Monday, December 27, 2010

i'm dreaming of a...

Merry Christmas from the Maurer family! Our Christmas this year was...great...and strange. It was weird being in an unfamiliar house, an unfamiliar area, and around unfamiliar people on such a huge holiday. It was weird walking outside in jeans and a t-shirt in the week before Christmas while hearing reports of snow for our northern friends. And it was weird that we felt so comfortable here after only having lived in a new state for a mere month.

Compass had a total of five Christmas Eve services this year. Shawn helped with four, and our family attended one together on the 24th. It turns out that Winston-Salem got its first White Christmas since 1960-something. We had a lot of people texting, emailing, and Facebooking us about the snow - presumably since it was well known how much we missed the snow storms of our youth. Most of the communication we got had a tone of, "Ha Ha! Now that you left, we got snow! Aren't you sad you left now?" as if there were any doubt that we were sad about leaving. What people didn't realize was that each comment broke our already sad hearts and made us ache even more.

I attended Compass' Christmas Eve service with a heavy heart - missing all that was familiar to us about the season. As the pastor began to speak though, my perspective began subtly shifting. He spoke from Isaiah 1:18 and described (much more eloquently than I can relay) the process used to dye garments scarlet and its permanence. He continued to describe the blinding whiteness of snow and encouraged the congregation to think of a white Christmas a little differently.

“Come now, let us settle the matter,”
says the LORD. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,they shall be like wool.

I realized then that in all my longing for a white Christmas, I forgot that I already had the most amazing white Christmas I could ask for. I had told Shawn that the songs, "White Christmas" and "Let It Snow" should be banned from Texas because all they did was give people false hopes. On the way home Christmas Eve, I found myself singing both of those songs with a renewed sense of meaning and with more earnestness than ever. We didn't get a single flake of snow in Dallas this year. But thanks to a tiny, helpless baby, our Christmas was white as the beautiful, pure snow.

I took an insane amount of photos this year because it was Cohen's first Christmas and I wanted our friends and family to be a part of our family's holiday. For the first year, we hid the presents and brought them out after the boys went down on Christmas Eve. We still haven't really addressed the Santa topic with Jude (but plan on telling him that it's so much fun to pretend that there's a Santa), so this strategy was more to stop little hands from ripping up the paper before Christmas morning. You know me and my self control issues.

Late Christmas Eve with our presents under the tree and our stockings stuffed:


This photo is actually for our friends Mike and Jill. Jude lined up his cars and trains in a very carefully placed single file line...very Loganesque.



Cohen didn't do a whole lot this year except look ridiculously adorable (Shawn says, "emphasis on the ridiculous"). We got him a sound machine and a Bible, his Aunts and Uncles bought him a set of Praise Baby DVDs, and his Great Aunt Jackie got him an adorable stuffed animal.


This was a cool little car holder from my Aunt Jackie that is a genius idea. It has little pockets for each car, and the entire thing rolls up to be easily transported:



Thomas the Tank Engine toothpaste! Someone in our house is very excited about brushing his teeth...especially the spitting part. "Pit?" he asks at the end of his brushing time.




There continued to be an awesome Thomas and train theme, which thrilled Jude's little heart to no end. Jude was very insistent that Daddy get out the little trains of this Thomas set from Grammy and Grampy:


One of Jude's favorite parts of Christmas this year was handing the presents to their intended. He loved running excitedly to the tree to pick out a gift, and then hand it to Mommy, Daddy, Cohen, or himself:
Thanks to an awesome Flip cam from Mama and Papa Maurer, I can show you some of Jude's excitement on Christmas (we didn't open up the Flip cam until our second round of present opening though, so this is a little later in the morning):
We definitely have more Christmas pictures, but the rest will need to wait. Shawn has the week off from work, so we're spending lots of time doing family activities, trying to get naps, cleaning, grocery shopping, getting our licenses transferred, and just enjoying a little bit of rest after a crazy couple of months. I'll be back soon with more photos of those adorable Maurer kids, though!

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