Ho! Ho! Ho?

We had the Elders over for tacos tonight which is always a pleasant experience. Julie has communicated with Elder Thomas' mother before and thought it would be nice to send her an updated picture of her missionary son (he has been in our ward for over 7 months now! We usually take a picture of new elders in the ward, ask for their parents' email address and then send Mom & Dad a picture, they seem to like that). Do you notice anything sad in this picture of Elder Thomas and Elder Edwards?


It is a trick question because the sad thing is that the snowman (and it, in and of itself typically isn't sad, except for in Calvin's world) held up between them is the only Christmas decoration in our home. The ONLY ONE!

And it is not even Christmasy, it's wintery.

I'm not sure we should admit this. What the heck! This is the second year that we will celebrate Christmas without any of our children (we are quite depressed about it). Around Thanksgiving, when we traditionally put out the tree and the decorations, both of us were kinda dreading the work of bringing everything up from the garage and moving the furniture around to make our decos fit. We did that last year and no one, NO ONE other than the two of us even saw them! Sure, we enjoy looking at the pretty lights and I suppose we could get a life certainly and invite someone over to socialize once in a while. Once. But we didn't see the socializing thing happening, why change a firmly entrenched tradition? and maybe, just maybe we thought, we could live without the pretty lights for one Christmas. We wouldn't have to put them away after the new year, that was an enticing thought right there. Oh! but the Christmas music is somewhere in the decorations boxes. Wait, doesn't a radio station play Christmas music 24/7? Objection overcome. But, won't this mean that we aren't celebrating Christmas and that it isn't important to us?.... mmmmm, no- we'll read Luke 2 on Christmas Eve. Objection overcome. We are, as Jerry has said; "Golden".

So, there is our pathetic Christmas story. We promise next year will be better. How could it not? There will be the patter of little feet in our house once again for Christmas. I might even put up some outside lights!