Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone! We had a wonderful time celebrating the birth of Christ this year and we hope all of you did too. Some highlights of this year's festivities for our family included acting out the nativity on Christmas Eve night, our annual Christmas Eve Joseph and Mary dinner (pitas, fish, and grape juice), watching and participating in the Swift family talent show, visiting family on Skype, visiting the reindeer in downtown Anchorage, checking out Christmas lights, talking to Isaac who is on his mission in Japan (via Skype and then speaker phone), planning out and searching for gifts to give each other, attending the ward Christmas dinner, watching our favorite Christmas movies (The Nativity Story, Mr. Krueger's Christmas, Joy to the World, It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, and White Christmas to name a few), picking out and decorating a tree, and enjoying the snow while living so close to the north pole.

This year we also started a couple of new traditions that really brought the Spirit into our home. First, each night from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve we sat down as a family and had a special Christmas Devotional. For these devotionals Julia would draw a yellow star out of a small box that had a story from Christ's life on it to share with the children, then Ethan would draw a green bell out of the box which had the number for a Christmas hymn to sing, and finally we ended with a family prayer. It was a fun activity that our children looked forward to each night and it helped us really focus on Christ throughout the Christmas season. Second, for one FHE we each decided on a gift we wanted to give to Jesus and wrote it down on paper hearts to hang on the tree; throughout the month as we saw the hearts we were reminded to be working on those gifts.

Hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas too. Here are some pictures from December including our yearly family picture. We took it with our camera on timer at UAA in one of the classrooms, so it's definitely not very professional (but at least the background is authentic!). With the poor lighting from only 4-5 hours of sunlight a day, we haven't had the chance to take too many pictures of our other activities.