Merry Christmas! We hope you and yours had a beautiful, blessed, delicious, relaxing, full holiday. We certainly did! Here are some pictures of our celebrations.
Our friend Carly came over to decorate cookies with us. We let Lucy get in on the decorating fun as well. This is a star, if you can't quite tell.
She wanted to alternate decorating cookies and loving on Charlie, which called for super-vigilance to make sure Charlie did not get decorated.
This is one of my favorites by Carly, which was the last cookie to be eaten.
Lucy is reading a book to Charlie.
Oops, she caught me.
That brings us to the big night. Christmas Eve! We had fish tacos for dinner. It started out as a joke. We were looking up traditional Christmas Eve dinners and apparently it's customary to have a fish feast (something like 7 different fish dishes, I can't remember). So, I asked James what kind of fish he wanted and he (jokingly) said fish tacos. But then it started to sound really good, so we just went with it. I'm really glad we did. I fried the fish and everything and it was delicious.
Then, we decided it was time to open presents. Now, we don't really talk about presents much with Lucy much so I didn't expect much of a reaction when I said presents (they weren't sitting out, they were hiding in a back room in plain brown boxes). Well, I couldn't have more wrong. We asked her if she wanted to open presents, and she started cracking up and in a wild delirium repeating "Open the presents! Open the presents!"
So, we got out all the boxes, and decided to first read the nativity narrative and sing a carol. During the nativity narrative, Lucy got really excited about the angels singing "Glory to God in the highest" and repeated the presents reaction with "Glory to God in the highest."
Then it was time to "rip 'em" as my brother used to say.
I know, it's a funny looking bunch of presents. All of our presents were shipped here, and most of them through Amazon. I was going to let Lucy decorate them, but... I ran out of time.
Oh, by the way, this is our Jesse Tree. We don't have room for a Christmas tree, so this is our official tree of the year (it's a posterboard taped to our wall). Each little picture represents a Bible story leading up to the birth of Christ. We put a picture up and read the corresponding Bible passage every night in Advent. Lucy LOVES the Jesse Tree and can tell you what each picture stands for, including Melchizedek (which was "Monkey My Duck" for a while).
So, we finally opened the first big box, which had tons of great stuff in it. And Lucy picked out one book, sat down and pored over it for a good long while. She is so funny.
Charlie says, "Open another present already!"
One box even had some Grandma Stanley Christmas cookies in it!
Charlie checking out his new truck.
Now here are a lot of pictures of the kids opening their toys, for the grandparents.
(I think that one is from us though.)
Lucy was really excited to get some books that she usually has almost constantly checked out from the library (she cries when we have to take them back).
Lucy was also very excited to get a little set of percussion instruments. Her face when she opened these and realized what they were was priceless.
She was so overwhelmed with the excited that she covered her face.
Charlie is rolling in the teethers now. He is enjoying all the textures and colors, contrary to what this picture might suggest.
James and I got a ton of books! A very English Major Christmas.
After we opened presents, we hung around for a while and then went to midnight mass. I know you are thinking we are nuts right about now, and I don't think I would argue with you about that. But! We had a great time at midnight mass! Lucy stayed awake for the whole thing and was even well behaved! She only got upset because she was really looking forward to singing the Gloria (you don't sing it during Advent and she always notices if something is different), but they sang it in Latin and she didn't recognize it. She kept whining "Ohhh, can't sing Glory to God!" so I had to whisper it to her. She had finally accepted it when they read the Gospel, which included the angels saying "Glory to God in the highest." And all was right with the world. My favorite part was watching Lucy's face light up when she saw the manger scene. It's something I'll always remember, but probably never be able to describe.
Christmas Day we slept in, ate waffles with strawberries, stayed in our pajamas all day, and ate a huge dinner. I tried to make Bananas Foster flambe-style, but burnt it. The timing is a little tricky. Oh well! It was okay because we were just going to put it on top of ice cream anyway, so we just put other things on our ice cream!
A couple days later, Lucy started playing this game where she arranges blankets very carefully in a laundry basket and then sits in it forever. Later, it came out that she is playing "baby Jesus in the manger." We laughed pretty hard.
Later in the week, our church had a living Nativity scene, which is inspired by St. Francis of Assisi. Several families with babies volunteered to dress up as the Holy Family and they even had animals.
Needless to say, Lucy really enjoyed it.
On New Year's Eve, we decided to carry on the Stanley tradition of fondue! We had cheese and cheese-like fondue with all kinds of dippers-- bread, crackers, sausage, a huge veggie tray and a huge fruit tray. Then we had chocolate fondue with strawberries, marshmallows and cookies.
Please believe me: Charlie smiles at us almost non-stop... until he sees the camera. I so want to capture that beautiful little smile and often spend a long time trying to capture it, but to no avail. He just gives me the deer in the headlights look, but who am I kidding, that is cute too.
This is as good as I could get.
We very much missed all of our family and friends back home this Christmas, but have been happy to connect with many of you in one way or another. Though we're far away, we've been truly blessed by a lot of little (and big) reminders that we are loved. We hope and pray that all of you are having a wonderful Christmas season!
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