Christmas Recommendations

The nest is still full with Shelley and Brad with us for a little bit more. We are all trying to be on our best behavior! It has truly been fun to have them here with us. Sunday night was especially fun as Jared and Ashley were also here for dinner and then everyone played a new game Brad brought, "Sliders". At first glance it didn't look like it was going to be very fun, but it turned out to be a hit! Now Michael has bought one for his family too. So we definitely recommend it.

A friend lent us the very short read, "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" by Barbara Robinson. Even if you don't like to read, honestly, this is a short easy book to digest and very significant at this time of year.

I hope to get Matt to post a picture of our Santa Claus find this year. We were visiting the county dump and someone had discarded him. The man who oversees this area did not want to throw him away. He is one of the larger animated ones. His animation days are over and his left shoulder had obviously been visited by a hungry dog or rat...his poor foam insides were showing through. I just can't help loving Santa Claus and didn't want to see him thrown away either. A sudden thought popped into my mind that he just needed a good old toy bag...we dragged him home and my old laundry bag from college days fit the bill! We are happy to give this Santa Claus one more year of jolly display on our front porch. Unfortunately, his shoulder issue has become much worse each time the toy bag is knocked off, once by the neighbor dog who must have felt he was a threat to eating our cat food and I even caught one of our cats knocking it off!

To expound on Santa...I know there are those who think the whole Santa myth is terrible. My thought is, he is a good guy who wants to encourage others to do good. He exemplifies good traits and wants to just give gifts to everyone without thought of reward to himself. He wants everyone to be good so that they can be blessed. As I said in an earlier post, Santa was an example of Christ to me before I learned about Him. We kept the Santa myth to a minimum with our own children. They could only ask Santa for one thing every year...everything else came from Mom and Dad. They could not ask Santa for elaborate gifts, since there were so many children all over the world and that would be greedy. It all worked fine, although I did get weird looks from the Santas over the years as my kids only asked for one minimal thing and even when Santa prompted them to ask for more, they stuck to their one request. Anyhow, this is just my own opinion and I understand the friends who felt strongly that the Santa myth was lying to their children. Our kids have never held the fable against me. Shelley says she still believes!