More celebrations!

Dad's birthday - fancy dim sum and cake

We had a busy Christmas week as Grace and Mom were in a community choir singing on Christmas Eve, and Grace, Jasmin, Aiden, and Mom all were in the church Christmas choir for Christmas Day! So just imagine the logistics of that many choir practices and performances...

No photos of the Christmas Eve choir performance, as no one we knew was in the audience... but it went well and they enjoyed having the day together.  The church choir was the host of angels in the narrated "stop motion" play. It was much more uplifting and enjoyable as we got to celebrate wholeheartedly the real reason for Christmas joy.

After church we got to eat a festive lunch at church together before going home tired and full. We played an epic game of Catan that Aiden won for the rest of the day.

Monday we had a cross-world Zoom with family and our Penang Christmas beach feast. 

And now the girls are off enjoying the country-wide Baptist Youth Camp for the rest of the week, Aiden is attempting to spend as much time as possible with his "inhouse" friends while they are also on school break, and Mom and Dad are enjoying the few days of true rest before the new year arrives and life must go into high gear.

Early Christmas Celebrations

 Thursday evening was our small group year end finale. We take off December and will restart in January - a nod to how busy people get for Christmas season. Of course, we ate out :)  Once we were all stuffed and more or less talked out, we played a game. It was a simple find the hidden books of the Bible in a paragraph, but it proved to be a challenge - 15 minutes in and no one found all 16 books! 

Our family had split up between the two tables, which ended up being an oops as we won both tables' prizes, having found 15/16 book names each!

 Everyone laughed it off, saying it wasn't fair to compete against professionals, and we shared the KitKat prizes as there was enough for everyone. 

Sunday was another day of celebration!  Grace and Aiden joined the special flagging team for the Joy week of Advent...

 ...and directly after, we joined the SIL group for their Christmas celebration. 

Again, lots of great food, chances to talk to those we don't get to interact with a lot, games, caroling, and presents.

The girls and Dad were delighted to have new audiences for their topics of novel writing and PhD writing. It's not easy to find people ready and willing to exchange in-depth conversation on those topics :)

Christmas joy!