Happy Christmas Everyone

Things are really busy in the run up to Christmas with the kids involved in various activities. Dan is 'typcast' as an angel in the church Christmas kids play (which was the whole service and was much funnier and better than you'd imagine a kids play to be).
Becky had her ballet show

There's the tree to decorate

Gingerbread houses to assemble

Parties to attend and host. We had a work party at a restaurant in Minneapolis on the Thursday before Christmas with drinks tokens for beer and wine but the bar didn't enforce the policy and some people were ordering $50 whiskies and we overran the tab by $1,600 which I had to put on my credit card! Let's hope Carphone will cough up for that one.
We also hosted a party for about 50-60 of my team on the Saturday at our house followed by a party for our youth group on the Sunday (if you've got to tidy the house best to just do it once)
Here's the youth group playing the chocolate game (favourite with UK youth groups and opening some White Elephant gifts). I've also finished leading the study group for the year and have a couple of weeks off. We finished with an interesting study on the prophesies around Christmas including the less well known one from Daniel 9 which predicts the year Jesus would come as well as the usual Isaiah and other ones - really amazing stuff.


Then it's just waiting to see if Santa has brought you everything on your list. In case anyone wonders what a 6 year old in 2009 wants for Christmas here is Dan's list preserved for posterity

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

A bit of top drawer marble action
Treat-tastic



One present was an obvious choice, so much so that Andy and I both bought it for each other - let's hope we kept the receipt.
The weather was a picturesque white Christmas
We went for rib of beef this year rather than Turkey, it was really, really good
So good that we all had it for tea on a bit of Yorkshire pudding and gravy - perfect!

After a hearty lunch we had a weather emergency - it got a little warm.
This may not sound drastic but believe me it was - it actually went above freezing for the first time in December. Why is this bad? Well imagine you have 18 inches of snow which is nice and powdery and easy to shift and then it starts getting wet and heavy. Now imagine you have a pretty big driveway full of this snow that tomorrow when the temperature drops down again (and probably doesn't go above freezing for the next 30-60 days) is going to turn into something resembling concrete.
The closest analogy I can give is to thing that someone has dumped 18 inches of wet concrete into your driveway, it weighs a ton but you have to shift it right then because tomorrow you just won't be able to even if you attack it with a metal spade. So for 2.5 hours on Christmas day we shoveled wet snow while the kids played until they were soaked to the skin. We certainly earned our Christmas pudding which we enjoyed with some real custard and icewine - maybe it was the exercise but it was the best Christmas pudding combo ever!

Tomorrow is boxing day where we'll be sledging and I'll go over a pretty big jump and wipe out - but for now I'll sleep well having a had a wonderful Christmas with the family.