The real meaning of Christmas...

As our first Christmas as a married couple grew closer and closer, we weren't entirely sure how we wanted to celebrate. We knew we were going to do a few things differently once we had kids (for example, Santa is going to look completely different in our house. A good response about why, and how we believe about this issue is found here). But there is so much more to Christmas than celebrating with or without Santa! We want to celebrate and remember Jesus' coming.

With fewer and fewer days to really dive in and think about these things, we decided to go away for Christmas. It would be a great break and time of refreshment in our own lives, but it would also give us a chance to think about how the years to come might look at Christmas time in our home. There were a lot of things we talked about, so this might become several posts.

We try to make a habit of family worship time every day, and want to do the same for Christmas, with a little more tradition and intention.
Our church (which for those curious is a member of the PCA) likes to celebrate the liturgical calendar seasons, and so we've become interested in knowing those as well. It turns out that the color to mark the season of Advent (Christmas) is actually purple. Christmas day is white/gold (go jackets :) - just kidding!). Anyways we talked about incorporating some of these colors (not that color is everything) to remind us to be worshiping corporately as the body of Christ as well as individually and as a family.

My husband also created a worship service incorporating the advent candles. Which again aren't a necessary thing to do, but can be really fun, and worshipful. The candles consists of 5 candles (4 candles placed around 1 center candle). One of the 4 is to be lit for each Sunday in Advent, and then the one in the center on Christmas Day. (We did them all on Christmas day this first year). The first one loosely stands for Hope, second for Love, third for Joy, fourth for Peace, and the 5th stands for Christ. Each Sunday we'll talk about one of these topics, and how it relates to Christ's birth into the world, and His second coming. There are scripture readings and hymns to sing along with it. Maybe next year around Christmas time I'll post more details about this family worship service. But it was a wonderful time of talking together, reading God's word, being humbled through the remembrance of His initial birth into the world, and looking forward to celebrating His second coming! We sung wonderful, and well-related hymns through-out (like Come Thou long expected Jesus, Joy to the World, etc.) but my wonderfully creative husband ended the worship time with a song that shows a little bit of our own family's flair! Check it out! :)

We also remembered to bring our camera this time!! WOO!! Sorry some are side-ways. I will try to fix later.

Here are some pictures of the scenery, God gave us great weather all weekend!

One thing we KNOW we will be doing for Christmas, is CELEBRATING!! What better way to celebrate than with GREAT food and drinks! We ate like kings and queens this weekend!! And here is the wonderful food, I'll give recipes later:

Homemade Chocolate-mint chip cookies, and doulbe chocolate cookies, with our favorite celebration drink, Rosa Regale:

Philly Cheese Steaks & Sweet potato fries:

Some home-made cheese-its and local sodas for snacking:

Christmas Eve Shrimp & Gruyere Grits...INCREDIBLE:

Christmas Day Beef Wellington!! My favorite!! (Was supposed to also have some tasty veggies with it, but I felt a little under the weather this day, and so without me in the kitchen, my husband cooked the meat, and it was plenty!!)

We also watched Charlie Brown's Christmas movie!

Merry Christmas!