Pre-Christmas December

 

We have had at least one decent snowfall, but sadly it has not lasted, and while it is cold enough now to hope for outdoor skating in the near future, we'd love to have some snow too... We've weathered one significant storm as well, but for us it was mostly just super high winds - not even rain in place of snow. The fun piece about the storm was that it was a few nights before Grace's project was due and we were all praying for no power outages so that she could continue to work undisturbed. And the total amount of power outage we had was about 5 seconds; and looking at the outage map, pretty much all around us were huge areas of power outages! Thank you God!

 

Painting the windows is one of Mom's Christmas traditions that has managed to travel around the world with us. This year she found some particularly good pictures to work from to give us lovely windows for the season. They took a long time though! Especially since she didn't get any help because Grace and Jasmin were glued to their computers racing to finish Grace's final project on time, and Aiden his first semester's worth of work. Mom just managed to get them done in time for for our Advent evening party.

So did Grace and Jasmin. They had to pull an all nighter the last night, but Grace is completely done her degree now! The project, the production of which we have lived around for the last 3 months, will hopefully be released for viewing soon - watch for it!

The party was a great success - we'd been very liberal with our invitations, so we had a lovely full house for our evening of antiphonal readings and advent songs along with snacks and hanging out. We discovered yet more people connections we weren't aware of - it is still managing to surprise us how many people know Mom's siblings or parents, though it shouldn't considering they've lived here for 20 years...just not something we're used to :)

Added into the mix of busy days was an invitation to join the Christmas choir at our church for the Christmas eve service. So the Sunday after the girls' all nighter was an afternoon practice followed by our party. Oof for lack of sleep! And then the Monday and Tuesday following were the Christmas eve services, so our holidays started with a bit of a bang of busyness instead of rest and relax!

Tuesday we also celebrated big as a family (Dad's birthday from the 16th which we hadn't had space to celebrate, Grace finishing her degree, and Aiden getting accepted to Dalhousie)! We did the typical yet very rare thing for us and went out to eat. Dad had discovered a fantastic little fish n chips place on the Bedford highway (Rudy & Olive's) in the summer, and it was good enough that that's where we chose to go. It's just a little diner that is constantly busy so not much of a dining experience, but the food is excellent and the portions satisfying.