Sunday, July 29, 2012

Christmas in July

 My family is a ministry family.  My dad is a pastor, my younger brother is a pastor, my husband works for a church, my older brother used to work in a church.  If you know anything about ministry families, you may know that weekends and Christmas are tough times to get away and make a trip.  And once we were finally done with Christmas church responsibilities, we were so exhausted that traveling was the last thing we wanted to do.  We experimented for a few years, trying to figure out ways to get everyone together during the holidays but we rarely managed to get everyone involved.  We're pretty spread out geographically, spanning from Arizona to Indiana to New York.  Several years ago we came up with an unusual idea but all agreed to at least give it a shot.  We decided to not even attempt to get together over the holidays.  Instead, we agreed to set aside one week in July when we would all come together and celebrate Christmas six months early.  We quickly fell in love with our new tradition.  We've just completed our 4th annual Christmas in July and I'm already looking forward to our 5th.  It is the only time of the year that we are all together as a group, so it is very special time that we cherish.  Over the next few posts I'll share some of what we did together.

We were excited to have the opportunity to host Christmas this year.  Hosting can be a lot of work, but we've traditionally had a lot of drama with our flights in the past (boo Delta), so we were pretty happy to have everyone come to us for a change.  :-)  Mom and Dad arrived Friday evening and Mike and his kids arrived a few hours later, after we'd all gone to bed.  Saturday was spent mostly hanging out around the house and stocking up on groceries to feed 12 mouths for the week.  Addison instantly fell in love with her two big cousins Marlena and Jacob and they were so good playing with her.  She's a very social player, so it was like heaven for her to have playmates this week.  Marlena happily got messy with her finger painting with shaving cream outside.  They also had fun blowing bubbles, coloring with sidewalk chalk, and playing in the sandbox.

 Jacob joined in on some bubble fun and also spent some time with a squirt gun, but once he found the Wii in our bedroom, we kind of lost him for a while.  :-)


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