Better late than never...

I about let the last Christmas Memories Monday get away. It's still the Christmas season, so I'm going to attempt to finish strong...

CHRISTMAS MEMORIES MONDAY: Food and Family

1. Do you have your big meal on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? Christmas Day. Christmas Eve is dedicated to the Love Feast at church. See the post just below this one for pictures.

2. Is there a certain meal you always cook (with maybe changing a few sides now and then) or is it just a feast no matter what the menu? For about the past five years we have been having bacon-wrapped rosemary pork tenderloin. I got the recipe at the first Holidays Fit for the King and everyone loved it so much, it became out new Christmas dinner tradition.

3. Who will come, or you go see, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day? My mom goes with us to the Love Feast and then comes over to our house on Christmas Day just after noon. It's just our immediate family on Christmas morning, though.

4. What time do your kids wake you up (or do YOU wake up if you do not have kids in the house with you)? Well... this year Zack woke up at 3:30am and I don't know that he ever really went back to sleep. I attempted to stay in his room until fell asleep again, but finally at 5am, I gave up. I told him that if I had to stay in his room any longer, I'd have to sleep in and we couldn't open presents until after noon. :-D Amazingly, he found a way to go back to sleep. The rule for our house is that you don't get to go downstairs until Mom and Dad are awake and go with you. And Mom and Dad sleep in until 7am. At 7am the kids, who each have a Christmas bell that sits next to their bed, are allowed to ring the Christmas bells announcing the birth of Jesus and then they come into our room, where Jimmy reads The Christmas Story. THEN we go downstairs.

5. Do you do the Santa thing? We play the Santa game. We tell the kids that it's pretend... but fun! We also tell them that even though the Santa game is pretend, lots of parents choose not to tell their kids it's pretend until they get older. "Santa" fills the stockings. That's it. Mom and Dad give the rest of the presents. We have found it to be a wonderful compromise that keeps the focus on Jesus as the greatest gift and our giving gifts to each other out of love as a reflection of the gifts that God gives us. The biggest blessings we have seen from being up-front about Santa is that if there's a "hot gift" of the year that we can't get, we simply tell the kids and ask them if they want to wait or get something else. There's no explaining that Santa does really love you and you are really special even though you didn't get what you really, really wanted and your friend asked for the same thing and got it. The other thing that is good is that there's not the dreaded conversation about how we lied to them about Santa until they were a certain age and now we're telling them the truth. As neat as the whole magical wonder of Christmas thing is, we just couldn't bring ourselves to pretend without letting our kids know we were pretending. Ironically, our oldest was talking about the Santa game just a couple of days ago and saying she was thankful we did it that way as many of her friend were devastated when they found out the truth.

OK... done! Hope you all had a very Merry Christmas!!!