Computer Woes

Our computer died this week. Sad. I am coming over to my moms a couple times a week to check email and the blogs. So if I don't respond to an email right away or something on the blog, that's why. I'll get around to it, but please be patient with me. You gotta love being able to schedule posts on blogger. It'll look like I'm so much more on top of things than I really am.

Happy Birthday Uncle Brad!

Today is Brad's birthday. I thought I would do a little tribute to him and how great an uncle he is to Emma. She loves him so much. Here are a bunch of pictures of the two of them together (Jill is in some of them, even though this isn't about her - it couldn't be helped. But she is a great aunt and we love her too!). Happy Birthday Brad - we love you!

Christmas Traditions part 4 (last one I promise)

A lot of my family traditions took place on Christmas Eve, but one that didn't was eating at the Lion House. Every year we would go down during December and eat lunch there. It was usually during a day of shopping. For several years now my dad has reserved a private room upstairs for us to eat in, and sometimes has to make the reservation as early as July to make sure we get it. We still do this each year, and will be going this year on the 23rd. Yum!

On Christmas Eve we would always go over to my Grandma's house and take our presents which we would be exchanging the next day so they could be dispursed under the tree. On our way home my parents (and then John and I when we were older but Jill & Mike still believed in Santa) would always pretend to have seen Rudolph up in the sky. This would of course convince us to hurry as fast as we could when we got home to get ready for bed so we could pretend to be asleep when Santa arrived. The funny thing is that once we got home and were ready for bed we still did quite a few things together instead of hurrying into bed. We would always read Luke chapter 2 and then watch the opening nativity scene from the movie Ben Hur (my dad loves that movie, and the nativity scene is really well made). We also lit every candle in the room, turned on the Christmas tree lights, and sat there for a few moments enjoying the beautiful soft glow. Then came the best part. We were all allowed to open one present that night! My parents would try to have a few items under the tree to us from them so we could choose something. We never did the pajama thing, so I'm talking hardcore toys here. It was awesome. And it just made it that much harder to wait until the next day. The last thing we would do is listen to Why the Chimes Rang. If you've never heard it or read it, it's a really neat and touching story. Email me or leave your email adress here and I will send you a copy of it.

Christmas Traditions part 3

Christmas lights are the best part of the season. They are definately Emma's favorite part. She loves the lights on her Christmas tree in her room, and has to have them on every night. While I don't rush to do this each year anymore because I abhor crowds (we get around to it before the holiday), I always loved going to Temple Square with my family to see the lights when they first turned them on. Back then they used much better colors than now. Now there is too much pink and yellow. I don't think of pink as a very Christmasy color. My favorite spot was a huge pine tree that still stands just inside the east entrance. They would completely drown this tree in red lights. I would stand as close to the trunk as I could get and just stare straight up. All I could see were thousands of red sparkling lights. Beautiful. When they still decorate this tree (they don't do it every year for some reason) I still love standing under it and looking up. In that one gaze upwards all my warm holiday memories come flying back to me, and in that one moment all is right with the world.

After seeing the lights there we would cross the street to the mall and get hot chocolate at the McDonalds which was just inside. Then we'd all pile back into our car and drive around to look at some of the better Christmas lights on houses. This was back when it was almost universally thought that colored lights are better than white ones, so there was tons of color everywhere. I still prefer colored lights to white, but each year there are fewer and fewer people who agree with me. Just a few streets away from my parents house are two streets that were always fabulous to see at Christmas time. One was called Christmas Street and the other Bible Street. Of course these were just adopted names for the season. Christmas Street was a dead end street where every house was decorated really well with lights. They would often have lights stringing from one house to the next, so the lights never ended. On Bible Street they had big picture boards along with exerps from Luke of the nativity story. You could drive along and read the scriptures and view the pictures. Both these streets still do this, and we take Emma each year.