Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to you! I hope you had a wonderful time with family and friends. We enjoyed our day, although I always miss my family around this time of year. It's so much better when we have family to share the season with.

This was only the second Christmas we've spent truly by ourselves. Other years we've either been with my family or Sam's. We both have traditions that we grew up with and so we're trying to incorporate both sides into how we celebrate the season. Sam grew up with the German traditions of setting out the boot or shoe on the eve of St. Nicholas' feast day (Dec 5) and the advent calendar (both of which we'll probably do with our kids). They also have dinner and open gifts on Christmas Eve where my family primarily celebrates Christmas day with opening gifts in the morning then having dinner in the afternoon. We want to combine our family traditions so we can both feel like a part of us has been brought into our new family.

So, this year we were going to open a gift or two after coming home from the Christmas Eve service at Patch, but through poor planning on our part we only had 2 gifts each. We just decided to do stockings that evening and waited on the gifts for Christmas morning. We still have gifts coming in the mail for each other as well as from our families.

We planned on having my friend, Carmen, and her family for Christmas dinner, but they've only been in Germany for 2 weeks and didn't feel like they could get to the train station and on down here. So, it was just us. I still made the full dinner of turkey, dressing, potatoes, candied yams, squash, cranberry relish and bread, but it would have been nice to have others to share it with. We'll just be eating leftovers for the next week, but then isn't that normal?

On another note, Saturday on our way home we stopped in at our new townhouse. Pathetic?...maybe, but we just like to look in the windows and see the progress. I was so excited to see that the wooden stairs had been installed, as well as, the hand rail and bathroom door (we can only see the ground floor). We also saw the hardwood stacked downstairs waiting to be put on the floors. We have our final walk through on January 2nd, so we're pretty excited about that. The townhouse next to ours has been sold to another American couple and the other unit has been looked at by Americans. We just might have little America there by the time it's done.

Last Friday, I heard a thump upstairs and when I went to see what it was I saw this bird on our balcony with Gabby watching it closely. It must have flown into the window hard and stunned it. It was pretty chilly out, so I went to get a box with a towel in it to put out by the bird. Thankfully, by the time I got back it had flown away. Gabby could hardly contain herself though when that bird was just feet from her. How exciting for the little hunter that she envisions herself to be!

Here are a few pictures from Christmas Eve. Try as I might I have not been able to figure out the timer on our camera, so we had to resort to individual pictures or seeing who's arm was longest(hence the funny angle of the pictures). We're both pretty short so those didn't turn out as good as we wanted, but here they are anyhow.

I wanted a picture of us in front of the Christmas tree, but this was the best we could do.

We wanted one with Gabby although she doesn't look too excited to be in the picture.

Me in front of the tree.

My sweet husband in front of the tree.