Keepin' It Real Christmas

I've been trying to conjure up the energy to tackle the "Christmas" post.

As I scrolled through all my iphone photos (kicking myself for never once taking out my "good" camera), I realized why I took down all our Christmas decorations on Dec. 26th.

This year's holiday season felt like being strapped on a non-stop roller-coaster.
And, truth be told, I'm glad it's over.

As a time saver, I thought about just dumping all the Christmas photos into this post and calling it a day.
But then I realized it would give the appearance of a happy little Christmas holiday where everything went perfectly wonderful.
And that was not the case for the majority of our holiday season.

Nothing truly "bad" happened, but it just seemed like a lot of the happy was followed by a downer.

Here are just a few examples:

Happy: Christmas Break!

Downer: Aubrey getting her very first ear infection the first day off.

Happy: Christmas cards!

Downer: Realizing I didn't order nearly enough 5 days before Christmas.

Happy: Visiting our cute, decorated downtown and getting to sit on Santa's lap!

Downer: Waiting for over 45 minutes next to the world's most annoying stranger in the freezing cold for the free carriage ride that lasted all of 7 minutes.

Happy: Impromptu tickets / date with Aubrey to a musical performance of Rudolph.

Downer: Aubrey crying buckets of tears because we didn't get a "Clarice" stuffed animal during intermission.

Happy: Drive-thru Christmas light displays!

Downer: Arriving an hour too early, having to go back home and come back later.

Happy: Deciding to put up Christmas lights outside!

Downer: These two coming home with this and (unrelated to that multi-light tree) our outdoor electrical unit shorting out -- again.

Happy: Fun treats for Aubrey's class Christmas party!

Downer: Making them the day before and noticing the next morning that the bananas had turned brown and the marshmallow tops were super soggy thus having to redo it all.

Happy: Traveling and spending Christmas Eve with family!

Downer: Coming down with a horrible cold that day.

Happy: Waking up on Christmas morning!

Downer: Waking up on Christmas morning. ;)

See what I mean?

Well, let's end on a few good notes, shall we?

I'll start it off with my absolute favorite part of this Christmas season...

Our Tree!

Aubrey came up with the idea to make a "Fruits of the Spirit" Christmas tree. 

So instead of pulling out all our ornaments -- we dried some fruit in the oven, made cinnamon ornaments and stamped out a fruit of the Spirit on each one, hot glued some cinnamon sticks together for stars, and strung popcorn and cranberry garlands.

And even this project didn't go smoothly! Our first batch of cinnamon ornaments had to be thrown out and remade because I somehow managed to botch the world's easiest 2-ingredient recipe!

But who cares...seeing her happiness in this photo made it all worth it. 

Some other positives over the holiday season...

These girls (despite having sibling quarrels at least once a day) loved getting to be home together. This is one of the few photos over the break of them NOT still in their jammies. 

Going to Patti's to see the lights and Santa again...

and Ms. Claus...

Two school Christmas programs with the cutest donkey and the prettiest dancing snowflake...

Christmas night...

 (Aubrey: telescope, accordion, craft kit, make-up kit, And Then story starters, and Clarice ;)) // (Mina: unicorn scooter, helmet, snow glow Elsa, Elsa/Anna Barbies, The Whale and the Snail, and Rudolph) Not Pictured: Cardboard Castle / Pirate Ship

And Christmas morning...

And our traditional scraggily family Christmas morning photo...

 And, of course, we cannot forget...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESUS!

As I started to feel sad about how a lot of things didn't go exactly as I had hoped, I thought about the very first Christmas hundreds of years ago...

I'm guessing Mary didn't envision giving birth to the Messiah mere feet from donkey manure, so obviously I am not the first one to have a few crappy moments during the holidays.

Now can I get a CHEERS! for 2015?!

Less than a year away from the next imperfect Christmas! :)

Christmas, Part 2 / Chinese New Year

Grammy and Pop Pop came to visit exactly one month after Christmas.
So we celebrated again!

To get us all in the mood, we started the first day of their visit by going to The Christmas Story house.
I have been dying to go, but Daniel has had ZERO interest.
Whether you like the movie or not, you have to admit it's a Christmas icon.
I mean, you can't tell me you've never used any of the following:
You'll shoot your eye out!
The Triple Dog Dare...
Fragile (Fra-GEE-lay)
I can't put my arms down!
FUDGE! (the F-Dash-Dash-Dash word)
Fa-ra-ra-ra-ra
And everybody knows about the leg lamp...

The house and tour was everything I hoped it would be. 

It was even snowing, which gave it a nice, nostalgic vibe. 

That evening, the girls shimmied into their jammies and opened up a copious amount of gifts.

No BB guns or pink nightmare bunny pajamas though... ;)

The next day, Mina and I were supposed to have our first Mommy and Me class.
We decided to skip it. (Shhhh!)
We went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame instead.
Totally worth it.

The museum was awesome -- stage / performance costumes, handwritten song lyrics, album covers, band members signature guitars/pianos/drums/ etc., memorabilia from groups ranging from Nirvana, The Supremes, The Beatles, ZZ Top, ELVIS, the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and more. It was all pretty impressive.

The last couple of days it snowed non-stop so we stayed snuggled up indoors enjoying all the new Christmas loot:

Playing Guess Who, watching 3D movies, and reading books...

On the last night, we celebrated Chinese New Year!

Dumplings are Mina's favorite. Fried Rice is Aubrey's favorite.

And these two are MY favorite. I could seriously eat them up...

Each year I plan on making a new Chinese dish with Mina. This year she wasn't too interested in helping, but I hope as she grows older she'll like doing it. Wonton Soup was the dish this year. It was even featured in my friend, Brandi's, Soup virtual potluck!

I am trying to learn all I can about things like Chinese New Year traditions, but more often than not I feel like I am doing it all wrong. For instance, I couldn't find my other gold napkin so I used a black one. Apparently black is the biggest no-no color on CNY (Chinese New Year) because it represents death. I also got Mina some silk Chinese shoes as a CNY gift, but apparently that's one gift you shouldn't give. Oh well, I'll keep trying and learning and maybe one year I'll get it right!

I know some adoptive families choose not to acknowledge their child's birth country, and that's completely their choice. I find that I think about Mina's birth family even more when we celebrate Chinese holidays. Perhaps that's another reason adoptive families shy away from things like this? It bubbles up lots of emotions, and I'm sure as Mina grows up things like this will spur some hard questions. It gets us all wondering about things we don't have answers to.

So even though we are separated by thousands of miles, anonymity, and unanswered questions -- I take comfort in knowing that (for at least one day) we're all celebrating together.

Ho-Ho-Holy Christmas

My girls never sat on Santa's lap this year.

And, to tell you the truth, I'm kinda glad.

(Gasp!)

Shortly after Thanksgiving, I asked Aubrey (nonchalantly) on the way to school, "What are you most excited about when you think about Christmas?"

Preparing myself for the "GETTING PRESENTS!" response, my 5-year-old shocked me by saying, "Getting to eat birthday cake on Jesus's birthday!"
"That's great! What else are you excited about when you think about Christmas?"
"Getting to decorate my very own Christmas tree in my room!"

I thought about turning the car around and driving back home.
This child must be ill if she didn't even mention gifts or presents when asked twice about Christmas.
But looking at her in my rear-view mirror, I could see that those two things made her literally light up. She was downright giddy just thinking about it all.

Right then and there I decided Santa was going to take a backseat this holiday season.

I also decided I wasn't going to totally outcast Jolly Old St. Nick.
I was just going to wait and let Aubrey be the one to bring it up.

By the way, I had to make a vow with myself to not to play the "Santa's watching..." card.
I didn't utter that magic little phrase one time during the holiday season.
Not once, I tell you!
(I'm pretty sure this means I get an award, right?)

In fact, Aubrey only brought up Santa one time.
I was cooking dinner, and she came up to me and asked (totally out-of-the-blue), "Mom, did Santa bring Mina gifts when she was in China?"
Caught a bit off guard with her big blue eyes looking earnestly at me, I answered, "No, honey..."
And off she dashed not saying another word about it.

Another thing that made this holiday season seem a little different was the fact that we left 98% of our Christmas decorations in storage back in Kentucky.
Apparently Daniel knew this and thought I did as well.
I did not.
And when I realized that I would have to tell Aubrey that her second favorite thing about Christmas wasn't going to happen this year, I wanted to cry.
Luckily, two mini trees had weaseled themselves onto our moving truck and were discovered in the garage. I bought some pink lights from Big Lots, and gave Aubrey her ornament for the year. (A princess cat bride -- the absolutely purrrfect ornament for this girl.) She used random things she found around the house to drape on her tree, and -- despite the lack of ornaments -- she loved every inch of it.

I tried to coax Daniel into taking us all on our first Christmas Tree Farm excursion, but he wouldn't go for it.
I couldn't bear the thought of Christmas without a tree in the living room, so instead of finding the idyllic evergreen we found ourselves in the fake tree display area of Walmart. Twenty bucks later, we were driving home with our 6 ft. tree in a 3 ft. box.

The next day I showed Aubrey how to make snowflakes out of coffee filters, which found their holiday home rather quickly...

My favorite moment was when Aubrey squealed, "This is going to look SO great for Jesus's birthday party!" I had never thought of it as decorating our house for His birthday, but it sure made an impression on me and how I'll decorate our home for Christmases to come.

As luck would have it, the Advent calendar I made many Christmases ago was mistakenly (providentially) packed in with the girls art supplies. I plan on doing a post in more detail about our Advent calendar before next Christmas because it really opened up some amazing conversations with Aubrey. She loved coming downstairs and seeing what the letter / word was for the day and all the while trying to guess what the message was spelling out. After the first week, it had revealed the words, "Jesus Is" and Aubrey started guessing what the rest of it was, which melted my heart. Seriously, ask your child the open-ended phrase, "Jesus is..." and see what they say. I couldn't help but get choked up hearing Aubrey shout, "Jesus is...AWESOME! Jesus is...GOD'S ONLY SON! Jesus is...THE BEST IN THE WORLD! Jesus is...THE KING FOREVER! Jesus is...ALWAYS WITH ME!"

So, despite the fact that our house didn't look much like Christmas, the only "Santa" we saw was the Chick-fil-a cow dressed up, and there was never an Elf to set on a shelf -- the girls had an extremely fun time leading up to Christmas Day.

We actually never set foot in a mall throughout November / December, instead we took advantage of all the things going on at our church. Because -- seriously -- as a Christian, shouldn't the church be the BEST place to spend your time getting pumped up about our Messiah's birth?



We let the girls stay up past their bedtime to go to the Christmas concert. It was incredible, and we all left that evening full of the Christmas spirit.

Mina's Sunday School class had a birthday party for Jesus. Her teachers said she danced the first half of the class while singing the Happy Birthday song. My goodness, I love her so much...

At home, the girls successfully broke nearly every piece of our glass nativity. 

I've since ordered a plastic one for safety reasons. :)

On Christmas Eve we went to the Candlelight service at church, which has become one of my favorite family traditions.

On our way home from the candlelight service, I asked Aubrey if she was excited about it being Christmas Eve night. She responded, "Why?" I realized that due to our lack of Santa build-up, she didn't realize that tonight was THE night.

Now let me just say, I loooove Christmas Eve. 

To this day I have hard time going to sleep. 

There's something magical about it. The anticipation. The excitement. Ah, I love it.

(See, I promise I'm not anti-Santa!)

When we got home I asked her if she wanted to put out cookies for Mr. Claus. She was super excited to set out the ones she had made earlier in the week with Daniel  -- along with some milk, of course. 

She also wanted to open the fireplace doors for easy entry.

After getting into jammies and reading some books with Zubie (who came and celebrated with us the week of Christmas!) and Daddy, it was time to say g'nite!

Aubrey said, "I think I'm going to stay up and try to see Santa coming." to which I responded, "You know, he only comes once you're asleep..."
"Then I need to go to bed NOW!"
And that girl was asleep before I shut her door.

By the way, we have a deal with Santa that he only brings four gifts per child:
Something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read.

So for Aubrey it went like this:
Want: Scooter
Need: Electric toothbrush
Wear: Heart-locket / necklace
Read: Jesus Calling Kid Devotional


For Mina:
Want: Mini shopping cart
Need: Backpack (for church and when she starts a MDO program one day.)
Wear: Backpack fell under this category too (Santa realized this as he sat it all out. Oops.)
Read: The Pet Dragon

Christmas morning was full of smiles, squeals, and laps around the house...

 

 

Opening more gifts from mom, dad, and other family members...

We had our birthday dessert for breakfast.

This year, Aubrey decided she wanted to have chocolate mousse instead of cake for Jesus's party.

A treat fit for a King, I'll say! :)

I realized that since Santa played such a small role this Christmas, Mina didn't really know who he was.

I laughed so hard, when she came up to me while I was watching an interview with Phil Robertson, and asked, "Swanta Cwaus?!"

I must admit that it made me pretty happy, happy, happy.

Our Christmas was very different this year.
I think for once it was balanced the way I've always wanted it to be.
The main focus was Jesus, with a fun little Santa sideshow.
We didn't go overboard on decorating or gifts.
We savored the season by making memories and reflecting on God's promises.
It was truly a Merry Christmas.