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Whew!! We’re finally finished with what Eric calls “marathon church” and are in the process of recovering for the craziness of the holiday. There are always a lot of extra church services during the holiday season, but the week leading up to Christmas is always the busiest.
This year, since Christmas Eve was on a Monday, we had normal weekend services, meaning one on Saturday night and two on Sunday with Bible class, Sunday school, and youth group in between, and then the Christmas services Monday and Tuesday. There are always two Christmas Eve candlelight services, one at 6:30pm and one at 10:00pm. And of course there’s a Christmas Day service at 10:00am.
Six services in 4 days. Wow! No wonder church workers and their families are exhausted!
Of course, this year, we’ve added our Judah to the family so instead of having a quiet home life beforehand and a low key Christmas afternoon dinner and gifts with my mom as we did in years past, we had Eric’s dad, stepmom, and brother visit. Which is awesome since Judah is their first grandchild/nephew. We had a great, but short, visit with them. They had to leave on Christmas Day to make sure they got back up to northern Wisconsin before a snowstorm hit. But thank God the weather was good for travel when they left!!
Judah was only marginally interested in gift opening. He had a tendency to rip off a small piece of wrapping paper and play with it. He got SO. MANY. PRESENTS …. He is such a loved little boy.
These books are so cool! He got them from Eric’s brother and his fiancee.
It was really nice to get back to baking this year! I didn’t make as much as I used to once upon a time, but that’s ok. Two old standbys (chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter blossoms – Who knew there were so many peanut butter blossom recipes out there??) and one new recipe ( a slightly adapted chocolate candy cane cake from Sugar Hero) were well worth it.
We’ve been trying for a couple years to figure out a Christmas dinner to make our tradition. It needs to be something easy and relatively quick since we’re trying to keep things low key. We tried homemade pizzas a couple times, but they just didn’t turn out for us. This year, I made turkey tacos, and quesadillas for Judah, and that seemed to work pretty well! We had crunchy taco shells and tortillas for soft tacos in case one of us had the desire for one instead of the other. It was yummy! Plus, Christmas just happened to be on a Tuesday this year so we managed to do Taco Tuesday, too. (And speaking of Taco Tuesday, this taco pizza recipe is a perfect dinner for that!)
Unfortunately for me, Santa also brought me a lovely cold and cough so I’m off to rest up so that the house and I can be recovered for the new year (and my 40th birthday)!
What about you? Do you have any holiday traditions? Did your family do anything special this year?
