quiet

I just got back from the christmas eve service at my church. The house is so quiet...my family isn't home quite yet. I came in the door and my dog greeted me but there was no talking, no singing, no nothing. Something I'm not quite used to but nice just the same. The day has been filled with so much hustle and craziness. Shopping to do....cookies to bake....presents to wrap....and now it's just quiet. For a few more minutes....then my sister will dance in the door and my brothers will come in laughing about something. My parents will follow. We'll hang the stockings, probably make apple cider, and watch a christmas movie. Christmas the way I know it will begin....I like the quiet that is right now....but at the same time I can't wait!

traditions

I've just been thinking about how many christmas traditions my family has....and we don't even have near as many as we used to. Some have died out over the past year or so. One of these is advent. Every night we would shut off all the lights in the house and light the appropriate number of candles on our advent wreath. We read a Bible verse and then we each got to pick a christmas song to sing. My brother would pick Deck the Halls every single night, every single year. We got so sick of it. Now laugh as we look back on it. It was fun. Now we're lucky if we do advent once a week. Everyone is just so busy and it is a rare night that everyone is at home. On christmas eve when we get home from church we always watch The Muppet Christmas Carol. Then we get all of our blankets and drag them into the living room because that is where we sleep. In the morning the first one to wake up wakes everyone else up. We dig into our stockings but we can't open any presents till our parents get up...we can't wake them till 6:00am. Although I'm sure they wake up when we do because we don't exactly try to be quiet. My parents don't put names on our presents....they put a picture or a number. While we are waiting for them to get up we try to figure out the code. I think we've figured it out every year. We have so many more things that we do but I can't think of any right now. I start counting down the days from half way through december but christmas can never come fast enough.

whistler

I went to whistler yesterday with two of my friends. I don't think I've ever had such a lazy day (besides the driving). We didn't have to be anywhere at any time. We just wandered around looking in shops and of course getting lost. I think everytime we needed to find a bathroom it took us half an hour. But it was fun. So relazing. We sat in Starbucks for over an hour just because we didn't have to do anything else. After supper as we were walking back to the car the snow flakes were huge....and it was beautiful. It had been snowing all day but these flakes were just awesome. We were trying to catch them with our tongues. Such a good day...