Christmas Time is Here

Tomorrow we leave for Casablanca, Morocco for five days.  This should be an exciting adventure to check out what is going on at a school we are considering working at.  This is definitely a discernment trip.  Please, please keep us in your prayers this week as we explore and consider the possibilities of the future. 

I am also excited about the possibility of seeing blue skies again and 70 degree weather.  The kids are excited that they will get a new stamp in their passports.  Ian keeps telling me all the different countries he wants to go to.  His latest is Denmark.  I don't know why Denmark, but I had to tell him, "I don't think Denmark is in our future."  I do love that the kids are starting to pick up the French language.  Isabel is still pretty silent, but Ian will rattle off vocabulary that he has learned in school.  His accent is so amazing that it makes me laugh.  He'll say, "Why are you laughing?"  And I'll say, "Because mommy will never be able to sound like that." 

This season is a bit bittersweet.  I love Christmas, and I love to celebrate Jesus' birth.  I do miss things from home like Christmas lights and the anticipation in the air.  I do recognize that some of that anticipation is materialistic in nature, so I am learning to withdrawal from it slowly.  Our apartment came with a tiny 5 euro Christmas tree.  It is very much the Charlie Brown tree.  You can almost hear Christmas Time is Here when you look at it.  We put it up with the few ornaments that we brought from home.

Bryan and I thought we'd get a new tree, a bigger tree.  I said to Bryan the other day, "We should go get a tree."  Ian said, "Why? We already have one."  And he was right.  We do have one, and it is going to be our tree this year.  It took my child to speak the truth into our lives, and I thanked Ian for those words of wisdom later.  When Bryan said that he was ready to go find a Christmas tree later, I told him that I thought Ian was right.  We do have our tree already. 

Some of this consuming stuff is ingrained in us so deep, so deep.  That does not mean that we don't keep our traditions alive as traditions are important.  Nevertheless, things are changing for us.  We are learning to find our abundance in the life of Christ rather in the accumulation of Christmas decor and more stuff.

Maybe Charlie Brown will make more sense than ever this year.