Christmas Eve is on a Sunday this year. Which means that my family will be participating in 4 church services on said Sunday.
My Dad is an Episcopal priest. When Christmas Eve is on a Sunday, he does two services in the morning for the Sunday of Advent 4, and then does a 5:30pm Family Service complete w/ Christmas Paegent and an 11pm Midnight Mass. We, the family, are usually involved in all of the services as well, as choir members or acolytes or chalice bearers or something else that wears vestments. We fondly refer to it as The Henderson Dog and Pony Show.
In between all of these many church services, we try to eat Christmas dinner, figure out last minute gifts, cook for Christmas breakfast the next day (a big tradition in my family) and take naps so that we will actually be awake for the 11p service. By the time actual Christmas day rolls around, we are all so exhausted we sleep till 10a.
But then it gets to be Christmas Day. Christmas Day is quite possibly my favourite day of the year. Because of what my Dad does for a living, we can’t go anywhere for Christmas (or Easter which usually fell on Spring Break most of my life but that’s another story) so we are always at home. Sometimes our grandparents would come, or cousins and aunts and uncles, but usually it was just me, my parents and my brothers. It is a great day. We’ll usually get up, look at Santa and open stockings, eat breakfast then open presents. Then we spend the rest of the day in our PJ’s just being together. We’ll watch movies, read, mess around with our Christmas presents. Then for dinner we’ll get dressed and go to the Waffle House.
Christmas is a very sacred day for my family. It is the one day that I remeber us always being together, all day, with no interruption. So often, when we went on trips or vacation, someone in the church would get sick, or someone would die and my Dad would have to go home. But Christmas day was OUR DAY.
I’m going to see my family for Christmas this year, for the first time in two years. I’m really excited. I will miss Jamie terribly, but I’m excited to be with my family. Even if I have to take communion 4 times in one day.
Do you have to get some kind of dispensation or something for taking that much communion? I think Catholics might be limited to communion once every 24 hours…of course there’s the whole transubstantiation vs.consubstantiation difference I guess.
Merry Christmas!!!
P.S. Can I tell you how happy I am that Firefox now comes with a spell checker installed? You can tell because I’m pretty sure I spelled both of those words right.
We’ll need to stock up on frozen pizza and Diet Dr. Pepper before you leave…
Love you!
-jed
Can you PLEASE get your Dad to wear these fabulous Prada shoes??? I mean, if they’re good enough for the pope…
http://www.degree360.com/blogimages/popeshoes.jpg
I love the blog that you have. I was wondering if you would link my blog to yours and in return I would do the same for your blog. If you want to, my site name is American Legends and the URL is:
http://www.americanlegends.blogspot.com
If you want to do this just go to my blog and in one of the comments just write your blog name and the URL and I will add it to my site.
Thanks,
David
I called you over Christmas to thank you for the loverly ornament and the loverly card but, as I ascertained, you were in Bama. What up chicka?
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