Christmas celebration highlights

For a couple nights before Christmas, I was just about to blog when one of our kids woke up and I had to keep him/her from waking everyone else up. Thus went several potential blogs.

Today, December 26, is called "boxing day" in England. We went to a Christmas cookie open house at the home of Joseph and Jana Roussel. We met them at St. Michael's Church and had Thanksgiving at their former apartment in 1997. We haven't really gotten to spend time with them since we left St. Michael's in 1998 to go to the U.S.

It was good to see their current home and hang with them and some of their friends. Our kids all did well there. The oldest two really enjoyed the cookies.

This is a brief 2 week window where we have more open time to see some people whom we normally aren't able to.

One important event that happened either on Christmas Eve or Christmas day was that our nearly 11 month old started crawling. We'll have to be more alert to her wanderings now.

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Our Christmas celebration went very well. We spent quite a bit of time getting ready for it during the days preceeding it. I did the grocery shopping. We all did some cleaning and arranging of the apartment. I also bought and installed a new toilet seat, as the previous one was an annoying nuisance. This celebration provided a good excuse to get our apartment in better order.

We had 7 guests for a meal that began at 2:00 p.m. with appetizers. The guests were 5 Frenchies (Pappy Alain, Grandma Antoinette, Aunts Lindsey and Nadine, and Pascal), Belgian David, and Korean pastor Kwon. It was a great group of guests who were enjoyable to have here and also were interested in our kids. To my surprise, the older 2 kids wanted to eat dinner with us, so we had 11 around the table. We discovered that our son likes gravy and turkey. Pasot Kwon took to our toddler daughter and was a huge help holding her.

My wife had a couple brilliant ideas that might become part of our Christmas tradition. One was a hot apple juice with cinnamon mixed in as part of the appetizers. The other one was a sharing of everyone of something in 2006 for which one is thankful. There was some significant sharing that took place.

We are blessed to have friends in Paris with whom to share these festivals and our lives. We spent quite a bit of money on the meal, but it was a good way to honor them. Generosity is part of what Christmas is about.

Our Belgian friend David talked about this book he had read that talks about different gifts that different European nations can bring. For example, Belgium has a natural bent toward being a faithful friend. This idea of different gifts that different nations have is very interesting to me.

I'm getting sleepy again, so I'll close for now.