The Tale of Our Quest: Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from the Bates!

We took this picture after church today. I'm thinking church was rough on Joshua.

I love that Christmas was on a Sunday this year! It was so nice to wake up, go to church, sing and hear beautiful Christmas music, listen to Christ-centered messages and THEN come home and open presents - it just set us in the right Spirit from the start.

I'm feeling very grateful today for the selfless, loving, infinite gift given to me on that first Christmas - the innocent, loving, pure baby boy. Because of His love, I can be free, I can experience this joy and have these relationships forever. His pure innocence erased my guilt simply because He loved me enough to pay it for me. I love Him. What a blessing and privilege it is to celebrate His birth today!

It has been nice getting to share in some of the Pack's Christmas traditions this year. I'm not very good at planning and implementing meaningful activities. Sara is an amazing planner. And although we only got to about half of what we planned - it was a lot more than I would have done on my own. I learned from her that planning and trying to do meaningful things (even if things don't always go as planned) is better than not planning anything (because you know full well that things won't go as planned).

One nice thing is that neither of our families is big into Santa. We just don't really talk about him or put any emphasis on him coming. As a consequence of this, we didn't hear our kids talk about Santa and their focus was more on the service of the day (#lighttheworld) and the birth of Christ. We didn't intend for that to happen. We don't really have anything against Santa. But he can get distracting. It didn't feel like that this year.

We read the book, "The Christmas Porringer" as families and in it "The Christ Child" brings the children presents on Christmas. This opened up a nice conversation about how different cultures celebrate Christmas differently - how in Mexico the 3 wise men bring the toys. We've also talked about the saint Nicholas story. We are thinking about implementing different cultural celebrations in the future since they seem more meaningful and centered.

We don't have a lot of room for toys right now so instead of a lot of presents we gave activities that we can do next week. We plan to have a stay-cation during the week.

Here is an overview of last week:

The Packs had cousins stay at their house for a few days - between our three families we had 20 kids running around. It made for some great football games for the boys! Here I am with some of the older kids on a walk to the Dollar Store.

We celebrated Miles' birthday this week and since Sara's phone was out of memory, I'm uploading his birthday song here.

More winter hiking...