of work (yay!) we went to the 3pm service yesterday. We're not supposed to have a White Christmas today, but we did have a white Christmas Eve yesterday morning. The boys had fun throwing snowballs. It can be easy to get distracted from the true focus of the season - celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I hope that you and your family will have a blessed Christmas!