My family has a number of traditions and my wife and I are adding to them. For about as long as I can remember, my family has always had waffles and bacon on Christmas Eve. Since we weren't home over Christmas this year, we celebrated this tradition during our visit a couple weeks ago. I am a big fan of having breakfast for dinner and all I have to say is, don't knock it til you've tried it!
In my sermon this week I talked about another family tradition. Ever since I became a Christian in sixth grade and understood the truth and significance behind the Christmas narratives, I have insisted that the Magi (or wisemen) do not appear near the nativity scene in our house because it wasn't until some two years later that they finally reached Bethlehem. So, for example, our nativity scene is in the living room but the wisemen are in the kitchen. By the way, the title for the sermon was "Wisemen still Worship Him." Think about it.
I enjoy pizza and so whenever and however I can get my wife to allow us to have pizza, I do. One of the ways I've found to do this is to ask to have that for dinner whenever we have to decorate for the holidays (e.g. carving pumpkins, decorating the Christmas tree...). This year was my wife and my first for having a real Christmas tree at our place because in the past we've always gone to visit out families over Christmas. So our parents shipped us all of our Christmas decorations, we got literally the third to last tree on the lot on the Tuesday before Christmas, and ate pizza after decorating the tree on Friday night.
I know a lot of people like to watch movies such as "A Christmas Story" and "Miracle on 34th Street" this time of year. However, my Christmas movie watching tradition includes "Home Alone" and "The Santa Clause" (Tim Allen), which as of last night I was able to catch both of.
We had a Christmas Eve service at the church which I thought went very well and was well attended because of so many families who were in town visiting members of our congregation. That's one of the nice things about having an older congregation...kids and grandkids are expected to visit them over the holidays. During the service we had a series of readings through the Advent passages in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke along with singing traditional Christmas Carols and some special music by members of the church. We didn't have a special Christmas day service but instead Harmony and I were invited over to the house of a family from church for dinner (the noon meal).
The basketball team had a couple of tough games last week (jv went 1-1 and varsity went 0-2). This week I start a series through the OT historical book of Ezra which I'm very excited about, having been studying it now for the last few weeks. I'll let you know how it goes.
By God's Grace, Jeff
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