Christmas Reloaded

Alright...3 posts in one day...that's what happens when it snows in Texas and they cancel church early.  Things get done around the house.

Christmas was actually pretty low key this year.  Usually we at the Smith house have a two day extravaganza that includes Christmas Eve with Jeff's extended family and then Christmas Day at the McClanahan homestead.

It all started with us scrambling to make it to Utah and as a result we didn't have a chance to get the usual Christmas decorations/traditions accomplished in time.  As a result, we didn't even do our traditional gingerbread decorating until well after New Year's and Kari and Jonathan were still stringing pine boughs around the house the week of New Year's!

 

Jeff's siblings were all outside of Texas this year.  As a result, it was just us and Grandpa and Grandma.  In some ways, it made for a more intimate Christmas--playing games as a family and reflecting on our Savior.

Kari's mom had just been hospitalized the week before and was getting over a sinus infection.  The majority of the cousins were away as well, so Christmas Day happened Christmas afternoon.  Again, it was a day of playing games and eating.

 Not much to say about New Year's.  Jeff was on call and we barely saw him the entire weekend.  He commented that it was fitting that at midnight on New Year's Eve he was in his car driving back from the hospital.

We had a chance to get down to the Dallas Temple yesterday.  We were walking the grounds afterwards and ran into two freshmen from Lake Highlands high school that were working on a religion project for their social studies class.  They were asking us about the temple and wanted a picture to symbolize it's meaning to us as Mormons.  We explained that one of the ordinances that happens in the temple is marriage where husband and wife are sealed to each other for eternity. They had just missed a happy newlywed couple that had been posing for wedding pics outside, so they asked us to be in a pic with them.  We snapped a pic of our own--the place where we were married for time and all eternity 11 years ago...